"There are several inaccurate legal and factual assertions" in Crete's letter to LACOE.
- Sarah Ziegenhorn, LAUSD Charter School Division
In today's political environment, it should not be surprising when a public figure feels comfortable making statements that have no basis in reality. Still, the ease with which Brett Mitchell distorted the facts as he addressed the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) board was remarkable. Even more incredible was that the actual data was readily accessible, sometimes in the very paperwork he had submitted on behalf of Crete Academy.
As co-founders of the charter school, Mitchell and his wife make a combined $390,982 annual salary running a school that focuses on the needs of homeless and economically disadvantaged students. Seeking to protect this income stream, he stood before the unelected LACOE Board on March 18, 2025, and asked them to reverse the LAUSD's decision to reject Crete's application to renew its charter. With the data not on his side, he presented different information.
"As acknowledged in our charter petition, Crete falls into the low-performing category"
- Brett Mitchell, January 10, 2024 [SIC]
"we are not a 'low quality' charter school"
- Brett Mitchell, February 13, 2025
One data point Mitchell repeatedly cited was that in previous years, oversight visits by the District's Charter School Division (CSD) found that his school was "Middle Performing". This was surprising, especially since the CSD does not include "Middle Performing" in its ratings. With four levels of performance on the scale (Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, and Unsatisfactory), there is not even a middle position.
It is also clear that while trying to persuade the LACOE Board that the concerns of LAUSD regulators were new, Mitchell knew the reports generated after its Annual Performance-Based Visits told a much different story. Just two months earlier he wrote a letter to the LAUSD Board that stated: "The District also relies on Crete Academy's Annual Performance-Based Oversight Visit reports for the last seven years, in which the Charter School did not earn a rating higher than 2 (Developing) in Student Achievement and Educational Performance and earned a rating of 1 (Unsatisfactory) in 2023-24." Crete has been mired in mediocrity for its entire existence.
The LAUSD CSD's findings are similar to those of the California Department of Education's Dashboard. Its first entry on the Dashboard in 2019 showed that the school's students scored 114 points below standard in both English Language Arts and Math:
The State suspended the Dashboard in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic. It resumed publication in 2022 but with a different coding system. In both English Language Arts and Math Crete was deemed to be performing "very low":
In 2023, the school's students showed a slight increase in their performance in English Language Arts but fell slightly in Math. This resulted in the lowest possible rating:
In the last report published, Crete lost most of the gains in English Language Arts and even more ground in Math. Not only did it land in the red for both categories, U.S. News ranked it as one of the lowest-performing schools in California. This data directly contradicts the school's claim that it had above-average growth in 2024:
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