Disclosure: The author is the Massachusetts State Director of Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter organization. -ed.
“Charter schools? Democrats don’t support those.”
It was a small group of anti-charter organizers who were saying it — and in truth, that was one of the more polite ways it was expressed. But that’s the kind of comment I heard at the recent Democratic State Convention. And to me, it was surprising. After all, as a member of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee, I have always supported public schools and the belief that every child deserves a shot at a quality public education. And as a proud Democrat, I believe we have an obligation to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts.
Here’s why:
I’m a single mother to three wonderful little boys. My oldest son Matthew is an amazing kid who happens to have special needs. My career began in journalism and I then worked with 1199SEIU for several years. I was the chair of the Somerville Democratic City Committee and served as a city commissioner. I had devoted my entire career to fighting for justice for other people’s families.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to find justice for my own child at school. During Matthew’s first two years in a traditional public school — for pre-k and kindergarten — he was suspended dozens of times. Even after working with an entire team of experts and being given every assurance that his needs would be met through an IEP, they continued to send him home from school several times a week and eventually resorted to locking him in the “redirect room” for up to 6 hours a day. The punishment was solitary confinement for my five year old. The crime? Not being able to sit down at rug time because of his ADHD diagnosis.
In our case, I was forced to move out of district — uprooting my entire life — to get my child into a public school that met his needs. That school was a charter school. You see, I knew the system. I knew there was another way to get my son into a better school. I’m willing and able to fight, and if I don’t know or understand the process, I have no problem demanding that someone help me figure it out. I had the resources to pack up my entire life and move to another district to access the school I knew was right for my child.
My boys are some of the fortunate ones. And I know it. But thousands of children with mothers and fathers who are struggling aren’t so lucky. Their families are struggling to break the cycle of poverty but are forced to send their children to failing schools. Families whose children won’t be lucky enough to have their pulled in a lottery, who lack the means to uproot their life and move to another city with better schools.
How, as Democrats, have we let it get to this point?
After all, we are the true champions of public education. It was Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion and the pride of our Massachusetts Democratic Party, who fought to move our nation toward a more just and equitable society — and challenged Democrats to dig deeper and do more to improve public schools. He fought for public schools — but also for real goals, accountability and for assessing for quality.
He would have been horrified to know that nine-in-ten low-income children of color in his home state had no choice but to attend schools that rank in the bottom 3% of districts across the state. It’s no coincidence that these are the same communities where three-quarters of the 34,000 children waiting for access to public charters live.
Being a progressive that supports public charter schools not only shouldn’t be controversial — it isn’t controversial. After all, our adopted party platform calls on every Democrat to “work to expand public school options — including charter schools.” Democratic leaders from President Obama to Howard Dean to House Speaker Robert DeLeo have called on all of us to embrace the role of public charters as part of the solution. They don’t see a longer school day, more personal attention, increased accountability and outstanding results as anomalies or threats to traditional public schools. They see them as an essential part of the solution for families.
And for good reason. Study after study has shown that public charter schools in Massachusetts do a better job closing the achievement gap that holds back poor children of color, a better job of serving English Language Learners and a better job helping children with special needs like Matthew succeed. These are the very populations–vulnerable populations–that we have a duty and obligation as Democrats to serve.
How quickly we forget that in 1993–the year education reform was born in Massachusetts–we were far from leading the nation in education. It was only with the adoption of bold, innovative new ideas and initiatives–including charter schools–that we were able to launch a new era of achievement for the children of Massachusetts. And today, we have the best public schools in the country — and the best public charter schools in America. Those reforms were led by Democrats.
As a mother and proud Democrat, I believe it is not enough for us to sit back and remember our role as the champions of public education — we have a duty to lead the way toward innovation and improvement so every child in Massachusetts and across our great nation has access to the highest quality education possible.
All our children deserve a quality education. As Democrats and committed progressives, we must lead the way. Because if we don’t champion these families, who will?
Keri Rodrigues Lorenzo
Democratic State Committee
JimC says
To me charter schools are a labor issue.
KLo says
… so you think of our schools as more of an employment system than an education system?
merrimackguy says
1. Charter school teachers are repressed labor compared to public school teachers.
2. Charter schools cherry pick their students (as well as keep only the one they want) so their results are not apples to apples vs public schools, who have populations with tougher characteristics. Charter parents are also more involved and that has a big impact on results.
3. Charters drain financial resources from public schools and leave them with lower performing populations (and less resources).
Also (these are less obvious)
4. Charter schools are a conspiracy (composed of various groups) to destroy public education
5. Some charter schools are an attempt by for-profit entities to suction up public monies.
6. That 34,000 is way overstated. You’ve been listening to Charlie “Numbers” Baker too much.
So basically your post is 100% wrong. You didn’t have any other recourse with your child? They actually suspended a kindergartner “dozens” of times? You moved to another town to use their charter school? How does that work? Couldn’t you just have moved to a town with a better SPED program? PS 100% of the people you dealt with in Somerville schools probably were Democrats. You couldn’t get anyone to help?
Have I got all the right points BMG’ers?
Mark L. Bail says
The word would be “oppressed,” but that’s not an anti-union argument. Charter school teachers don’t hang around long enough to matter. Numbers 2 and 3 are good. Number 4 is an exaggeration in my opinion: conspiracy smacks of organized, secret opposition; charter proponents tend to hang out with various groups opposed to public school education, want to privatize education, and dislike unions. 5. We don’t have for-profit charter schools, though they can be managed by an educational management organization that is for-profit. 6. The 34,000 number is definitely not an accurate statement. The reporting and compiling of these numbers include double-counts and are widely regarded as false. What is this number?
I don’t disagree with the poster sending her kid to a charter school. I disagree with making policy decisions based on someone’s individual experience. I also disagree with the fact that Keri Rodrigues Lorenzo didn’t fully disclose that she’s the staff director of Families for Excellent Schools , a noted astro turf organization.
jshore says
Good start Merrimackguy! Here is my contribution to your list:
1. Charter school refusal to backfill seats across grade levels and throughout the year.
2. 25 years of charter’s failure to outreach to Special Education and English Language Learners so that they reflect the sending district.
3. “Post testing” students after they have “won” a charter school seat and then demoting them to a lower grade if they are not the right fit! No child coming from a Massachusetts accredited traditional public school, should be subject to demotion! No parent is going to allow that to happen to their child. Demoting a student puts an additional year of tuition into that charter school’s coffers and takes a seat away from a student on the “waitlist” for that earlier grade!
4. By “consolidating” their name, charter school networks, like Brooke Charter School (p51), are allowed to aggregate the data of all the schools in their network. When you look on the BESE site you never know what charter school “campus” in their network is succeeding or failing. Are Special Education students or English Language Learners segregated into their own building and having their scores being shored up by the other charter campuses in the network?
Charter schools were supposed to be held to a higher level of accountability. Why can’t our traditional school districts aggregate the data from all the schools in their district to determine their level, like charter schools do! If we salted the populations of Boston’s 3 exam schools back into the mix would any of our schools be underperforming?
5. Remember during Governor Baker’s campaign he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about “tax credits,” Notice how recent charter school spin has moved away from “parent choice” to “charters for the lowest 25% of underperforming urban schools.” Now charter school vulture investors take money out of the tax base and create a windfall with a 39% ROI, using New Market Tax Credits at the expense of our poor urban communities who could be using those NMTC’s to build infrastructure to reduce poverty.
MassDevelopment provided $26 million in New Markets Tax Credits to Friends of KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School Foundation! They purchase a six-acre site taking that land out of Lynn’s tax base!
Brooke Charter School this year was awarded an additional 691 seats by BESE to open a high school. How is Brooke going to pay for it…New Market Tax Credits and Historic Tax Credits and they even formed their own LLC to sell them!
Look, there is a social contract and charter schools have violated it. Charter schools are segregation academies that have created more problems than they have solved, Our state and our cities can’t afford the negative impact that charter schools have had on our public schools that serve the majority of our kids. Don’t be hoodwinked! Keep the Cap!
JimC says
Speaking of employment systems, do you have anything you’d care to disclose?
petr says
The CommonWealth employs teachers to enable future job seekers to read, write and do maths. What you call it matters little besides what it is.
Here’s the thing: I don’t care about your kids and it shouldn’t matter to you — or, indeed, anyone– whether or not I care about your kids. I care about the teachers and I’ll let them care about your kids.
I’ve long advocated for seamless involvement by the present day teachers unions in charter schools and public schools. The wedge driven between the charter school movement and the teachers unions is the one thing preventing both from succeeding. Charters can’t be everything they want to be if they repeatedly chew through an iteration of young teacher-bots only programmed to disgorge a repetition of lesson plans without actual training and public school teachers can’t succeed if their resources are attrited away.
You may be well meaning and earnest — and I believe that you are — but the people who are funding you might not be. They might, in fact, be speaking outta both sides of their mouth. Take a listen to what each side says and compare and contrast. That’s an eye-opener.
jconway says
N/T
jconway says
They are not a panacea for public education or Ch 70 inequity, but vouchers and charters do make sense for SPED purposes. My nephew was underserved by the Cambridge school system which was otherwise one of the best ranked and funded in the state.
Our development director has had issues with Easton and Sharon’s systems and they are a lot of SPED moms who feel the same way. Sometimes a heterogenous public system doesn’t work for students who need specialized and more hands on approaches to learning. It’s not one size fits all, but it should be a choice and an option for parents who can’t afford specialists or private schools.
Mark L. Bail says
for the full disclosure! You work for Families for Excellent Schools.
http://hedgeclippers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/WallSt-Money-Mass-Schools-FES-Report-Digital.pdf
Honesty goes a long way. Jerk!
jconway says
She totally undermined an interesting argument by not disclosing. I’m sympathetic to her argument based on my sisters experience and other parents with SPED students that the traditional model doesn’t serve them well. That’s an important debate to have since the charter debate often gets drowned out by the entirely valid labor, funding and transparency arguments that public school teachers and their allies are rightly pissed about. It doesn’t help advocates and detractors have both lost sight of their original role, and how they could work to assist the existing system.
In theory, charters should be designed as appendages of the public school system with specialized curriculum, management, or serving particular bodies (advanced, SPED, STEM, vocational, boarding school or service oriented). The original idea is that wealthy, primarily white people can afford to pay high property taxes in rich districts or send their little darlings to specialist schools. Why can’t there be a public Concord Academy for example? Or Commonwealth school? Regional Boston Latins? Charters should’ve been a means of addressing that.
Instead they’ve been drummed up as a solution to every public school problem by visionless policymakers, someone found a way to make a lot of money off of them, and they’ve been structured to takeaway public funds instead of separately funded from a statewide pool. This automatically makes it a union fight and an equity fight for the students who lose the lottery. And we are back at square one.
I think if we solved the funding issue and funded charters out of a distinct revenue pool, we would be able to then tackle whether they work and how and utilize them as lab schools for teaching innovation rather than a backdoor to privatization or Union busting. Pablo had a very detailed and workable solution to this issue in another thread a few months back.
KLo says
… of working for Families for Excellent Schools. It’s my job to organize thousands of parents across the Commonwealth — which is something I decided to get involved in after realizing I had no voice in advocating for my own child. Of course a Jobs With Justice report is going to hate on FES — they are funded by the MTA. Their arguments aren’t based in fact, but guesses (that are incorrect) but I understand why they did it. I used to write stuff like this for SEIU! LOL
Mark L. Bail says
your Democratic status and your parent status. Why did you leave out the fact that you’re paid by FES?
And then you dismiss the JOJ report (which I agree wasn’t very good) because it’s funded by the MTA when you’re funded by FES?
Priceless.
sabutai says
“On average, charter middle schools that held lotteries were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving math or reading test scores, attendance, grade promotion, or student conduct within or outside of school. Being admitted to a study charter school did significantly improve both students’ and parents’ satisfaction with school.”
Source
Or
“Taken in the aggregate, the empirical evidence to date leads one to
conclude that we do not have definitive knowledge about the impacts
of public charter schools on students and existing schools.”
Source
Interesting that you state that a report you don’t like wasn’t based on fact, and that you used to write stuff like that for SEIU. In other words, you have a history of writing non-factual reports. But this time we should trust you because of who’s paying your way this time?
petr says
… jerk responses aren’t, generally, either well meant nor well recieved. I know you know this, Mark.
Well meaning Democrats have a long and storied history of being co-opted, usurped, steamrolled and generally snookered. I’m not saying that’s definitively the case here… but that there are explanations at least as plausible as some underhanded jerk playing politics.
In fact the entire charter school movement can be seen in this light: well meaning reforms co-opted in the long con. In point of fact, conservatism in this country really couldn’t work any other way. It hardly makes sense to blame possibly well-meaning, but naive, proponents for being co-opted. Indeed, the wedge that gets driven in just this manner is more than half the rationale for the con.
Mark L. Bail says
I should have called KLo a “jerk,” Petr. You’re right.
The fact that she’s employed by an organization and she’s paid to express her opinion and post here, well, that warrants a full-disclosure.
The fact that she saw fit to include her Democratic credentials and neglected to mentioned that fact that she is paid for her opinion suggests that she was intentionally obscuring the fact. Unintentionally parodying herself, she then dismisses a Jobs With Justice report on her organization based on some of its funding coming from the MTA, which is ironic, given that FES is funded by dark money.
I can respect someone with a different opinion if they are honest. The honesty is compromised here.
jconway says
And I think her story isn’t fictitious since it’s similar to a lot of SPED moms I know, including my sister. That said, the lack of disclosure violates the BMG rules and it’s something I take very seriously.
Christopher says
…but I am flabbergasted that a public system doesn’t seem to know how to better handle its SPED population.
Mark L. Bail says
Petr, you write:
My knee-jerk response was, I believe, correct. Your “usurped, steamrolled, snookered” lobbyist of a dark-money funded for the worst aspects of charter schools has a respectable resume that includes stints on talk radio and membership in a Democrats for Educational Reform.
Sometimes knees jerk because one piece of evidence tells the entire story.
JimC says
I think the post should be updated.
merrimackguy says
After googling her….
Either her online exploits are fluff or maybe her kid would perform better in school if she spent more time parenting and less time as an activist.
sco says
I oppose charters, but this is a gross personal attack. Would you have said the same about me if I, as a father, had made an anti-charter post?
KLo says
Actually my son performs quite well in a public charter school. In fact, he’s blossoming both socially and academically. I didn’t know single working moms were to blame for having kids with special needs. If I quit my job do you think his ADHD would go away? I’d do it in a heartbeat.
johnk says
nothing is easy, I see an Special Ed administrator of a past school all the time, she’s never says hi to me. I might have been a PIA. Yes, I know the system too and I agree that you have to fight for your children. I also spend a great deal of time at home and also pay for tutoring.
But KLo you crossed a line a line of ethics here. Astrofurf in a blog is the sleaziest thing you can do. You have to tell people that you are a paid lackey for charters and not come here to post pretending to be just a regular person telling a story. It’s not right.
Editors, please update or remove this post.
merrimackguy says
She’s lying by omission on this post. Lying- hence my jerky reaction.
briandunn says
This is a disgusting attack. I disagree with Keri on this issue, and she knows that. But, attacking her parenting and/or her children is way below the belt and you should be ashamed. She also does not hide her place of work. She’s very public about it. I disagree with her on the issue, but calling out her parenting is disgraceful.
merrimackguy says
I never realized down rates could hit double digits. Cool
petr says
…If I believe the above statement, I’d have to oppose charter schools as they are currently enabled. At the present time, I do not think that the hiring practices for teachers, their training and retention policies of most charters allows a ‘quality education.’ I think what you want to say, but are forbid by the adversarial nature of the debate, is “All our children deserve excellent teachers.”
I do not, however, oppose charter schools. I, also, do not use my pro-charter bent as de facto opposition of traditional public schools and most especially do not use present charter hiring practices to bad mouth the teachers unions. This is exactly and precisely because I do believe that “All our children deserve excellent teachers.” And I know where to find a large, experienced, cadre of excellent teachers.
Now, let us put the two together…
Christopher says
…what in the world could a kindergartener possibly be doing to deserve all those suspensions? Have the adults involved really never dealt with a child that age who can’t sit still?
I was open to charters for a long time because I have seen examples of public/private partnerships work in a lot of contexts. I now favor phasing them out entirely because after all these years I do not see them doing what it was my understanding they were intended to do – namely, experiment and innovate in ways that could be adopted by traditional public schools to benefit everyone. Now they feel like they are really just private corporate schools entitled to a share of what are already limited public resources.
jconway says
Then I think they can operate as specialist schools or laboratories of teaching innovation. I tutored at CPS and the U of C Lab School and it’s shameful the democratic, progressive, Dewey inspired education was only available to the Lilly white wealthy scions of privilege and sons and daughters of faculty and not the area public schools nearby. Why not have a few public schools operate like that?
The CPS school suspended kids for being late to class even though many of them had schedules taking them from one end of the building to the other. The library was locked at most hours of the day unless a class was operating in it, and President Obama spoke there since so many kids from that school had been killed. They regulsrly lose a sandy hook worth of kids in a four year span at that school alone. Inequity in education has to be fixed, and it’s not fair that parents of color could bashed for choosing METCO, charters, or parochial. What choice do they have when we gave them the worst schools to go to? But in the long term, let’s make their neighborhood school just as good if not better.
Christopher says
In my book (and I think my experience, not personally of course but in school systems), you only suspend if a kid’s continued presence excessively disrupts the learning or threatens the safety of others. I’ve always said fix the public schools rather than create a potentially separate and unequal system.
jconway says
When school feels like prison, with metal detectors, bars on the windows and random frisks in the hallways we shouldn’t be surprised that students don’t want to learn and are conditioned to feel they can’t achieve. I helped one student in my cohort get to IIT.
He actually had no plans to apply to any colleges despite a high GPA since his family assumed it wasn’t affordable. We got a lot of work to do, and its hard to think Brown v Board is meaningful when you see the disparities between north and south side schools and their all black/all white nature. The contrast to my alma mater was stark and alarming.
Christopher says
Disproportionate racial numbers per se don’t bother me, but schools on the north and south sides of Chicago should be funded equitably and governed fairly. Regarding the prison feel I don’t know what to say. On the one hand ideally it shouldn’t be like that, but OTOH if there have been problems with gangs, drugs, and weapons, I’m at a loss for what the alternative might be. Surely there must be something communities with these problems can learn from communities without them.
nopolitician says
The 1960s fight was that schools in the same district should not be segregated. But the Democratic fight ended there? Why? Springfield was criticized a couple of years ago because our majority-minority schools still had a degree of imbalance – we had one school which had 35% white students and another which had 5%. People (from outside the community) were up in arms! Meanwhile no one thinks that schools in Hampden/ Wilbraham that are 97% white are any kind of a problem because the town is predominately white.
Multiple studies have shown that the Springfield MSA and the Boston MSA are among the most heavily segregated in the country – not within those cities, but between those cities and their suburbs. The disparities in education between those districts is pretty substantial too. Maybe we need to start looking across quaint town borders.
Christopher says
I’d be open to a statewide property tax, or delinking said tax from school funding, but I’m more than fine with school districts being our cities and towns (though I’m of course aware that some small towns join into unified districts which is fine too). I’d be opposed to busing kids across town lines. How about just equalizing the schools in the first place?
merrimackguy says
It can’t be true.
Mark L. Bail says
wrong with your organization receiving money from the Walton Foundation, but http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/who-we-are/grant-reports-financials/2013-walton-family-foundation-grants
merrimackguy says
Waltons and Kochs are the same crowd
Mark L. Bail says
it’s an agenda. I don’t think the Kochs are involved in education.
The charter school movement is largely funded by the billionaire class. That’s not a secret. Its well-documented. The only secret the rest of the FES’s funding. They’re basically lobbyists masquerading as a grassroots organization.
sabutai says
If this is such a clearly progressive issue, why does your employer need to pay out-of-state signature collectors to get a question on the ballot? And does your organization endorse expanded gambling in the state, which was the other question we has pushing for outside the supermarket?
iggyaa says
Wow. If we had heard about your trouble with your son when it was going on, many people would have told you to get an Education Advocate to go to your school with you. I think would have looked for a SPED advocacy group to sue your school.
I keep thinking about all the kids who were left behind with those teachers and administrators who clearly didn’t know how to deal with special needs students. There is NO evidence that anything being “learned” about teaching or education is charter schools is going back to the public schools. Take a look at what Sen Pat Jehlen is doing – she’s advancing real work to change our public schools and their evaluations systems – not giving a lucky few a chance at a better education. I’m not actually convinced that Charter Schools give a better education either – it’s hit or miss depending on the schools.
The idea of charter schools was to experiment and pilot other ways of doing education. If the good ideas had a way to end up back in public school, that might have been useful. Unfortunately, it’s just further aggrevating the class system in this state and they must go. They must stop draining our public schools and our public schools needed to be aided in innovating and experimenting.
Check out the new Boston Public Schools curriculum for K-2. Now THAT’s making real change! We just piloted it here in Medford.
Honestly, I’m shocked that someone who holds this point of view and these values is on the Democratic State Committee and it makes me want to run for it to counter these conservative values.
Christopher says
For one thing, the DSC like the party is hardly an ideological monolith, and for another thing you can’t really blame a mother for seeing the good in a model that seems to have helped her own child.
nopolitician says
Keri, I respectfully disagree with your premise. Your logic supporting your conclusion is not sound.
Your situation clearly proves that our schools are in need of improvement. However your ability to successfully utilize a charter school does not prove that charter schools are the way to solve our education problems.
By their very nature, charter schools sort children into “those with parents who care the most” and “everyone else” because you have to affirmatively apply to a charter school to even be put on a waiting list for admission. If you can’t bother with your child’s education, you’re definitely not going to make note of the brief application window of a charter school, never mind actually getting the form and applying for admission.
Removing better kids from public schools leaves public schools with a higher concentration of students whose parents don’t care the most. It makes the schools worse, because good schools are a combination of good teachers, good administration, and good students. When any of those become too “bad”, they make the entire school bad.
You can control and get rid of bad administration and bad teachers; you can’t control and get rid of bad students. Unless you are a charter, that is – you can throw the bad students out, or better yet, keep them from applying for admission before they ever get in.
I can appreciate any parent who wants to get away from a “bad school” – usually bad because of its students – but to suggest that this is some kind of “progressive” issue is ludicrous.
Let me ask you this: what do you do with this highly concentrated group of bad students once everyone else has escaped from them? Because it is a very clear conservative/Republican strategy, to separate the best from everyone else and then let everyone else fend for themselves. I’d love to hear your progressive take on what to do.
If all our children deserve a good education, then how about we figure out how to educate each one individually, and then figure out how to pay for it? If you want to do it right, it will mean both raising taxes and eliminating the entire concept of district-based education – because districts are another way people segregate themselves, and parental income correlates very strongly with a child’s success. We would need to create a variety of schools – which anyone could attend – that are in tune with the wide variety of students and their learning strengths. One size never fits all.
I understand that in the absence of this kind of massive reform – which may be politically impossible – charter schools are the next best way to combat our district-based segregation, because they give people in poorer districts the power to segregate themselves without needing money, and albeit in a more fair way. Perhaps charters could be used in a way to eliminate district-based boundaries by opening them up to all students, regardless of where they live. This would require a change in the law, allowing charters to spring up anywhere, and allowing parents like yourself to send your kids to one without having to uproot yourself.
Then we see how charter strategies change – if a charter school could pluck a student from a Wellesley district along with their $30k in per-student spending, they’re not going to pass that up, will they? So then maybe charters will house the best kids from any community, rich or poor, small or large. But I bet they go after the dollars, because in reality, that is what they are about – arbitraging the difference between the money provided to educate an “average” student but trying to attract the “cheaper than average” students.
I expect that rich exclusive communities (and their representatives) will never, ever let that happen though, because when it comes down to it, Massachusetts isn’t very progressive when it comes to issues of segregation and inequality. This state’s bread-and-butter is its ability to have very exclusive school districts which keep out the “wrong” kids. Most liberals in this state like their schools, and they really don’t like their taxes going to help “poor” school districts because this difference is what keeps their property values up.