“What changes do you want to see in charter schools?”
I sometimes hear this from people who know I’m against Question 2, which would allow for unlimited expansion of charter schools without changing anything about them or their funding.
Question 2 is an up or down proposition, but it’s never good to be the “Party of No.” Actually, the Senate passed a bill last spring called the “RISE Act” (because everything has to be an acronym). It would have allowed for charter school expansion with critical changes in the way charters are approved and operate. I was one of the senators who helped write the bill, and agree with almost all of it.
I was disappointed in the Charter School Association’s response. They didn’t say, “We’re okay with this provision, but not that one.” They immediately rejected the entire bill. I’d like to hear from people who support Question 2 (or are considering it) which portions they support, and which ones they oppose.
Here are its main provisions, which show the ideas Senators have, not just about charter schools, but about improving education for all children.
The 1993 Education Reform Act didn’t just create charter schools and state standards. The most important provision increased state aid by $1.2 billion a year, distributed in a way that moved us toward more equalized spending. Three studies of MA school finance reform in the 1990s found that achievement of students in previously low-spending districts went up. (At the time there were no high-stakes for schools and teachers based on tests, and there were few charters.)For 7 years we kept the promise of moving toward equality. But since 2000 state funding has fallen far behind the costs of health care and special education. I served on the Foundation Budget Review Commission. We found that we’re short-changing schools by a billion dollars a year. Low-income communities can’t make up their losses from local property taxes. We are now among the states with the greatest inequality between school districts (and the greatest income inequality).
Schools labeled as “failing” are mostly in those low-income communities.
MCAS scores correlate almost 90% with income.
The lowest income students attend schools with the least adequate funding, which are labeled the “lowest performing.”
The “lowest performing” districts have twice as high a cap on charter school tuition, and would be targeted for unlimited charter school expansion under Question 2. Giving all students a fair chance requires more state aid, distributed fairly, not separating out a few students and ignoring the needs of others.
In contrast, the Senate “RISE” bill allows for raising the cap on charter school tuition payments in “low-performing” districts at the same time, and dependent on, progress toward equalizing and adequate funding of all schools.
Here’s more on the Foundation Budget Report
DECISIONS ABOUT LOCAL BUDGETS SHOULD BE MADE DEMOCRATICALLY AND LOCALLY
Charters are granted by the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The Board says it can’t consider the effect of a new charter on other children in the district.
School committees have limited resources. When they have to send more money to charter schools, they have to cut other programs and/or close schools. For example, five years ago, people in Somerville learned that, if a new charter were successful here, our school system would lose so much money that we would have to close a school. Some families would gain a new choice, but others would lose the school they had chosen and loved. That decision would not be made by locally elected and accountable school committee members, who have to consider the needs of all children. It would be made by an appointed board, whose members say the law doesn’t allow them to consider the effects of their decisions on other children.
Most of the money in school budgets comes from local property taxes. Giving the state board the power to spend local money is an unfunded mandate and taxation without representation.
The Senate bill allows school committees to establish and pay for charter schools. If the state Board approves a charter without community approval, it would be paid for by state appropriation. This is what 13 other states do.
CHARTER SCHOOLS SHOULD BE OPEN TO ALL CHILDREN
Charter schools don’t have to admit students who seek to enroll during second half of the school year, or in their upper grades. This makes it easier to create a consistent school culture, but it denies some students their choice, and makes charters very different from district schools. It’s not a model district schools can adopt; otherwise we would have thousands of children unable to attend school. Boston Public Schools educate 4,000 homeless children.
The Senate bill requires that charter schools accept students whenever they sign up.
Of the 5 schools with the highest suspension rates in MA, 3 are charter schools, with Roxbury Prep giving out-of-school suspension to 40% of students.
The Senate bill would not allow renewal of charters with high out-of-school suspension rates. (Source)
Many charter schools have high attrition rates: in some schools, fewer than half the 9th graders graduate in four years.
The Senate bill would not allow renewal of charter schools with high attrition rates.
CHARTER BOARDS SHOULD REFLECT THEIR COMMUNITIES
A recent report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that 31% of charter boards are composed of members from the corporate/financial sector and that only 16% of charter board trustees in Massachusetts are parents. Significant parent representation on charter boards is largely confined to schools that serve predominantly White students. Recently, KIPP, which runs schools in Boston and Lynn, held its board meeting in Dover.
The Senate bill requires charter boards of trustees to include a member of the school committee from the sending district, 25% (or at least two) elected parent representatives, a teacher representative, and one elected student representative.
WHAT ABOUT THOSE WAITLISTS?
Charter proponents say there are 32,600 students on waitlists. But 9700 of them applied more than 2 years ago, and didn’t re-apply since then. And the number includes 3500 on waitlists for Horace Mann charters, which are run by the school district and not subject to the tuition cap. The waitlists for district schools in Boston are larger than those for charter schools. Almost 1000 students are waitlisted for BPS’ Snowden Academy.
Meanwhile 1700 children in Boston are waitlisted for BPS’ preschool — a program proven to reduce the achievement gap.
The Senate bill requires charter waitlists to expire at the end of the school year.
If we keep raising the cap on charter schools, more district schools will go out of business, concentrating students who face the biggest challenges in a shrinking number of district schools while extra resources go to the charters…Let us…incorporate the best ideas from all schools to educate all of our children, not only to score high on standardized tests, but to develop into responsible and capable adults, ready to take their places in a complex world.
nopolitician says
I’d like to take a step back and criticize the language we use to describe our schools.
The Charter School ads have repeatedly used the phrase “failing school districts”. I have heard one charter advocate state that all the schools in Springfield are failing, which is false, because we have a number of Level 1 schools – the highest rating.
Districts are given labels based on the lowest common denominator – if one of twenty schools is a “Level 4” school, then the entire district is labelled “Level 4” – ignoring the fact that 19 of the 20 are perhaps even Level 1 (in reality though, it is never like that – Springfield has about 67% schools that are level 3 or 4, 33% that are level 1 or 2)
A school is designated as a failing school if one of its subgroups is failing. That school may be just fine for a majority of its students, but if its “high needs” students are failing, the entire school is rated as failing. So although 2/3 of Springfield’s schools are “failing”, hence the district is “failing”, the entire student population of the city is viewed as “failing”. If you attend a Springfield school and do well, it doesn’t matter – you attended a failing school in a failing district, you must therefore be failing.
Now there is definitely some rationale for doing things this way, but consider the overall impact of publicly rating/shaming schools – the population that attends them changes over time.
Before the rating systems, a parent would have to do some legwork, talk to others, and figure out if a school was OK for them. They might be OK with the idea that although some kids weren’t doing well in the school, it was going to be perfectly fine for them. That kept higher-achieving kids in the district.
Today, with a ratings system, parents are shown a stark reality: do they want to send their kids to a Failing school in a Failing district? Obviously the answer in most cases will be “absolutely not – I’d be stupid to do that”. I have heard more than one person seriously argue that it should be considered child abuse, grounds for taking a child away, for a parent to move to Springfield and send their kids to a Springfield school.
This drives segregation. It pushes up demand for school districts rated as “Excellent”, and pushes down demand for school districts rated as “Failing”. It becomes an intense feedback loop because wealthy parents can pay more for those Excellent districts whereas poor parents cannot. As the wealth shifts, it makes wealthy communities more wealthy and poorer communities more poor.
This is exactly what has happened in Massachusetts. Over the course of my life I have seen some school districts rise in stature and others fall, and it correlates precisely with the wealth of those communities.
I do not believe this is an accident. I believe that this is someone’s strategy (hello, Grover Nordquist). Coupled with Proposition 2.5, it is turning our state into communities of haves and have-nots. Just as charter schools skim off the best potential students from the public school system, our entire education system is designed to sweep the best potential students into certain districts.
I’m not sure how to solve this – it would be politically difficult to say “the public should not be exposed to this data”. A better way to do it would be to release the data in a way that is more relevant to people. Let people know that if they send their child to a certain school, their child has a high chance of success.
We need to stop this segregation because one of the biggest problems with urban districts is that they have a high concentration of poverty, and students from impoverished households, on average, do not do as well in school as children from wealthier households. Then you get another feedback loop because the concentration of impoverished kids can make things more difficult for everyone else – when a teacher is spending 40% of her energy tending to 5 out of 25 students, the other 20 students get short-changed. That teacher might be able to deal with 1 troubled student, but five simply doesn’t work.
pat-jehlen says
Nopolitician, let’s be in touch!
This labeling of schools by test scores is the most damaging legacy of NCLB. You explain it so clearly.
alain-jehlen says
Yes, there’s a solution to this problem: The state doesn’t have to label schools “failing.”
Jack Schneider of Holy Cross College is developing a system for assessing schools with the Mass. Consortium for Innovative Educational Assessment, a group of about half a dozen school districts. His approach is a sort of dashboard that describes many aspects of the school, based on a wide range of information. He starts by asking what the community wants out of its schools, and then develops measures for those things. Test scores are a piece of it but only a piece. So you can find out a lot about a school’s strengths and weaknesses. Parents can decide for themselves what’s important. And school staff have a basis for trying to make the school better.
Christopher says
I don’t think what’s important to get out of education should be asked or determined community by community.
nopolitician says
I totally understand why, in our new data-driven society, people are approaching things this way. I hope that they can come up with a diverse group of dashboard elements that show people reasons to attend most schools in the state, because if the ranking is based on a small number of criteria, that means most schools will not be viewed as “the best”.
I would recommend reading a book called “Weapons of Math Destruction”. It describes how the focus on metrics at the college level based on “US News and World Reports College Rankings” has, in large part, driven the increased expense of college education. The initial ranking criteria had no basis in science either – they took a look at which schools were “considered to be the best”, and they designed an algorithm that reinforced that viewpoint.
Colleges now spend insane amounts of money to try and improve their rankings even though it has nothing to do with the actual quality of education. One college even hired graduates who couldn’t find jobs just to boost that part of their score. Why is this so important? Because now that the colleges are ranked, they are fighting to survive – who is going to pay to send their kid to a school ranked 95 out of 100?
This kind of brand competition may be fine with kitchen appliances – Consumer Reports tells me which blender to buy, and I’m probably not going to buy a blender just rated mediocre, which means mediocre blenders will eventually go off the market. That’s not how schools work, especially public schools where “choice” is tied to where you live.
Increasing demand for “Best Buy” blenders increases their demand which increases their supply (and often decreases their price). Increasing demand for “Best Buy” schools increases their demand but there is no increased supply, so that just means their price goes up (in the form of housing prices).
I hope that the metrics being pursued are largely based on the performance of the teachers and administration rather than the students. For too long we have conflated “student performance” with “quality of education”. Yes, there are some poor urban schools which are poorly run, but the primary problem that separates poor urban schools from wealthy suburban schools is their student population. A school made up almost exclusively of the children of professionals is going to “perform” better than a school made up almost exclusively of the children of parents working night shifts for minimum wage, or chronically unemployed parents. That shouldn’t excuse schools from trying to educate those children, but relying on those factors just intensifies segregation.
Jasiu says
The Senate passed the bill. Did the House take it up? Was there a vote?
theloquaciousliberal says
The House punted, leaving the decision to the political process (pending a vote on the ballot initiative). See e.g.:
http://www.wbur.org/edify/2016/08/17/mass-democrats-charter-school
JimC says
Wouldn’t that make them regular public schools?
SomervilleTom says
It seems to me that this is the point of the exercise.
Mark L. Bail says
charter schools don’t reflect the population of a public schools, particularly in regard to ELL and SPED students.
pattynolan says
I endorsed Pat Jehlen in her race – and love that she is leading the charge on addressing the overcasting mania and need to re-assess our reliance on tests. I disagree on Question 2 – I am one of those proud liberal Democrats voting YES on Question 2. Mo Cowan just had an editorial endorsing YES on 2 – for similar reasons.
The summary for me:
Charters schools are public schools and they work in Massachusetts – where we don’t have for-profits and we do have evidence of charters closing achievement gaps. The approval process is rigorous, accountability is high and there are thousands of families on waitlists who deserve our support. They cannot afford private school and do not get into elite exam schools in Boston. And many myths about charters like they kick students out, they don’t enroll special needs children, they are responsible for the funding problems, are just not true. The Boston Sunday Globe’s editorial is a good summary of why.
Focusing on outcomes for all kids: separate studies by Harvard MIT and Stanford, which correct for selection bias – found significant positive results, FOR urban students. I hope enough of us vote yes to support the thousands of students on the waitlists and support those educators working hard to effectively close achievement and opportunity gaps.
I am a School Committee member in Cambridge – the committee endorsed No on 2 – two of voted no on the measure, and I speak here as an individual, not for the Committee.
Pablo says
However, I have a boatload of respect for th MA Senate for attempting to forge a compromise bill on charter schools. There are things in the bill that I love, other things… not so much, but it is a real attempt to find a solution that meets the concerns of all involved in the charter debate.
The charter school industry rejected this bill outright and the House wouldn’t even consider it. It is my hope that, after voters defeat Question 2, that the House members who have toed the charter industry line will take a more thoughtful approach and work with the Senate to come up with a compromise bill that will do the right thing for all students.