Can California avoid yet another year of stalemate when it comes to protecting the 400,000 students who attend the state's 1,600 private, for-profit post-secondary schools?
Maybe not.
Currently, the state has no law governing private, for-profit schools; the old, flawed law expired on July 1 last year. The bureau that used to oversee these schools was shut down. So those schools no longer need approval to operate in California. And the 400,000 students who attend them have little protection from fraud.
Legislators, unable to agree on a new law, passed a stopgap bill last year. But it calls only for schools to sign voluntary agreements to abide by the old law – and it expires July 1.
So this is an urgent matter. The state needs a way to handle numerous issues: student complaints, schools that go broke, teachers that don't have credentials and more.
The Assembly killed a bill (Assembly Bill 2746, by Assemblyman Roger Neillo, R-Fair Oaks) that had a good structure and many good provisions. (It also had some flaws that easily could have been fixed.)
The Senate has been struggling with Senate Bill 823, by Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, for more than a year. Even with the latest fixes, presented finally last Thursday, it's ugly – 112 pages long, overly prescriptive, unwieldy and unworkable. It passed out of the Senate, however, and the Assembly will vote on it Monday or Thursday.
So the choices look like this: The Assembly can pass SB 823, a lousy bill, just to have some regulation in place.
Or the Assembly can kill it and leave the state with another year with no proper oversight and enforcement system in place.
Or the Assembly can gut SB 823 and make it another extension bill, similar to last year's stopgap bill that established minimal, voluntary oversight of these schools.
That's not ideal. Legislators should not be simply passing extensions year after year after year. Students deserve a law with real protections.
Still, such a stopgap measure probably wouldn't be the end of the world. It would give the Legislature the opportunity to start over with new players at the end of this year.
The Senate will have a new president pro tem, when Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, replaces Perata. The Assembly already has a new speaker, Assemblywoman Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles.
This issue is too important to handle badly. So far, fears of a draconian bill have made the stopgap, voluntary agreements work. This does nothing to deal with the fraudsters who don't sign voluntary agreements. But with no permanent solution in sight, the best that can be done is to pass another stopgap and start over with a new cast of characters in January.
