This is not because I’ve suddenly realized that charter schools are a good idea. It’s because they’ve distracted us long enough, and because the story of heroic entrepreneurs saving education has stubbornly resisted the facts, the only way to kill the myth is to allow as many charters as possible.
The most cursory research shows that charter schools underserve both students with ed plans and English language learners. (compare the percentages with the district numbers here.) (or read the Globe article here)
Charter schools also have a terrible attrition problem. (these numbers are often buried in their annual reports, but the Globe quotes the MTA study here. (Note in this article how the charter schools blame the students they are failing to educate. Classy!)
These problems won’t go away with more charter schools. In fact, more charter schools will make the number of students on the charter schools’ vaunted wait lists go down, while students will presumably be streaming out the back door in the same numbers.
When I worked in a charter school, the students who left were not just slackers who wanted an easy diploma; they were also students who had to take care of a younger sibling after school and couldn’t manage the extended day, or students who had to work in order to afford necessities and couldn’t swing both the extended day and the homework, or students with a talent in the arts or athletics that was malnourished by our pathetic offerings in both areas.
In short, the ideal Boston charter school student is a native English speaker with no learning disabilities who has no other demands on her time and no passion for athletics or the arts. Given this fact, charter school attrition may even increase if the number of schools increases.
Finally, the talent pool for charter school staffing is not infinite. Charter schools typically pay less than district schools for far more hours per day and more days per year on the job. They depend on a committed young staff without family obligations. Once again, the number of idealistic young people willing to forego thousands of dollars per year in income for the privilege of working longer and harder than they would in a district school is relatively small. More charter schools will either force the schools to pay more in order to compete for qualified staff, thus crushing their already strained budgets, or it will lead to schools hiring fewer good teachers, which will affect both test scores and attrition.
Charter schools are a distraction to true education reform. They are irrelevant to the educational needs of the great majority of urban students. The only way to expose the fraud and focus on real reform is to lift the cap.
but it’s an interesting argument, thanks.
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p>We have at least two good, legitimate, innovative charters in the Valley — a performing arts high/middle school and a Chinese immersion elementary school, who succeeded in the competition for the limited number of charters. We also have, if I recall the details correctly, a collapsing charter in Springfield that chose a convicted felon as its principal.
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p>Does the cap force competition between charter schools that gets us better ones? That’s one argument for it — another is that we have to limit the number to limit the total impact on the budgets of the ordinary public schools.
The cap did force competition between proposals for one that would work — which is why charters didn’t like it. Removing the cap eliminates the last obstacle to Paul Reville establishing as many charter schools as he can.*
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p>*In order to make the Boston Globe happy, of course.
Has anyone at the state Department of Education offered an estimate of how much money, over a five or a ten-year period, public schools will lose in per pupil revenue if the cap on charter schools were to be removed?
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p>It seems to me that this policy proposal, whatever its contested eduactional merits, requires some serious cost estimates on its fiscal effects on local public school districts
It depends on how many students enroll in new charters. If the charter industry opens more schools, it’s more money from the towns, on top of the $250 million moved out of the control of elected officials in FY 2010.
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p>The per pupil cost in Gloucester is $9,630 which comes to a total of $2 million suddenly pulled out of the city’s budget had that rejected charter been allowed to upon per Paul Reville’s wishes.
I appreciate Jamaica’s argument — it would, in the words of Paul Reville, be a tough but necessary pill to swallow — if only the stakes weren’t so high to learn the lesson — there’d be a generation of kids ill-served by the charter myth on one hand, but the impact on the district schools would be fairly catastrophic…
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p>In Gloucester, a projection based on the GCACS various enrollment schemes — [a month away from their their first round of lottery applications and they STILL haven’t settled on whether they’re going start with 4-7 or K-2, or for that matter they don’t even have a location for the school] — at $11,266/student — a number provided by our Supt. — and the new state reimbursement scheme, the second year of operation of this school will cut over $1M from the district budget and by full enrollment build out it will be around $3M.
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p>The charter advocates will say that there’s no harm because the district is educating less kids, therefore “the money follows the child” — ignoring of course that the infrastructure costs do not track in the same way — drawing a couple of kids from each class in the district may decrease the class sizes, but it doesn’t shift the cost of keeping the buildings open, or the number of teachers/specialists/aides etc. needed to teach the remaining children. Likewise it does nothing to reduce the busses, utilities or other operational costs.
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p>The only way to compensate is to slash personnel and merge classes pushing the class sizes to unacceptable levels, cutting programs and/or closing schools, redistricting hundreds of children – something our district had to do only a couple of years ago.
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p>Jamaica’s post makes the case that the Charter movement is a self-selecting system that is essentially a fad– unproven to be any better than the schools we have today. The solution isn’t “competition” from every snake oil salesman and huckster who shambles into town on their wagon filled with the latest in ed-yoo-cashunal in-o-vation – “buy now and we’ll throw in an extra bottle fer half price.”
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p>The solution is to prioritize PUBLIC education – for ALL children – and commit the energy and resources necessary to achieve that goal.
JGinGloucester’s points are well taken.
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p>Just to add some flesh to the bones of this discussion, I’ll share something that came up at the Citizens for Public Schools forum yesterday. Senator Robert O’Leary, co-chair of the Joint Education Committee, was our guest. He spoke about the “Ed reform” (actually misnamed “An Act relative to the Achievement Gap”) bill and how legislators arrived where they arrived.
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p>A retired Boston teacher–a woman with a long record of exemplary service as an English teacher who has been often recognized for her excellence–commented about the plight of Boston schools and schoolchildren. She said it is common to see kids come back into a regular Boston school from a charter in January. They’ve been ejected or decided to leave for some reason, maybe because they have unmet special needs or behavior issues (she said Madison Park now has more special needs kids than not). The kids arrive in class extremely demoralized and disoriented. It affects the rest of the class too. More kids trickle back from charters over the next few months. Meanwhile the school is dealing with a lack of basic resources to help the kids adjust, e.g., enough social workers.
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p>She said there’s no other name for what charters are doing than “supersegregation.” And we’re told these kinds of “reforms” are the civil rights issue of our time.
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p>Something’s terribly wrong here and my concern is this: will we even know how this bill affects most kids in the Commonwealth, or most kids in “underperforming districts”? What will most of these kids lose as a result of funds shifted to the one segment of our increasingly bifurcated system? The Gloucester mess doesn’t bode well for a new era of transparency and accountability, does it.