Fashioned from the Governor’s Readiness Project of June, 2008, this complex new law aims at closing achievement gaps and completing the unfinished business of education reform by fulfilling the promise that every child is entitled to attend an excellent school and be prepared for educational and career success.
From the very early days of his campaign, Governor Patrick has insisted that education reform be the state’s top priority because it is the foundation on which the economic future of this Commonwealth will be built. He recognizes that education is the key to our prosperity but also that we have a moral obligation to provide all children with the opportunity to succeed. Put simply, education is the convergence of our moral obligations and our economic vitality.
In the past 17 years of school reform, Massachusetts has vaulted to the top of the country and sometimes the world on measures of academic performance. Empowered with the nation’s highest academic standards, rigorous assessments and powerful accountability systems, our teachers and students have worked incredibly hard to achieve amazing results. Yet, we still have a long way to go.
In 1993, we made a commitment to excellence and equity, to high expectations and an excellent school for every child. We worked hard. We set the pace for the nation on how to effectively employ high standards as a strategy for the improvement of teaching and learning. We made progress. But in spite of our best efforts and high averages, many students are not full realizing the benefits of education reform.
The Readiness Project is the Governor’s vision for the education future outlining a set of strategies designed to complete the job we set out to do in 1993. In July of 2008, the Governor charged me to immediately begin crafting a proposal that would provide educators with stronger tools and greater capacity, more supports for teachers and students and more flexibility and opportunities for innovation. The Achievement Gap bill delivers these tools, providing us with a great shot at finishing the work of school reform
This landmark legislation spreads innovation and choice across the Commonwealth, provides strong intervention tools to deal with persistently under-performing schools and lifts the charter cap by applying the strengths of our best charter schools in the places and for the students who need help most.
We must quickly rescue children from bad schools. Bad schools are not caused by high concentrations of poor teachers but by a combination of factors including low expectations, weak curricula, ineffective instruction, leadership issues, inexperienced faculty, poverty, behavioral, social and emotional problems and other elements. This bill ensures that this wide range of issues can be addressed and that leaders have the prerogatives, supports and resources to take immediate action.
The charter cap lift is highly focused, targeting the neediest districts and the children with the greatest need and relies on the experience and skills of a limited number of the most successful charter providers. These schools will offer opportunity and hope in places where failure has been the norm.
The most exciting and far-reaching part of the bill is the provision for Innovation Schools. Available to all school districts, Innovation Schools will be authorized through an inclusive, local process mainly controlled by school committees. These schools can be conversions of existing schools or new schools and will replicate the best aspects of charter schools within traditional school districts by allowing for enhanced autonomy and flexibility in the areas of curriculum, budget, school schedule and calendar, school district policies, and teachers’ contract provisions. Innovation schools can be proposed by teachers, principals, colleges, museums community based organizations and others. Most importantly, the funding for Innovation Schools stays in the district.
This monumental bill gives us the framework we need to build on the success of education reform and close achievement gaps. From here, it’s all about implementation. Education reform is big, challenging work, work that will involve thousands of leaders and tens of thousands of educators and nearly one million students. Only in a spirit of partnership will we be successful in finishing this work of reform and achieving our goals for our students and the Commonwealth.
Both you and the Governor have little to no credibility on charter schools until that charter is rescinded.
… just because you disagree doesn’t give you the right to hijack a thread.
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p>Secretary Reville has taken the time to write a post. I think he deserves some measure of respect from you beyond a boorish disruptiveness.
The stone wall of silence from the Patrick Administration on this issue (destroying documents meant for public archiving yet!) is a slow bleed on their integrity on education.
document destruction is a wrinkle in this issue with which I am not familiar.
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p>As far as ‘integrity’ is concerned I’ve read the OIG report. It has satisfied my curiosity about what happened and who’s to blame. It’s readily available on these here internets. I don’t need to hijack a thread to find out what ‘integrity’ (and whose…) is at stake.
..it was in the OIG report that documents that legally must be preserved were likely destroyed by Messrs. Chester and/or Reville. The report (in concert with the leaked email) make it clear that Messrs. Chester and Reville are to blame. Thus, I think it hurts an administration’s integrity to talk about education when it took legally questionable steps to push through its agenda. You may disagree.
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p>PS: Given the large number of people on this thread who think first and foremost of Gloucester when discussing Deval Patrick, his administration, and education, wouldn’t you think they’d want to get this issue behind them? Better to do it now, then have it blow up in six months. It’s not going away. (We got front-page posts trying hard to pre-empt any serious discussion about Charlie Baker with questions about what he might’ve done with the Big Dig. Why not hold Democrats to somewhat equal standards?)
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p>I thought you were discussing document destruction specifically by the Patrick administration. It was not clear. I know about the CSO notes: The report says that CSO evaluators failed to keep their notes and other paperwork regarding GCAS evaluation. It also says they told GCAS that they would keep their notes. I think the ‘legally must’ part is nebulous. Since the wrongdoing centered, as far as I understand, upon what Chester knew about the scope of his duties and his failure to follow the CSO recommendation (the entire thrust of any complaint) I’m inclined to see the CSO failure as accidental, or, at worst, shoddy administrative work. It just doesn’t follow that Chester and CSO, being on different sides of the approval question, would then collude to destroy documentation.
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p>I do disagree. I think, besides the obvious spin potential of already vocal critics, that there just isn’t that much there there…
Is that phrasing more to your liking?
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p>It relevant to Reville’s post, if not artfully stated. Charters and Innovation Schools will only succeed where they have community backing.
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p>Don’t get all faux-populist on what looks like, essentially, a crusade of yours. Had the GCAS been a better applicant they might have received an acceptable rating and been chartered, despite what the community may have wanted: the community might have been forced to accept them just as well on a more above-board process. Commissioner Chester appears not to have known the parameters of his job all that well and contravened the CSO ‘do not approve rating’… which rating occurred, as far as I can tell, entirely absent what the community did or did not want.
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p>As far as communities having confidence: the OIG report ought to instill confidence that the process, if followed correctly, is fair… and that those who didn’t follow the process are suitably chastised. So don’t pounce on Secretary Revilles first post looking for your pound of flesh. It’s bad form.
What is being done to fix the chapter 70 formula that your boss has called ‘broken’ on numerous occasions?
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p>Why no ch 70 sect 4 review commission?
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p>What is being done to reverse the mess you created in Gloucester?
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p>What is being done to fix the Charter funding formula that Candidate Patrick called unfair?
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p>What happened to the 5 year ch 70 phase in to 17.5 percent that was PROMISED to my community?
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p>Welcome to BMG.
… do you have anything to say about what Secretary Reville actually posted? To wit; the education reform that was passed and the further work to be done? Did you even read it? Or did you just feel an itch in your pet peeves and blurt out your ‘response’?
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p>I doubt very much that ‘citizen participation’ is going to go anywhere if this is the quality and timbre of the ‘participation’.
between direct dialogue, even on a difficult uncomfortable topic … and behaving in such a way that you ensure the diarist (and public official) doesn’t come back. Do try to stay on the productive side of that line. Here are some ways you could have written your questions which aren’t so boorish:
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p>What is being done to fix the chapter 70 formula that
your bossGovernor Patrick has called ‘broken’ on numerous occasions?<
p>What is being done to reverse the
mess youcharter school debacle created in Gloucester?<
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p>You’re asking important questions. I love that. You’re clearly knowledgeable in this area. I love that too. Secretary Reville is engaging BMG. I love that. Let’s put it all to good work — but that requires good manners from all sides. For you, it means don’t let your ugly frustration come though. For Secretary Reville, it means answering questions honestly and completely.
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p>Here’s to hoping for both.
On the other hand, this is not the first public forum Secretary Reville has experienced. The beauty of blog technology is that he is free to ignore rude comments or questions that do not appear substantive or posed in good faith, and concentrate his responses elsewhere.
I’m not worried about Secretary Reville. I’m worried about our community. If members of our community act like jerks and in fact chase off our cherished guests, then our entire community suffers.
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p>I really value the dialogue that comes when some public officials stop in, make a post, and then come back to respond. Methinks they’re less likely to do it when members of our communities behave disrespectfully.
When journalists avoid tough questions to preserve fragile access to a source, they’re rightly condemned for it.
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p>But it’s “citizenship” if bloggers do the same?
You did just fine in that regard yourself below.
Rude is one way to describe Reville’s treatment of the good folks in Gloucester.
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p>Regardless of whether or not you think Secretary Revilles actions are ‘rude’ (Personally, I don’t think so) are you saying that gives you license to be rude yourself? Fail.
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p>Sounds more like your using it as an excuse to validate and exercise your high moral dudgeon.
MarcusGraly’s opinion could have been stated more “artfully,” but having participated in online forums, including rough and tumble newsgroups that preceded blogs, since the late 1990s, I can say I prefer the semi-anarchy of a free market of ideas and expression.
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p>If that means I get an occasional warning for referring to one of our differently-winged friends as a congenital idiot, so be it.
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p>If Secretary Reville wants to post on here, where, he should know, we have a number of well-informed diarists on education, he should expect a jostling.
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p>One of the problems with Democrats in general is our focus on process and dislike of (effective) GOP crassness. It would be a good idea that we focus more on the matter and less on the art.
Mr Reville
Would you kindly respond to my questions and comments.
I’d like to ask some questions since you are here.
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p>Upon what scholarly, not rhetorical, evidence is based your contention that lifting the charter cap will narrow the “achievement gap”?
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p>How do you define “bad schools”?
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p>What specifically about this bill targets the “many factors” that you describe as leading to bad schools?
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p>Do you have any plans to address the chronic under-service of gifted and talented students in public education, who are evacuating the system at high rates?
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p>What is your feeling on the ban of practicing teachers from the state board of education?
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p>Would you ever consider reclaiming the testing regime of MCAS from the New Hampshire private sector, and resuming its composition and publication by the Mass. state government by qualified public servants?
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How are you going to protect the existing public schools when charter schools bleed much needed resources from a community? Gloucester would be a good case study but other communities are hurt by the current funding formula.
Candidate Patrick made the below comments relative to the charter funding formula at a MA Gubernatorial debate on Sept 13, 2006. So how does the Governor reconcile his comments relative to the charter funding formula with the gaping hole that charter funding is creating within municipal budgets like Gloucester, Swampscott, etc.? The answer is that he cannot reconcile his prior statements with today’s reality.
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p>So what happened??
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p>GABRIELI: Tom and I support charter schools because we see them as an opportunity for innovation and choice. Deval, I think you’re wrong to refuse these kids the choices that every other parent seeks for themselves to go to a great school.
PATRICK: Chris, you’re wrong that I don’t support charter schools. As important as charter schools are and as helpful as they are, we need to come up with a different and better funding mechanism before we raise the cap.
REILLY: Deval, if there was a moratorium proposed by the legislature, to curb any growth in charter schools, would you sign that legislation? I wouldn’t. I think Chris would veto it.
GABRIELI: I would veto it.
REILLY: Would you veto it?
PATRICK: Yes, but listen, we’ve got to be serious about funding. The formula works in theory, but in real life, there are real tensions between real families and that is not community building and that is not advancing ed reform.
REILLY: It’s a matter of giving parents choice, give them a choice.
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p>Source: MA gubernatorial debate on CBS4 news [Xref Gabrieli] Sep 13, 2006
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p>At 1 minute 30 seconds Governor Patrick acknowledges that chapter 70 is broken. If it’s broken it should be fixed.
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p>Sorry to be rude. I’d prefer to be called angry simply because this administration has recognized that problems exist yet has done NOTHING to fix inequities and problems with education funding.
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p>For what it is worth, Paul Reville has been a failure as Sec of Ed. My opinion.
…and closing achievement gaps….
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p>Two new studies, conducted independently using different data, different researchers and different methods, both found extensive segregation in charter schools.
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p>A good summary of the two is in today’s Answer Sheet at the Washington Post web site.
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p>How does the progressive grass roots Democratic base feel about the implications of these studies for the path on which we have been launched with the “achievement gap” bill?
Interesting summary, thanks LisaG. A compact analysis of the segregationist effects of charters in Boston is also available here.
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p>Excerpt from this short article:
I touched on segregation down below, but it bears more discussion.
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p>In Springfield, I believe that the charters are racially segregated. Robert M. Hughes is seen as a “Black” charter school, as is New Leadership and Martin Luther King. SABIS is the charter school that the white parents pick.
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p>The numbers bear that out.
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p>MLK is 57.6% Black, 33.8% Hispanic, and 2.9% white.
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p>RMH is 74.7% Black, 21.5% Hispanic, and 1.6% white.
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p>New Leadership is 67.8% Black, 29.3% Hispanic, and 2.5% white.
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p>SABIS is 31.6% Black, 27.8% Hispanic, and 34.6% white.
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p>The public schools are 23.2% Black, 54.8% Hispanic, and 15.7% white.
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p>I think this is true because the schools have no other identity. None of Springfield’s 4 charters have any distinctive characteristics. Sure, they may have some minor emphasis on some educational tenets, but they are not known for that. They are “alternative to the public schools”, and people, based on their race, know which one they want to pick. If SABIS was to close, I am willing to bet that many of the families there would move from the city, because the racial make up of SABIS is something they are comfortable with.
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p>If someone created an “Irish Heritage Charter” in Springfield then I can almost guarantee you that this would be an invitation to many white parents to move back to the city.
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p>I would be a lot more comfortable with a charter school if it was heavily themed (not racially). I think the Chinese Immersion Charter School is a great example of that, as is the Performing Arts Charter school. Charters like that can bring together people in ways that are not immediately evident, because the people there have something in common. Although such themes could be used as racial dog whistles — the abovementioned Irish Heritage Charter would be a pretty strong signal to the color of one’s skin.
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p>I think it’s important to note that most towns known for their schools are incredibly segregated. Around Springfield, the “good school” towns are usually upwards of 95% white, with any significant numbers of nonwhites being Asian. I think that this segregation is what makes them popular — any community that started to get too “brown” would quickly fall out of favor. Many people I know mention the “lack of minorities” as a strong point of their communities.
First, let me start by thanking you as a parent, as a public school teacher, and as a school committee member in the Wachusett Regional District for your efforts in restoring the Chapter 71 funds that were lost in the 9C cuts. Your call to Dr. Pandiscio was greatly appreciated by those of us on the committee who had been working hard in urging the Patrick administration to restore the $1.3 in funding we had lost.
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p>Second, I have a question on what appears to many (including me) to be something of a charter school fixation exhibited by many in the highest education circles of the Patrick administration. The National Charter School Study by Stanford University clearly indicates that charter schools, by their nature, are really no better than public schools in achieving results. Best practices can be found in schools of all sorts, and charters certainly don’t hold any copyright on effective instruction. Indeed, the literature indicates that when experienced teachers are allowed to innovate and schools are allowed to focus on instruction with support from state-level programs, kids do better. Because the charter school funding mechanism in Massachusetts is so deeply flawed (as is Chapter 70 in general) and the oversight for these schools so weak, do you really believe that the alternative models you folks are offering public schools is going to make public school advocates more comfortable with lifting the charter cap? What incentive are you really giving public schools to be innovative? To take risks? I can tell you–none. The ridiculous AYP thicket that has the best schools in the Commonwealth on “watch” lists is as good as a bludgeon to any creativity or risk-taking one might be able to engender in a school that is staffed by innovative teachers and administrators. You have one set of schools chasing its own tail while you give charters with mediocre performance histories (or worse) more of the taxpayers’ dollars. How does that make sense?
Approving arts oriented charters while traditional public schools can no longer afford to fund the arts.
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p>Does that make sense?
… that you can argue the blanket statement that charter schools are inherently no better or worse than public schools whilst simultaneously arguing the specific case that charter funding and accountability are seriously lacking: either they are, on balance, effectively similar or they are crippled by funding mechanisms and lack of accountability.
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p>If, however, your thesis, that their funding and accountability mechanisms are seriously flawed, is correct, then the fixing and the funding may create better and more effective charter schools. The fact that Stanford believes they’ve achieved parity in so hostile a funding environment might be proof of their inherent quality…
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p>
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p>If I might be allowed to paraphrase your argument thusly: “It’s all a big mess, let’s not make it any bigger, ok?” and voice my (general) agreement. As I see it, charter schools lie at intersecting antipathies and so, of general consequence of being birthed by politics, these antipathies are weighted as much, if not more, then the same things that are used when weighing ‘traditional’ (read: entrenched) public school funding. How do I know this? Because of the continued insistence on the same old tired lines of argument like “charter schools are not public schools” and “charter schools take resources from public schools”. The rhetoric displays a weighted bias towards traditional public schools. But charter schools are public schools. The mess, therefore, isn’t in the existence of charter schools, but perhaps in how we think of them: The very fact that some charter schools have opened and closed (read: not have their charter renewed) mitigates against the statement “while you give charters with mediocre performance histories (or worse) more of the taxpayers dollars”… the very fact of having a charter that can be revoked, it seems to me, provides a solid foundation of accountability. So maybe we can agree that it’s all a big mess and needs to be kept from getting bigger, sure, but can we do it without losing sight of what is?
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p>It’s often an instructive exercise to ask why things are as they are: in the case of charter school several clear themes emerge; a very real antipathy towards intransigent hegemony of traditional public schools (real and perceived) and the resulting inconsistencies school to school; our brutalist understanding of the relationship between management and labor; as well as the vagaries of funding mechanisms across divers geographies. All these have created a clear desire to step outside the system while still holding hands… that is to say, to do so in a way that is supported, respects public policy, and tries for evenhandedness. I can’t say we’ve seen success… but I also can’t say that the concept has seen an altogether robust implementation.
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p>I don’t argue that charter funding is seriously lacking. What I say is the charter school funding formula is deeply flawed. By that I mean that the current funding mechanism favors charters at the expense of traditional public schools.
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p>Personally, I think charter schools are superfluous and unnecessary. Would that as much energy and flexibility were productively introduced into the existing public schools serving all our students. We’d all likely be much better off.
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p>My apologies if I misread your argument, or mistermed my counter-argument. I didn’t, per se, mean ‘lacking’ in strictly quantitative terms but rather the more transitive qualitative deficiencies.
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p>And I’m in (general) agreement with you: the entire public school funding mechanism is flawed. As I note elsewhere, however, is that the existence of flaws, across the entire system, isn’t an indictment of one particular subsystem (charters). I think flawed systems, and sub-systems, should be fixed, not tossed.
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p>
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p>Again, I’m in fairly general agreement with you: mostly because you’ve spoken like someone who believes we’ll all be much better off if teachers ran the schools without undue interference from bureaucrats, grandstanders in the lege, and others. In a more perfect world, teachers would be the first and last line of defense on all things related to curriculum and the politicians would be relegated to asking “how much do you need?” and “when do you need it?” I think that if you had to sit down and devise the system that was most counter-productive and possessed of endlessly looping cycles of work, re-work and busy-work, while simultaneously making the smallest, most incrementalist advances we could get away with, it would look a whole heaping lot like the system we got now.
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p>But we’re not in a perfect world. We are in the world we have. And the very antipathy towards charters, first viewed as a threat to fiefdoms and domains back in the day, not ‘superflous’ as you see them, is clue to the need for their existence. The notion of charter schools as ‘superflous’, however valid and compelling, is, nonetheless, novel. The very fact that the entrenched agrarian model proves so difficult to discard is, likewise, a clue to the hidebound and slow-changing nature of ‘traditional’ public schools. You want to ‘innovate’? You might have to give up your summers off…
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p>Personally, I’d like to see the idea extended down to the ‘charter classroom’, where the teacher lays out his/her curricula and goals and the government funds it without imposition of mandates, rules, procedures, specific certification beyond what makes sense, etc… I don’t see that happening any time soon tho…
“the very antipathy towards charters, first viewed as a threat to fiefdoms and domains back in the day, not ‘superflous’ as you see them, is clue to the need for their existence. “
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p>I think it would be superfluous to have free-lance private firefighting companies that go around, putting out fires they see, funded by my tax money because the town where I live has lots of fires. Does that automatically imply that we need such firefighting companies?
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p>…I think that, as far as this analogy goes, it’s a fair one. But the problem here, isn’t an increase in fires, but structural issues with the ‘official’ public fire dept: imagine if the original department suffered from funding issues, constant labor disputes and a training regimen that, altogether, were perceived to be slightly askew wrt to the actual job of fighting fires? If these structural issues interfered with the actual job of fighting fires you can bet that some, if not all, of the taxpayers might be willing to look into hiring free-lance fire fighters. All in all, should we iron out the structural issues free-lancers would indeed become superflous.
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p>I’m entirely willing to throw charter schools under the bus if we could truly make them superflous. I don’t think we’re anywhere near there. Nor, as I pointed out, is opposition to charters had anything to do with their ostensibly ‘superflous’ nature.
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p>
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p>The ol’ summers off routine. Most educators wouldn’t mind spreading the school year throughout the year so they could have vacation lives like the rest of the world, but, alas, until there is a commitment to build new buildings and retrofit old buildings designed for year-round instruction, the notion is a non-starter. And is that really how we want to spend limited education dollars?? You cannot have a year-round school in New England that is not air conditioned.
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p>The agrarian model is antiquated, but the blame for the perpetuation of that model is borne by both teachers and the state/communities who look at the price tag and say, “Never mind.” If you’re going to play this game, play it fair.
and pity ’tis ’tis true..
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p>
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p>True enough… but if there are constraints on your ability to innovate then you ought to acknowledge them, no?
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p>To be further fair, I haven’t seen too many charter schools, who are entirely free to innovate away from the agrarian model, actually do so. This is a failing on their part.
Not in great detail, but I did here:
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p>
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p>The inhibiting factor in bold innovation in our schools is the dreaded fear of not making AYP. That’s what I mean by you have some of the best schools with the best and brightest teachers and administrators chasing their tails in a never-ending MCAS trap. And those schools with real achievement issues are so constrained by the state that they dare NOT innovate, deviate, or any way experiment if there is the slightest chance they’ll lose ground.
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p>The cards are stacked against meaningful innovation in our public schools by the nature of the MCAS rat maze.
It doesn’t say charters have achieved parity. A lot of them are equal to public schools. But the number that are significantly worse is twice as high as the number that are significantly better.
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p>Charters aren’t underfunded at all. I suggest you quit hijacking this thread with comments that make no sense until you learn about the issue. The problem with the funding formula is that when a student leaves a public school for a charter, the state takes an amount of money from the public school equal to that student’s “share” of the funding. Except most of a school’s costs are fixed costs, so when a student leaves, their share of the costs doesn’t leave. The building still has to be heated and maintained, the lights have to be kept on, the administrators still have to be paid (maybe you can get rid of a teacher if you take away enough students from the same grade, maybe not). So you end up underfunding public schools.
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p>Charters are not public schools. They are paid for by public money, but they have a tendency to discriminate in favor of easy to deal with students. They find ways to keep special needs students, behaviorally challenged students, etc. out, or push them out if they get in. Is it illegalto discriminate? Yes, but all you have to do is make them miserable enough that they leave voluntarily.
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p>As for the accountability systems being flawed, yes fixing them would solve some of the problems. But creating more charters not subject to newer, better accountability standards makes the mess worse. Accountability first, more charters second. That’s the reverse of the tack Sec. Reville has taken.
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p>I never said charters are underfunded. I was in agreement with lightiris who said that charter school funding, as a subset of chapter 70, and indeed, chapter 70 as a whole, was flawed. I suggest you quit harping on comments with little sense until you read what was written.
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p>
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p>And the charter schools are not allowed to use the funding for the bulk of their fixed costs: they are required to have buildings in place with proper heating installations and maintenance costs, lighting, etc… as part of the chartering process before they are funded. I suggest you quit attempting to hijack this thread with comments that make no sense until you learn about the issue.
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p>I SAID the funding was flawed. But, flawed or no, funding issues are different from whether or not charter schools are a worthwhile endeavor. My point, which you handily missed (or didn’t bother to read in your hurry to regurgitate the talking points, yet again…) is that funding flaws aren’t a good reason to axe charter schools altogether… any more than funding flaws are a reason to axe ‘traditional’ public schools altogether…. You’re in the decidedly Orwellian position of arguing that flawed funding is a persuasive case for axing charters whilst simultaneously trying to get me to believe that flawed funding is equally as persuasive a reason for fixing public schools.
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p>You can hang on to this fiction for as long as you like if it makes you feel better. It will, however, remain a fiction even long after you’ve abandoned it. Charter schools are public schools. They teach public students and they use public funds. They are public schools. They may be public schools you dislike and with which you disagree. That’s something you have to deal with. I personally, don’t like how ‘traditional’ public schools axe music and drama at the first sign of fiscal turbulence: does that, then, give me leave to say they “are not public schools”? Of course not. Stop acting the chump with your predigested memes. Charters are part of the entirely flawed system of funding and allocation and politics we call “public education”. Deal with it.
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p>As I, and others, have said repeatedly, here and elsewhere, abuse of the charter school system is neither an indictment of charter schools as a concept, nor a reason to forgo them entirely, any more than we would stop having banks simply because some of them get robbed. That it supplies a handy talking point to fit your pre-arranged ideas about charters and traditional public schools matters not at all to those of us discussing the real issues here.
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p>If charter schools have any ‘tendencies’ that discriminate, or are in any way antithetical to fundamental principles of public education then public policy ought to be enacted that would curb these tendencies. If these “tendencies”, either explicitly or implicitly, breach legal boundaries then legal remedies ought to be brought to bear. I’m confident that charter schools can stand on these terms.
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p>By your criteria, voucher programs that send some or all of their students to parochial schools transform the latter into public schools. (I’m neglecting the criterion of “public students”–what could that mean?)
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p>No, charters are an attempt to contest the concept of “public”, substituting an established concept that includes some kind of effective control and democratic oversight, with a corporate-style of unaccountable governance. Charter are a move towards privatizing schooling, and degrading the concept of “public”. I’d a thought that bloggers on this site would pause before rushing to embrace the definition of “public” offerred by charters. I for one reject it: these are not “public schools” in the sense that I recognize and respect.
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p>By any objective criteria vouchers are a transparent attempt to defund public schools. I object to them. Never liked them. Always have I been against them.
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p>Your equivalence borders on a slur.
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p>You say that like it’s a bad thing… Isn’t all innovation an attempt to contest the accepted? You simply can’t have innovation, nor even renovation, for that matter, without challenging definitions.
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p>Hows that ‘established concept’ and ‘effective control’ working for ya?
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p>Charter schools didn’t spring out of the head of a CEO. They aren’t free-floating capitalist virii attacking the body politick.
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p>There exists real and urgent concerns about the public school system and it’s evident shortcomings: the morass of laws, loopholes, committees, mandates, paper, inertia and labor disputes that too often overwhelm the stated purpose of education. This you cannot deny. So, charters exist. Public Schools without the overlay of work, re-work, busy work and work-arounds that make up a lot of public school DNA.
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p>If you want to get rid of charter schools you have to fix the public school system.
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p>… <chirp>…
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p>Yeah. I thought so.
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p>No man is an island, it is said… but you’re certainly doing your best! Good luck with that.
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I can’t say it easy to follow your reasoning, such as it is. You object to vouchers so much as to call comparison between charters and vouchers a slurr. So far as I can see, the comparison fails for you only because you don’t like it. But what you don’t like isn’t therefore incorrect, can we agree to that?
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p>Vouchers are a kind of innovation, which is something you seem to admire without much reservation in the case of charters.
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p>As for your question, how are the public schools working for ‘ya? Well, reasonably well, all things considered. We have neighborhood schools in our community; they are locally controlled by people we elect–who are accountable. They motivate tremendous community involvement. And state wide, we have the best schools in the nation.
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p>Are they perfect? No. Many of our schools are under-funded. And charters directly worsen that root cause, just as vouchers do.
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p>As for “so charters exist”. You’ve got to be kidding. You take it as an argument that i) public schools are not perfect, ii) charter schools exist (i.e., parents seek to get out of underfunded schools), and from these premises conclude that charters are somehow part of a positive agenda for education?
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p>This follows closely another brilliant argument on behalf of charters: “for years leaders have attempted to deal with the educational gap owing to poverty. Their attempts haven’t worked. Therefore we might as well try charter schools.”
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p>This is the kind of reasoning that produces destructive educational fads.
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p>The true solution space is not so far to find. It involves adequate funding for teacher professional development, a de-emphasis on high-stakes testing, funds to repair and update aging facilities, amoung other things. Things that don’t sound glitzy. Just effective.
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p>The comparison fails because they are not comparable. Vouchers aren’t, in any way comparable to charters, any more than matches are comparable to flamethrowers for lighting cigarettes. It seems likely to me that you favor the manufacture of such a comparison mostly due to its invidious nature.
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p>Statements general, indeed banal, enough to cover both charter and traditional public schools: in short, you’ve said nothing. The canard that charters aren’t accountable is just a ready-fit to your prejudices against charter schools. Try again.
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p>Myself, I’m perfectly in harmony with a school system where the majority of students excel in ‘traditional’ public schools and a smaller group are served by charter public schools. What matters most to me is not how we get universal public education excellence, but that we get it. While the majority of students do ok, they don’t excel and the public school system doesn’t serve the CommonWealth nearly as well as it could be served. “Best in the Nation” isn’t particularly thrilling. I prefer the simpler “Best Possible”.
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p>And, again, I’ll repeat my agreement that the funding is screwed up, across all public schools, traditional, charter and what have you. But the fact that you want to use the imperfections of the funding to axe charters implicates you as someone less interested in school excellence and more interested in propping up your pet animosities. I suppose it is to be expected if you really do think that an equivalence exists between charters and vouchers. I know the funding for public schools is flawed but I don’t go around using that as a reason to advocate the abolition of public schools.
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p>Just like charters. See, we can agree!
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p>Funding “imperfections” aside, there are plenty of reasons why people would rather see charters wither on the vine–their results leave a lot to be desired. And to the extent that we are draining resources from public schools, some with excellent results, to charter schools with mediocre to par results at best, there are legitimate reasons to pull the plug. There are legitimate reasons to revisit the value of charters, as others have pointed out here clearly and succinctly.
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p>If charters were doing an intergalactic job, we’d be having a different conversation, but they’re not.
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p>And by the way, you have a tendency to get a bit nasty when you’re frustrated. Peppering your comments with sarcastic and snide remarks detract from your point. Attacking the character of RG by suggesting he or she is merely indulging his/her “pet animosities” and faking an interest in “school excellence” is really unnecessary. People with real investment in quality education don’t have to agree on the value of charter schools, do they?
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p>I think the jury is still out on that. Downstream in this very thread both MATCH and Boston Preperatory results were dismissed because of the high transfer rates. It could be correlative, or it could be general antipathy to charter schools looking for justification. There is no way to tell. But of the MATCH and Boston Prep students who’ve soldiered on, the results are excellent. Are they too small a sample? Perhaps. I’m encouraged, however, by the efforts that some are making. I think good things, even intergalactically things, could happen with charters. I also think that good, even intergalactically good things, could happen in traditional classrooms… though I think the run-up to orbit on that is longer. I remain convinced of the efficacy of charters as a concept, but remain unconvinced that so bright a distinction needs to be made between charters and traditional public schools: it’s a fork, where (if you ask me) it needs to be a feedback loop.
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p>I’ve been following public school debates for a long time and this general antipathy towards charters is something both prevalent and structural. I think you’re an honest debater here and truly see charters as superfluous: but you are an outlier with this view. That’s not to specifically call out others as dishonest, but to recognize where the cart is in respect to the horse, when it comes to the arguments proffered.
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p>I also think that an argument can be made that antipathy to charters has hobbled the policy implementations, with caps and charter approval stringency, creating hurdles that have been difficult to overcome and opaque with respect to measurement. I don’t think that the political process through which the charter schools were birthed was entirely friendly to them and the resulting compromises created what some would have hoped at the time the conditions for charters to ‘whither on the vine’. A self fulfilling policy…
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p>Too true. As a bonus I have only the lamest of excuses: 1) I didn’t start it and B) everybody does it…
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p>To be blunt: they do have to agree on the earnestness and the honesty of the advocates for both charters and traditionals. Now you could make the case that I’ve singularly failed just that with respect to RG, and perhaps you’d be right. But from where I sit, invidious comparisons between charters and vouchers was the first volley and a clue to the nature of RG’s advocacy. RG has assumed lack of earnestness on my part by a particularly telling demonstration of lack of earnestness on his/her part…
OK, I see why you say that vouchers–in which people take public money to send their kids to a school with no local accountability–are totally unlike charter schools–where people take public money to send their kids to a school with no local accountability. It’s because you don’t like the comparison, and you’ll denounce anyone who makes it. Gotcha.
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p>And since I answered your question about how well the public schools are working for me in a way that you don’t approve of, it follows for you that the answer is banal. Gothca there too.
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p>And I see that practical and unglamorous ideas about improving schools don’t interest you (“aren’t thrilling”). You’re interested only in “The Best Possible” solutions to public education, (whatever that might mean) even if or particularly if it isn’t attainable or even very clear and the attempt to get there (where?) is meanwhile harmful to actual students. Kind of Gotcha, or not.
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p>As for your final insult, I get that you’re angry and upset, but I don’t think I (or anyone else) could quite see why from your posting. There’s no apparent reason to conclude that because someone dislikes the funding scheme for charters he or she is uninterested in school excellence. First, because there’s no demonstrated connection between charter schools in general and quality education, and secondly because how we fund education is actually a pretty central public policy issue, and drives the quality of our educational establishment. Charters, like vouchers, punish public education, and they are a direct threat to real education reform based on sound public school financing. I can’t say that without disqualifying myself as a citizen interested in school excellence?
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p>Possibly your basal level of rage is owing to something concrete that you’re not telling us about–you got kids in a charter school? or just a bad day at work?
To echo the earlier reply, if charter schools are public schools, then as a member of the public, I want a say in them. Put them under the school committee I elect.
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p>Of course, that will never happen, because charter schools don’t want the general public to have a say in what they do. They want to be schools that take public dollars and teach public students (what is a private student anyway?) and have very little public accountability. They want to follow a perverted “market-based” model which rests on the false belief that the market will reward good charters and will punish bad charters. The gaping flaw in that theory is that the people making choices are not using their own money. When something is free, people don’t put as much effort into determining its worthiness.
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p>With the morass of local, state and federal involvement in traditional public schools and their funding, I’m not sure you can say you (i.e. ‘the public’) have that much ‘say’ in them as they exist now. Charters, at least, provide an upfront evaluation of reasons to deviate from the cookie-cutter model of public school policy: the starting point is the already decided upon model.
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p>I think this is crucial. Charters aren’t simply a means to say “I want to open a school”, but a clear outline of goals in the context of well established public policy. A charter is a specific document that says what your school is and how it will achieve it and why you think you can do better than the already set up system. It has to hew to certain rules and regulation or say how it will do better than the rules or regulations require. It can be quite a complex process and the rigorous evaluation of it can provide the public (i.e. the school committee) with enough information to say yes or no. But what’s important is that they are doing this with the work already established (i.e. ‘traditional’ public schools) as a starting point. Most of your criticism would be valid if the charter school movement were an actual attempt to obviate public policy instead of recognizing it as the default mode
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p>Wow. That’s a full dosage of cynicism there. Ouch.
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p>Like.. um.. free public schools?
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p>I could not disagree with this statement more.
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p>RMH is the perfect example. There are serious questions about the people running this school. The board has had numerous dealings that are not above board, including questionable rent deals, dealing with related entities (money being moved between the school and the failed Wells Credit Union — a bank that failed due to corruption of its board, some of which also sit on the board of RMH) and no-bid contracts potentially for entities related to board members. And lately, there was a coordinated effort to cheat on the MCAS involving the principal and other teachers, perhaps more.
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p>The people in Springfield are up in arms over this issue. They are calling the mayor, they are calling the school committee. Yet no one in Springfield has any power over it whatsoever. The only party that has power over this intensely local issue is the State Board of Education. If they choose to do nothing, even if 100% of the people in the city wanted something to be done, we can’t do a damn thing about it. Our tax dollars would continue to go to this school and be wasted.
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p>If this was a public school, the people of the city could vote the school committee out of office and put in someone who wants to do something. Change could happen locally. We would have control over our dollars. At any given point in time, people will be unhappy with how their school committee is acting, but that committee still answers to the local voters. The state board of education does not, and even though it is a governmental entity appointed by the governor, virtually no one votes for their governor based on that issue.
RMH seems to be a mess, no doubt. I don’t know what went on. Last I heard, tho’, was the the board voted in late January to shut em down. If you look at the timeline, at least as respect to, first, academic performance and, second, cheating, I can’t say that the board of education was particularly slow to act.
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p>But the point is what I was getting at: you really don’t have that much say over your existing traditional public schools: the whole gripe against teachers is that it’s devilishly difficult to fire the incompetent ones. So the situation at RMH, though seemingly more egregious, is analogous: I imagine school board across the state are oft besieged with ‘up in arms’ citizens wishing to do away with this teacher or that administrator. So the scale is bigger with RMH… but so what? What’s really different?
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p>And how much accountability do you want? The whole raison d’etre of the ‘intelligent design’ crowd is that they can’t enforce their view of the world on existing school boards. Not for lack of trying… Some of the more paleolithic segments of America have indeed voted religion unto school boards. I’m sure that proponents of ‘intelligent design’ would call that ‘accountability’ while you and I might call it simply nuts. Be careful what you wish for…
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p>In all my years on a school committee in a large district, I’ve never encountered a single parent, either in public or in private, who demanded a teacher or administrator be fired. Most parents know that this their role. They complain, of course, but the ultimately hiring and firing decisions reside with building principals–as it should.
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p>To suggest that the public has as much control over a charter school as they do over a public school through a school committee is simply incorrect. Public pressure when parents attend meetings has a great deal of sway over what gets done vis a vis district decisions. School budgets get voted down at town meetings all over this state. Parents are routinely included and informed about large-scale issues that require community buy-in–like closing a school, reconfiguring grades, redrawing boundaries, adding or discontinuing programs. If they are not getting included in these things, then they need better representation on their school committee.
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p>The composition of school committees is up to the public. If they don’t like the direction of the regional or municipal schools, they can vote in new members. It happens all the time–with real consequences, some good and some not.
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p>Well, this is a ludicrous characterization of the charter approval process. The school committee, the residents of the city, its public officials–the view of any or all of these matter not a jot to Mr. Reville, Commissioner Chester, or to a majority of the Board of Education as they deliberate on new charter applications. They’ll happily approve a charter proposal even if no single person in the city or district wants it.
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p>If you need this demonstrated to yourself, just ask Mr. Reville or Mr. Chester how they view the role of public input in charter decisions. They have publically stated many times in connection with the Gloucester charter that public input is irrelevant. In fact, Chester notes that attending to the public sets a bad precendent, making charters subject to the will of the public.
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p>So that’s the process that our progressive Governor has given us under the guise of Ed reform (right, I know he didn’t invent it–a Republican administration did that. He only expanded it…)
Patrick:
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p>You are the first person that I have seen make reference to the fixed vs. variable cost issue that croaks traditional district schools when students leave for charters. You are, in fact, 100% correct. The prevailing thought is that when a student leaves, the cost to educate that child should go to the charter with the child. Unfortunately the vast majority of the costs associated with that child’s education do not disappear. Those associated costs are mostly fixed costs. There are never enough students leaving to lay off a teacher so, if anything, class size is marginally reduced and costs to heat buildings do not disappear. That is why Deval Patrick campaigned on a platform that supported charters, but with the requisite adjustments to the formula. In other words he understood then and certainly does now that the sending district is left with a hole in its budget when a child leaves. Somewhere along the way, Deval Patrick’s practical understanding of charter funding was hijacked. This is what happens when ideologues create policy. This is what happens when decision makers and policy makers have never sat on a local school committee and dealt with the blood and guts process of developing a school budget. Again, you get the prize for understanding the basis cost accounting principles associated with the unfair and destructive charter funding formula.
Prior to the Robert M. Hughes charter debacle in Springfield, I saw charter schools as a mechanism to sort students within a community. The application process screens out those who can’t be bothered enough with their child’s education to undertake it. It screens out transient students and students from seriously dysfunctional families. Thus, the existence of charters creates segregation (speaking generally, not racially).
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p>Of course, our entire state’s education plan is built on segregation, so the segregating nature of charters isn’t surprising, and it likely provides benefits to education-oriented people in poorer communities, providing them a way to segregate their children away from the masses without moving to another community, and without having to use economic strength to do that. However, I feel like when you distill the best students out of any school system, what remains is even harder to educate, and the public schools set the reputation for a city, not the charters. Given the limited nature of the charters, I don’t think that people are going to move to these communities to take a chance on charter lotteries.
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p>But now, after the RMH mess in Springfield, I also see a charter school as a school that is using tax dollars but has almost no local oversight. The only recourse the state has for RMH is to revoke its charter — the death penalty. There is no minor punishment available. Sure, the “market” forces are in play, if they really are lousy then they won’t attract as many students and won’t get as much funding, but they just need to convince 120 parents that they are better than the worst alternative and they make their quota.
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p>The public does not see this distinction at all. Many people thought of RMH as a public school. They accused the city of being corrupt, they complained that the school committee took no action against them. So even though RMH was a private charter school, the city got a black eye from its failings.
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p>So how can charters be held accountable to the public beyond the death penalty of charter revocation — a penalty so severe that even mass MCAS cheating coordinated by the administration and teachers at the school is not enough to guarantee its invocation?
See JGinGloucester’s post below, after Secretary Reville’s reply, in particular the comment on the proposed charter school’s board of trustees (or lack thereof):
One of the things that came out about the Robert M. Hughes Charter School was that when the school bought computers, it bought them without bids from a group called the Strother Group. A recent article on the school noted that one of the board members is named William Strother.
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p>Seems like that alone should be enough to shut the school down, yet it wasn’t. I predict they will be given another chance, because the parents are lining up behind the school, they don’t want it to close, despite its serious problems and mismanagement of public funds.
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p>That may be an unrealized problem — the parents are too vested to be impartial here, and there really are no other stakeholders close enough to the situation, yet far enough away from it, to make a proper decision.
Hello, lightiris. Thank you for the thoughtful post. Governor Patrick was extremely pleased to restore regional school transportation funding initially reduced during the mandatory 9C exercise. I assure you that the Administration makes these budget decisions with considerable deliberation and, often, as was the case for the transportation reduction, with genuine agony. There are people behind every line item; in this instance, students and educators. We at the Executive Office of Education were especially thrilled with the restoration and appreciate your strong advocacy and that of your peers.
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p>Regarding some other aspects of your post, in order not to be repetitious, I respectfully note a response that I posted to Sabutai below that addresses a few common areas of interest. There, I attempt to explain how our “Smart Cap” proposal is, in fact, directly responsive to the research that you cite. In short, we believe that our new charter model is more focused, mandating charter providers with strong track records and requiring more from them.
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p>Most importantly – and contrary to the majority of media coverage – this is not just a charter bill. Charters currently serve less than three percent of our students. While the law allows for a limited, targeted expansion of charters, this is just one part of a much, much broader strategy.
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p>You ask a terrific question: What incentives are we giving traditional public schools to be innovative? First and foremost the answer is an opportunity. From the proposals initial days, Secretary Reville has stressed that Innovation Schools could function like a professional practice group. Teachers could coalesce around a set of ideas and, by working through the Innovation School process, take genuine ownership of a school, including its management, curriculum, and budget. We believe the prospect is both exciting and, more importantly, holds tremendous promise for our educators and our students. Of course, additional financial incentives would be welcome, but, given our current budget realities, that is an area that must continue to work on as this initiative evolves.
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p>Thanks again for your comment and the opportunity to respond. More to come!
Sir:
Do you care to comment on the inconsistency in Deval Patrick’s position as a candidate vs. the realities of what happened in Gloucester? Thank you for your time.
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p>I would also appreciate knowing when Deval Patrick’s policy relative to charter funding changed and why. Thanks again.
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p>http://www.boston.com/news/glo…
Dear Secretary Reville,
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p>Thanks for the chance for some give and take on an issue of great interest and importance.
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p>You say that increasing the number of charter schools benefits “the students who need help most.” But the Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education’s own figures show those students have not even been represented in proportion to their enrollment in the public districts from which charters draw their students.
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p>The bill says charters should make efforts to recruit needy students and must report data on their enrollment, but it seems the charter lobby was able to keep the bill from growing any real teeth on this matter. So I know you’re aware that many people, including my fellow members of Citizens for Public Schools, are concerned charters will continue their pattern of underenrolling students with significant disabilities and English language learners, also continue their pattern of very high attrition rates.
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p>If this happens, the charter expansion and the accompanying draining of funds from public schools seems likely to hurt rather than help students with the greatest educational challenges as well as other children who attend schools in the sending districts. (Another problem is the lack of a track record of charter schools successfully educating the population that they are now being asked to serve.)
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p>How do you respond to these concerns?
Personally I think it’s great that Secretary Reville has stopped by to post a press release on the Ed Reform legislation, and I’m eager to read the ensuing discussion, but one can’t ignore that this sudden outreach has perhaps just a wee bit to do with spin and image repair in light of a fair amount of what I would argue is due criticism regarding his role in the misbegotten granting of the GCACS charter.
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p>Let’s be honest — the raising of the cap on charter schools is a central pillar of the Ed reform package and with the still unresolved controversy surrounding the granting of the GCACS charter, it’s fair game to engage him on the issue. I am obviously very concerned about the effects of this school in our community, but thinking more broadly, every community that faces the prospect of a charter school being imposed on it should be extremely skeptical and concerned about the process (or lack thereof) by which this school was reviewed and granted.
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p>The Gloucester debacle should server as fair warning to other communities that due process, transparency and accountability don’t really factor into the equation when decisions are being made that will have severe impacts on their district schools. At nearly every step of the way we’ve hit procedural pot holes, witnessed disregard for community input, been amazed by flexible regulations, been awed by the blatant dismissal of the professional review process, been privy to political interference and the cherry on top — suffered an attitude by both Secretary Reville and Commissioner Chester that they’ve done absolutely nothing wrong or untoward during this whole process! I would venture to say that their response to our community has been at best arrogant, and at times downright contemptuous.
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p>Our community has lost respect for the integrity of the decision making process and oversight not only by the Commissioner and Secretary, but frankly the BESE as well. I’m curious how it is that they are supposed to move forward this ambitious agenda if there is strong and lingering doubts surrounding the very folks charged with implementing it. I think that’s a fair and relevant discussion point and one that the Secretary needs to address. If “change” is going to work it needs to championed by people in whom the public has trust — frankly, in my view and based on real world experience, trust in Secretary Reville and Commissioner Chester has been severely damaged.
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p>As for Ed reform… where was the proposal to address the broken Chapter 70 funding? Where was the Charter school funding fix? Changing the reimbursement scheme doesn’t help our district one bit since the overall impact of the school’s existence in a community our size means that severe cuts will need to be made starting in the second year of the school’s operation.
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p>By the time this school fails (assuming it ever gets off the ground) the damage will have well and truly been done. Will the Secretary and Commissioner be around then to help pick up the pieces? Me thinks not.
I am so glad to be a part of such a productive and important dialogue about education in Massachusetts. I plan to be responsive but want also to let readers know that from time to time, members of my staff, including Chief of Staff Tom Weber and Communications Director Jonathan Palumbo, will respond on behalf of my office. In all cases, I will continue to read, to respond and to post.
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p>The Achievement Gap bill really does represent the single biggest achievement in education reform in Massachusetts since 1993 and I look forward to discussing issues relative to the new law. That said, some readers have brought up other issues that I will address.
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p>First, regarding the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School, I recognize that this has been a complex and agonizing situation for the residents of Gloucester. I believe that Board process, while not perfect, was fully legal and appropriate. As to my personal role, I have repeatedly apologized to the Gloucester community for my email, which has led to so many misunderstandings. It is now time to look to the future. I believe that the new law, with its provisions for Innovation Schools and Horace Mann charter schools, presents an unprecedented opportunity for community leaders to use one of these vehicles to resolve the local tension surrounding the charter school. The commissioner, department, and my office are all committed to working with the tremendous leadership in Gloucester to find resolution that will improve education for students in Gloucester. As far as the allegations made by the Inspector General, I would direct readers to the Commissioner’s point by point response.
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p>Second, regarding charter schools, part of the purpose of my post was to remind readers that the bill is about a lot more than just charter schools. Our cap lift is highly targeted and as constituted will impact only seven districts, at most, statewide over the first few years of implementation. It is also worth noting that we put in strong provisions that will require the new schools to present annual reports on what they’ve done to recruit and retain the populations of students who need the most help and who have not traditionally been served by charter schools. We think this is the right approach and believe that the experience of successful charter schools already in existence can go a long way toward improving education for students. I will, again here, take the opportunity to suggest that the controversy generated by charter schools is precisely why we wrote the Innovation Schools portion of the bill. Innovation Schools are both an opportunity and a challenge to educators. Innovation Schools will allow educators, colleges, and many others to design schools that will employ much of the autonomy of charter schools but operate within the school district, meaning that the money stays put – thus eliminating one of the main arguments against charter schools.
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p>Finally, on education funding, we have acknowledged that there are imperfections in the Chapter 70 formula and, while we still insist that the main issue is more a function of not enough resources as opposed to the formula itself, the Governor has proposed and funded a review commission to study in the formula in his FY11 budget. We have also taken the next step on the work started in 2007 to implement equity reform by taking a closer look at the expected contributions of each district relative to state support for education. We will continue, as the economy allows, to make adjustments as merited.
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p>In conclusion, thoughtful and concerned people will disagree about strategy, policy and the most effective proposals for achieving educational success. I believe that a spirited discourse is an important part of arriving at policies and practices that will serve all of our students well.
” It is now time to look to the future. I believe that the new law, with its provisions for Innovation Schools and Horace Mann charter schools, presents an unprecedented opportunity for community leaders to use one of these vehicles to resolve the local tension surrounding the charter school. The commissioner, department, and my office are all committed to working with the tremendous leadership in Gloucester to find resolution that will improve education for students in Gloucester.”
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p>First: I find this very confusing — first the sentence “it is now time to look to the future” — from my perspective that’s precisely what we have been doing and frankly the vision is pretty bleak — it’s also a phrase often used instead of “it’s time for you to get over it” — I just want to understand what YOU mean by it.
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p>Second: The Charter folks, emboldened by you, the Commissioner and the lack of action by the BESE, are moving ahead with their ill-formed plans to open the charter you all refused to revoke… What would Innovation or Horace Mann schools mean in this regard? Are you suggesting that the charter would be abandoned in favor of one of these options or would we be looking at getting one of these in addition to the GCACS… How will the new law have ANY effect on the GCACS which is scheduled to open (at least theoretically) in September of this year? Are you prepared to pull the plug on this train wreck?
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p>By the way, you are aware that they have no physical location, (though they are rumored to be looking at a recently vacated building in our industrial park about 200 feet from an abandoned toxic brownfield site). They have no Head of School/Executive Director. They barely have a Board of Trustees: of the original board of 8, four have resigned, another hasn’t attended a meeting since May 2009 and it’s not clear whether two replacement trustees were ever vetted and approved by the DESE…. I bring this up because “viability” was high on the list of reasons why the Commissioner decided to disregard the CSO’s “do not recommend” analysis and push this baby through — though I think you’ll agree that it’s not looking very “viable” right about now.
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p>And finally I have to take issue with the “misunderstandings” surrounding your email…. With respect, I don’t think anyone who reads your email misunderstands in the slightest. It wasn’t taken out of context, it WAS the context. Own it. Better, in my view, to say you screwed up than to say you were misunderstood….
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p>I do appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read and respond — props for that — but understand that when you chose Gloucester to impose this mess on, you did not choose a patsy community that would simply roll over and let it go. You are dealing with very committed parents and community leaders who view your imposition as most unwelcome – not because we don’t value innovation – we do — or that we are satisfied with the status quo – we aren’t. But we are working very very hard to better the education landscape for ALL the children in our district and your actions are making that very hard for us.
jg
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p>My understanding is that provision is a direct result of an amendment offered by Marian Walsh during debate, one that the governor and his allies fought against — and lost. I’m concerned not just with what you can get through the Legislature, but what your goals are in the first place. Is it unfair to say that the administration wishes the cap affected many more districts?
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p>Bringing in the rather amorphous Innovation School idea does not counter the body of academic evidence that shows that charters are ineffective or counterproductive (starting with the massive work done by CREDO at Stanford). Adding a maybe-good idea in with a bad idea doesn’t make the bad idea any less bad. I have yet to see why it is such a high priority of the Patrick administration to open more charter schools when it cannot offer evidence that such action benefits students.
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p>Thank you for providing a link to the bill, by the way. I think Innovation Schools sound like a promising idea, and look forward to seeing the nuts-and-bolts regulations on it.
Greetings, Sabutai. My name is Tom Weber. I have the privilege of working on behalf of you and the Commonwealth as Secretary Reville’s Chief of Staff. I have been reading your posts and the others with considerable interest. The competition of ideas and priorities in this thread is remarkably similar to what we experience every day and it motivates us, along with Governor Patrick’s unbridled passion for education, to forge public policy proposals that we believe serve the best interests of all students and educators. Thank you and your fellow posters for the information and inspiration.
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p>Regarding what we have termed the “Smart Cap” – that is, raising the net school spending cap on charters from 9% to 18% in the 10% lowest performing districts, restricting new charter licenses to providers with a demonstrated record of successfully serving our neediest student populations, and instituting new recruitment and retention requirements to ensure that these new charters are, indeed, serving those students – this concept has been the core of the charter component of the Governor’s proposal from Day One. Indeed, the framework of our legislation is responsive to the issue that you justifiably raise – and Secretary Reville often notes himself: the distribution of student performance across charter schools is actually quite similar to the distribution of student performance across traditional public schools. That is really what the aggregate of available charter studies tells us. Meanwhile, some charter schools and some traditional public schools have achieved remarkable results. The goal, then, is to foster and replicate the conditions necessary to implement best practices across all public school settings.
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p>In the case of charters, the Commonwealth has now embraced the “Smart Cap” – a more focused and rigorous charter strategy that we believe will be a model for the nation. At the same time, our traditional public schools still, and always will, serve the vast majority of our students, which is why Innovation Schools represent the most exciting element of our new law with the greatest potential. Having worked to support the Secretary in his tireless efforts to realize the Governor’s vision of realizing a high-quality education for all students, I can assure you that our only “high priority” is good schools, whether they be traditions, charters, or our new Innovation models.
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p>Of course, as you note, a law is only as good as its implementation, which is why that process has been our focus from the moment the law was enacted. Governor Patrick issued that charge at the bill signing and Secretary Reville noted that this effort will require the participation of thousands of education professionals across the Commonwealth. We believe that we have the framework; now we must work in continued partnership with the field to realize the law’s full potential.
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p>One minor point of clarification to your post immediately above: the near-term impact on a limited number of districts (the seven districts noted in Secretary Reville’s diary), just like the other aspects of the charter provisions that we have described, was always part of the Governor’s proposal. It was not achieved through a legislative amendment, but rather was part of the original design. The statement that you cite above is exactly what Secretary Reville has been saying to our partners in the legislature, stakeholders, and publicly since this bill began to take form last winter.
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p>Again, thanks for the thoughtful post and the opportunity to dialogue.
Sir:
Why such a limited response?
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p>Where is the response to the very real issues regarding the charter funding formula?
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p>What is being done to preserve funding in sending districts which was a concern of Deval Patrick’s when he campaigned for Governor in 2006?
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p>I await your response.
Dear Tom,
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p>Thanks for joining the fray. I have two specific questions I hope you (or Secretary Reville or whoever’s on board today) will answer.
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p>Though you and Secretary Reville insist that we should not pay so much attention to the charter part of the bill, the bill and the PR promoting it suggest that charters in underperforming districts will be the vehicle for closing achievement gaps. Since the bill was named the “achievement gap” bill, I think it’s only fair to engage in a substantive dialogue about the record of charters and why lifting the cap, or a smart cap or whatever you want to call it, will be an effective way to close these gaps.
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p>First, can you tell us which are the “providers with a demonstrated record of successfully serving our neediest student populations”? As I’ve posted before, the DESE enrollment data shows that students with significant disabilities and English language learners, for example, are not proportionally represented in MA charters. On average, charters enroll 4.1% students with limited English proficiency, while the schools in the sending districts enroll 14.7%; for students with disabilities, the figures are 11.9% versus 19.6%. (For enrollment comparisons between charters and sending districts, see Dr. Roger Garberg’s paper posted at Citizens for Public Schoolsunder “Worth Reading.”).
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p>And some of the charters most often praised as successful have extremely high attrition rates–the MATCH, for example, which lost more than half its class of 2009 between freshman and senior year. Boston Preparatory Charter, which boasts 100 percent of 10th-graders with high MCAS scores, lost 84 percent of its students between sixth and 10th grade – just 17 of 106 students persisted. Can we expect to reach the promised land of closed achievement gaps with such leaky vessels?
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p>It’s interesting that a charter school that HAD focused on serving students with disabilities, the Uphams Corner Charter School, had its charter revoked because of poor MCAS scores. Was it doing a good job with a group of students who tend to score low on standardized tests? It’s hard to know, but students were reportedly weeping at the news that their school was being closed.
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p>And second, as far as “instituting new recruitment and retention requirements to ensure that these new charters are, indeed, serving those students,” what is there in the law that will ensure these students begin to be served by charters? Charters have already been required to report enrollment numbers; that’s how we know about the underenrollment problem. If the reporting requirements show that, despite any recruitment efforts, they continue to underenroll the neediest and most challenging (or send them back to traditionals if they are not keeping up, as often happens in Boston), what does the law say will happen?
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p>Thanks.
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p>Interestingly, BPS doesn’t track, and therefore cannot even publish, transfer rates for it’s 30 odd schools. So it’s difficult to say, entirely, if being this ‘leaky’ is out of norm, charter or no. Boston Latin is said to have a high transfer rate, too…
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p>MATCH is pretty upfront about rigorous standards, long hours and set expectations: they haz them. They’re also focused on specific curricula involving media and technology. They’re pretty clearly not trying to underhandedly game the system. They also do some tracking of post-transfer students and note that, of those students who have left, few drop-out altogether and most go on to do well at their new schools. The fact that they bother to track such things in the first place suggests that they are both aware of the criticism and not susceptible to it…
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p>Boston Prep has a 190 day school year (incrementally eating away at the agrarian model, yay), 8+ hour school days and a dress code. Standards and rigor are, well, standard and rigorous. It also serves specific communities historically riven with high dropout rates.
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p>It is interesting that you chose two rigorous schools to demonstrate how ‘leaky’ charter schools might be.
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Petr,
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p>You and I clearly have different notions of school “success” and the mission of public education. You are impressed with the “rigor and standards” of these charters and are not very much troubled by attrition rates of 50% or more (Boston Prep’s attrition rate was 84% between 6th and 10th grade). I am more impressed with a teacher or a school or a system that supports and retains a struggling student to graduation than a school that maintains its “rigor and standards” and loses more students than it retains. My high standards have more to do with supporting students toward achievement of their individual goals than getting everybody over an arbitrary bar measured exclusively by standardized test scores.
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p>My comments about attrition rates at MATCH and Boston Prep were in the context of claims that the achievement gap law will only allow “providers with a demonstrated record of successfully serving our neediest student populations” to open new charters. I asked Tom Weber (where have you gone, Tom?) which are these charter operators with demonstrated records of success?
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p>I know about the success of schools like MATCH and Boston Prep at achieving high MCAS scores with a rapidly dwindling population of students. But both MATCH and Boston Prep report ZERO percent limited English Proficient students. MATCH reports 9.4% students with disabilities, compared to 20.5% for the district as a whole. (Boston Prep reports 15.8%, again compared to 20.5%.)
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p>It’s one thing to be fine with high attrition rates, assuming, as you seem to, that these students happily find a home in a school with lower standards and less rigor. Teachers in traditional Boston public schools describe things differently, with kids coming into school in January, having been urged to leave their charter, or having decided on their own. They are disoriented and demoralized, which affects their ability to succeed and is disruptive for the rest of the kids as well. Some of these kids have disabilities, which probably affected their performance in the charters. Easier to counsel such students out than do the careful work of finding out what they need to succeed. Meanwhile, Madison Park’s population of students with disabilities is climbing and is now 31%.
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p>Anyway, again, I have a different notion of school success.
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p>But my question still stands about one of the rationales for the law. Where are these providers with a record of success with the neediest students?
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p>I would not say that A) transfer rates are accurately described as attrition rates and 2) that I’m ‘not very much troubled’ by transfer rates. I point out that the Boston Public Schools doesn’t keep records on transfer rates and thus we really can’t say if this is, in any way, abnormal. I am, as I said, very much impressed that MATCH bothered to track students after they transfered out: seems a clear case of going ‘above and beyond’, if you ask me (and I believe you did.)
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p>In addition, the specific class that suffered such attrition was, if I’m not mistaken, the inaugural class for Boston Prep. OK. Has this been repeated? Is this a continuing concern, if indeed it is a concern at all? Begging your pardon, but it just seems like somebody saw the number 50% and said “aha! got you now charters!” Perhaps the kinks needed to be worked out. Or, perhaps it is as you say and they are truly and actively shedding curve draggers. My point is, that you have no concrete underpinnings for the certainty you express.
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p>I would imagine this to be, very much, the case. I think that high standards sometimes come with disorientation and demoralization. Why, I wonder, do you think I would view this differently? This is an extremely odd argument: I think that the danger of demoralization and/or disorientation exists every time a test is given regardless of whether the test is given in a charter or traditional classroom. I think the very idea of organizing each grade by age/peer group and teaching by curricula, the core structure of both charters and traditionals, is a real and explicit buffer against demoralization and disorientation.
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p>I think you’re skating dangerously close to the caricature of liberal teachers: that of someone who would coddle the students and never ever endanger their feelings. I’m certain this is not the case, so don’t take (too much) umbrage. I mention it to show you what it looks like from here. I don’t particularly wish to demoralize you, but, in this instance, with you being so certain, I think a measure of disorientation is to be expected.
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p>I think that this is a valid point. I don’t think charters do all that well by the students with disabilities. As a person who went to public school in the seventies and eighties and was diagnosed with a learning disability in 1991, long after I had dropped out of high school, I have acute and intimate knowledge of public school failings in this regard and the distance they’ve come since… I think that charters are indeed behind the curve with respect to learning disabled students and other disabled students, but don’t let’s pretend that the traditional public schools isn’t still riding that learning curve. I’m heartened that the issue is being raised and addressed. More work is to be done.
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I’m glad to see somebody in the Patrick administration admit that in the aggregate, charter schools are no more successful than “traditional” public schools. However, eliding over the logical misstep in its support for charter schools is less than pleasing.
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p>Yes, there are charter schools that perform better than average, as there are district schools that do the same. That’s the idea of an average. What is missing, however, is any foundation to the claim that outlying charters perform better because they are charters. Comparing successful charters against failing charters presumes the inherent utility of charter schools in general. If in the aggregate, as you say, there is little to distinguish the two categories, why keep both? I have seen nothing in this conversation, or the academic literature, to buttress the presumption that charter inherently offer something better. Without buttressing that claim, there is no sense to driving more money into private/charter hands.
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p>I appreciate the correction. Given Senator Walsh’s historic support for charter schools, I should have known better. I was misinformed.
Between what Sabutai says here:
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p>and what I say here:
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p>sum up my feelings on this subject pretty succinctly.
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p>This entire experiment–sort of like the open classroom concept of the 60s–has been an instructive failure that we should expose rather than cosmetically conceal. As Sabutai points out, continuing to shovel money and resources at the concept is senseless, and, I would add, fuels an adversarial climate that is counterproductive in moving the Commonwealth’s schools forward. Charter schools wedge natural allies, creating a climate of competitive hostility that serves no one. The ol’ canard that charters foster health competition among schools is, in a word, silly. Show me one teacher who ever altered an instructional practice because s/he was challenged or threatened by a charter school. Show me one administrator who ever made a significant change in the instructional program at his/her school because s/he was challenged or threatened by a charter school. The notion is simply ridiculous.
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p>The Innovation Schools project sounds promising, but I’m not sure it goes far enough. There ought to be an avenue by which schools that are doing innovative but smaller in-school initiatives and projects can identify themselves and participate in a programmatic collaborative that provides a methodology that objectively assesses the effectiveness of the program–and the measure CANNOT be solely improved MCAS scores. (The limitations of MCAS are a discussion for another day that I’m hopeful we can have here.) This collaborative would provide resources for getting initiatives off the ground, for assessing their effectiveness, and for creating an effective communication mechanism that would help schools share their results–both positive and negative–with other schools.
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p>There are a lot of talented boots-on-the-ground educators posting on this site. We tend to be among the innovators, the movers, and the shakers in our respective buildings, and we can help you understand what goes on at ground zero versus 30,000 feet–if you give us a chance.
Here, here!
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p>This conversation is a microcosm of the larger fact that charters as conceived and constituted and funded now are divisive and disruptive (for example when they are shut down and families, who may have been perfectly happy in the school and felt their children were thriving despite now MCAS scores, have to scramble to figure out what to do next).
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p>The new law seems to add fuel to the fire, not quench it or answer the fundamental questions about adequacy and equity of resources and opportunities for innovation in whatever governance model or school structure exists.
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p>Your points about “competitive hostility” and how destructive it is are well taken. You might be interested in BC professor Dennis Shirley’s testimony on RTTT, in which he describes the results of his research into school reform efforts in the UK. Rather than persist in the hope that the threat of competition will force improvements in traditional public schools, he recommends the following, based on his research:
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p>Note that the original conception of charters was they would do something like what Shirley recommends, being “laboratories of innovation” that others will emulate, but there’s no evidence that this has happened.
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p>And lightiris, I too look forward to the important discussion about the MCAS, which has been on hold for too long and needs to be had in a more nuanced and meaningful way than whether one is for or against testing and standards.
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All of these suggestion are good. We did a little school-to-school stuff when we were looking for a governance model two years ago as well as in our planning switching to and rolling out a trimester schedule next year. Successful schools should be visited all the time to the point where students are not only unfazed by the interruptions but proud that they are visited for doing cool things. Partnering is important not just between teachers and administrators; students make up the third side of this triangle. When students get a chance to talk about educational experience (not their learning) in a context that exists outside their school, what results can be enlightening for everyone. On a smaller and clearly more attenuated scale, we can see this sort of thing occuring during a NEASC visit in a reasonably sized high school. The change in the building climate is measurable, and students get a chance to be real stakeholders. While I’m not all that enamored of some of the expectations NEASC touts as meaningful, the general idea is certainly one that can be modeled on a larger scale as schools share projects and initiatives they found successful AND unsuccessful.
Mr. Reville, If we want a picture of Ed reform under your vision, we have no better place to look than Gloucester. Here is the prospect: The state Education Board makes its decisions on new charter applications without regard for either the financial impact on the district, the need for the offerrings of the charter school, or the evaluation of the charter school office. Instead, the Board mandates charter schools under preasure from politically powerful constituencies such as the Boston Globe and the Boston Foundation (these are your personal picks, or are they the Governor’s?).
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p>Nationally, the Walton Foundation and like groups, enamoured of a corporate-style model of school reform, and with a virulent hatred of unions, will continue to pour money into charter schools, both directly as well as indirectly through their efforts to fund charter advocacy organizations.
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p>The charters in turn continue to specialize in enrolling those kids who are easiest to reach and to teach. The public schools are left with the ELL, SPED, and students at the bottom end of the poverty spectrum within the district. Yet the public districts must pay tuition rates per charter pupil as if the charter school were educating these more difficult and costly students. They then continue to struggle, and lose public confidence.
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p>That’s game, set, and maybe match for the purveyors of anti-government ideological cant, pushing vouchers, school choice, and educational de-regulation. Now the ideology emerges wearing progressive clothes, decorated with hypothetical “Innovation schools”, promoted by politicians who are distracted by the political allures of a cost-free ed reform and so unable or unwilling to see what the data are saying about the whole enterprise, viz., charters, choice, and school closures do not improve public education, even while the fiscal impacts bleed it dry. Meanwhile, these anti-public school initiatives give comfort to those whose agenda is the dismantling of public education and government generally.
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p>It’s probable that, through the ed bill, this Democratic administration will have changed public education for a generation. Congratulations for achieving what Republican administrations have failed to achieve, despite their best efforts: striking a blow at the sustainability of public schools.
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p>The question is–and this is not a question for Mr. Reville to answer–how do Democrats start to recover the meaning of public education from the corporatist, free-market ideologues such a Mr. Reville, the Pioneer Institute, and the Walton Foundation, that are driving the agenda today?
I can tell you, as an upper-middle-class parent, that the primary repellent of my city’s public school system is the poor quality of many of the students. I researched the schools, speaking to people who teach in them. From what I learned, I would not want to expose my child to the severe problems that a significant number of students bring to the table. I don’t want my kindergartner to have to comprehend children who are homeless, or whose parents or siblings are in prison. I don’t want class time spent teaching some children that it isn’t appropriate to swear at the teacher, or to use the n-word. I don’t want to have to worry about gang recruiting. I don’t want to have to explain to a first-grader why their classmate bringing marijuana to school is a bad thing. Elitist? Maybe, but I bet 99% of the people here wouldn’t willingly choose those things either.
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p>Sure, there will always be problem students in any public school, but when so many problem students are in one place, that place is just not viable to many education-oriented parents. I know that the quality of the teachers in the Springfield system is generally high. I know that students can get a tremendous education in Springfield if they want to. But I see the risks outweighing the benefits. It’s easier to segregate. And if a concerned parent is going to segregate, they are going to do it with certainty rather than by lottery. A concerned parent is going to go private, or move — fleeing the system, leaving behind those who could not afford to flee, or who did not care enough to flee.
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p>Maybe that’s a bit extreme — I know a number of good students in the public school system, it can definitely be navigated by those who are committed. But most people are not committed. Most people see the odds stacked against success. Most people don’t choose such a system. The biggest liability that the city of Springfield faces is its schools. It is the first question prospective buyers (who don’t know the area) ask about the city. It is, in my opinion, why so many young families move out of the city.
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p>But even taking that into account, I have to question the state’s commitment to educating its hardest-to-educate students. Look at a major premise of Chapter 70 funding — a “low income” student gets 50% more “cost” allocated to them in the foundation budget. Think about that — it means that the state is assuming that a classroom of 17 low-income students is the equivalent of 25 high-income students — will need the same level of teaching, resources, etc. If you had to show equal results, which would you pick? 17 low-income students or 25 high-income students? Seems like the number is off by at least a factor of 2. Is the state prepared to almost double the Chapter 70 money going to communities with an 80% school poverty rate?
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p>Look at how wealthy communities fund their schools – much higher than the mandatory “foundation” level. Dover almost triples their foundation requirement, whereas most poor communities fund right at the lower limit. If much of the state is spending way more than “foundation”, then is the state really doing its part by simply funding poor communities to the foundation level, no higher? Is the “foundation” really the “minimum needed for an adequate education” when so many communities feel the need to spend so much more?
That pretty well sums up the dynamic of school choice, charters, vouchers–the whole agenda. Many parents aren’t looking for good schools, Innovation schools, or schools with a curriculum aligned with the state standard–they’re looking for schools with good students, i.e., kids from wealthier communities, with better home environments, better test scores.
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p>That’s the problem with Mr. Reville’s telling us that Innovation Schools are an answer to the fiscally and socially devastating consequences of the charter school program (which latter he advocates for even as he acknowledges the violence charters do in communities that value their neighborhood schools). Give people a charter school, and they can segregate/isolate themselves from the more troubled children in their community. “Innovation schools” don’t allow for that isolation, and so they’ll be at a disadvantage to charters.
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p>Strangely, our current gang of reformers proclaim that this isolation by charters will somehow close the achievement gap. What they mean is, charters will disperse the gap amoung a welter of schools, and when the dust clears in 10 years the gap will likely be some one else’s problem. Then its on to the next reform fad (reform without good evidence but attractive PR). Except we’ll have dug a deep hole for our public schools meanwhile, and it’ll be the devil pulling them out of it.
That’s why I’m on the fence about charters. On one hand, I do see them as potentially harmful to the public schools (due to funding issues and selective brain drain), but on the other hand I can see how they can be used to combat economic segregation and even urban flight, because it gives people a way to segregate based on other things.
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p>I think that charters can help promote racial and economic integration because they give people a commonality to associate around. For example, a performing arts charter school puts together people who are interested in performing arts, it allows them to segregate around their interests instead of along racial or class lines. Since performing arts is the focus, other differences aren’t as important.
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p>I think that themed charter schools would be a great thing. Instead of selling themselves as “better than the public schools”, they could sell themselves as “a different alternative to the public schools”. Maybe they could even figure out ways to attract students who aren’t doing well in general and generic public schools by offering things that inspire kids who don’t do well in traditional settings.
Swampscott complaints help Gov. Patrick admit ‘Chapter 70 state aid to education is broken’
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p>By Kristin D’Agostino
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p>Swampscott Reporter
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p>July 11, 2008
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p>Another hot topic was Chapter 70, the formula created by the state to determine the amount of education money given to each community.
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p>Former Swampscott School Committee member Mary DeChillo asked about Chapter 70.
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p>”Chapter 70’s broken, everybody knows that,” said Patrick. “Even in communities where you get your share, it’s not enough in relation to what the local community has to raise in property taxes. That’s too much pressure.”
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p>Source: http://www.wickedlocal.com/swa…
While there is a lot of “posted” passion about the single issue of the Gloucester charter school, much of what Secretary Reville mentions in his statement, those real reforms that are now law, has been overlooked. For many years, superintendents, school committee members, and mayors have been trying to make changes in those procedures which had been holding back needed and deep change in some of our schools. What is notable is the SUSTAINED and DISCIPLINED commitment that political leaders have continued to make for improving educational outcomes for all children. The desire for excellence and equity has not been selective, just for the few and not including the many; “all means ALL.”
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p>Too often our viewpoints might get stuck on a local, state regional, or even national level. But if we view education from a global view, the US cannot be competitive if so many, too many of our students still are not fully realizing the benefits of educational reform and are not acquiring the knowledge and skills that they need to succeed work and raise families in the next nine decades of this 21st century.
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p>Someone once said that the measure of a society or of an organization is how it treats its members who have the greatest needs. The Federal government and many states, including MA, are taking on the challenges of elevating the lowest performing schools, those schools where none of us would want to send our own children or grandchildren. Common decency requires that “we must quickly rescue children from bad schools.”
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p>The Achievement Gap Bill is consistent, not only with Federal initiatives, but also with the Governor’s Readiness Project and plan. The Readiness Project identified many of the innovations and interventions that have become law. And it includes ALL public schools (both traditional and charter).
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p>Through this bill, educators, school committee members, teachers’ unions and community organizations have a clear opportunity to show that they have the creativity and capacity for innovation and the flexibilities needed to design and implement schools that grow from bad to good to great.
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p>Our state leaders could have been complacent with MA’s high rankings. At a time of extreme financial pressures and losses, they could have taken a pass on bringing education reform to its next level. They could have waited until times were better. But the children in the failing schools cannot wait for those “better” times.
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p>America has not yet educated all its children to high levels. All across the country and the continent, we are seeing examples of many High Performance High Poverty schools. We can learn best and effective practices from educators in Chicago, New York City, and Toronto. Perhaps for the first time, we can say that we know what we need to do and how to do it in order to improve under-performing schools. Many of those proven practices are now included in the new education reform bill.
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p>The bill is a framework; it will not implement itself. “From here, it’s all about implementation.” MA has the political will, the leadership, the strategies, and the resources (from the Federal government). to quote that grat Aerican philosopher, Larry the Cable Guy, it is not time for us to “get ‘er done.”
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What can we learn from educators in Chicago in New York City? The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post have recently reported that changes brought to Chicago under Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley were not successful. For example, a front-page Tribune story on Jan. 17 reported:
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p>Diane Ravitch has been reporting in Ed Week on the disastrous results of Mayor Bloomberg’s charterization strategy in New York City.
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p>These are not models I’d like to see emulated in Massachusetts.
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p>I’m less familiar with what’s happening now in Toronto and would be interested to hear what that’s all about and how it relates to the “achievement gap” law’s provisions.
I appreciate the argument that maybe folks like me are focusing too much on the deceit and political machinations that shoved a deficient school into our little burg and not seeing the “big picture” … but it’s our reality and we have to cope with the fallout of being Reville’s collateral damage for the benefit of the “greater agenda.”
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p>So while Innovation Schools and Ed reform is being shouted from the rooftops, we’re having our legs shackled and fixed to a stake in the ground because our already fiscally challenged district will now be facing the additional struggle of dealing with the financial repercussions of accommodating a school that isn’t needed and isn’t wanted, but which served a political purpose that was not related whatsoever to the quality of education in our community.
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p>What benefit will this all be to our children when our district is laying off even more teachers or closing and consolidating already overflowing schools? Perhaps we can cut even MORE programs or raise fees even higher… after all it was for the good of the Commonwealth — Sorry ya got hosed Gloucester but really… you’ll see, it’s gonna be SOOO much better… And folks wonder why cynicism runs so high.
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p>This whole thing has been about trust and integrity and the belief that the ends do NOT justifying the means. If this can happen here then it can happen in your town…. unless of course you live in Worcester. That’s why people need to understand what happened here. Gloucester has been burned and Reville and Chester and frankly the Governor have soot on their hands.
The “Single Issue of Gloucester”, as your write so dismissively, is probably the best picture we have of the future of public education under this administration’s bill. In that picture, “all” is replaced with “some”. As in Gloucester, the bill envisions depriving the majority of students in struggling districts with resources diverted to a few.
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p>So let’s measure the charter program against your criterion: we find districts that are mired in poverty. We mandate charters that cream the students in the district, leaving behind those who are poorest and most difficult to educate. To these we send the bill for the new charter schools, even while the new charters recieve funding from wealthy foundations eager to advance a corporate-style reform agenda.
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p>By your criterion, we have made for ourselves a sorry social contract here: if you’re poor and your troubled, the future of education reform leaves you out.
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p>For many politicans, and middle-class education advocacy groups such as Stand for Children , any attempt to seriously address the central issue of poverty weakens the committment of their constituency, who are not there to solve the problems of late capitalism. And any critical stance towards charters jeopardizes the support of seriously wealthy patrons and campaign contributors, or political allies like the Globe or the Boston Foundation. Under these conditions, advocacy and political leaders fall in line behind charter schools, which look like positive action, if not examined closely. But the kids with the greatest needs? They’re left outside (according to the data).
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p>Whew! Excuse me, but who’s paying for your lunch! My read of the political history of education in the Commonwealth is that we’ve seen political leaders avoid major action unless forced by court order, including the 1993 Ed Reform Act. Absent force, we get under-funding Chapter 70 for more than a decade. Now we have the prospects of Federal grants being used to force ill-conceived ideas like lifting the charter cap. Our state leadership snap at this, sure, but “SUSTAINED and DISCIPLINED” committment!
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p>Since there “reforms” don’t cost the state a red-cent, and instead pass the bills t the cities and towns, its hard to give state leaders a big cheer here. Really, this kind of shilling is too much.
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p>As I suggested on another post, the Gloucester incident has the potential to become an unproductive distraction. As an educator and as a school committee member, my lens is trained on both sides, and I’m concerned about a small but vocal group of passionate people unwittingly creating the impression that what happened in Gloucester is all that meaningful in the big picture. I’ve sat on the largest school committee in the Commonwealth for six years, and in my experience the numbers of substantive conversations we’ve had about charter schools I can count on one hand. Charters are not an issue for every district, but curricular quality, instructional methodology, and meaningful assessment are. Chapter 70 funding is. Transportation is.
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p>As a teacher, charters don’t come anywhere close to touching my day–in any of the districts I’ve taught in. I view, as I said, charter schools as an unnecessary drain on the public coffers and an innstructionally questionable venture.
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p>The time and effort put into trying to make the charter school more affordable, more palatable, more accountable, and more effective has been a colossal waste of money and time. Had the same efforts been put into the public schools that are struggling, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Indeed, we probably SHOULDN’T be having this conversation.
Reville’s credibility does not exist yet the Patrick campaign has no issue with allowing him to post a major message on education to what probably was a very receptive group a mere four years ago. Well, Paul Reville, a quick review of 48 messages tells me you got your clock cleaned. You are toast and you are no longer relevant. Your behavior in Gloucester, along with your partner in deception, Mitch Chester, has rendered you to be ineffective at best and a liability at worst. If the idea behind this blog entry was simply a test of Reville’s status post Gloucester, consider the test an abject failure. If Deval Patrick cares to prevail in November, this is a man that may need to disappear for nine months.
“High Expectations”, “Excellent Schools for every child”, “Closing the Achievement Gap”, “Innovation and Choice”, “Race to the Top”, “No Child Left Behind”. Let’s be honest – these are hollow, meaningless phrases. I would hope that our Secretary of Education could talk to us plainly.
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p>In my classroom, I don’t talk to the students about “closing the achievement gap” or how we will “race to the top”. I don’t talk to them about how I won’t “leave anyone behind.” I teach them about science, challenge them to explain their thoughts clearly, etc. Whether I teach using method A or method B is probably not the most relevant thing here. Whether I am in a “Horace Mann Charter School” or a “Deval Patrick Charter School” or a “Mr. Rogers un-Charter School” doesn’t matter. What matters is whether I am empowered to be inspiring, passionate and creative. Everything else is secondary.
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p>How do we get teachers to be inspiring, passionate and creative? First, give them the resources they need to be as creative as possible. That costs money. Secondly, give them more control. Finally, hold them accountable. Not through a limited one day, one-size-fits-all test designed by a profit-making enterprise in New Hampshire. But through meaningful, in-depth evaluation. Oh yeah, that costs money too.
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p>As I read it, the Patrick administration followed in the path of its predecessors, working systematically to reduce teachers’ ability to be creative and inspiring. How?
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p>The Patrick administration has worked to reduce the power of teachers’ unions, thereby reducing teachers’ control. First, the administration has pushed the legislature to allow municipalities to unilaterally move their employees to the GIC, bypassing collective bargaining. While it may save towns money, it weakens teacher contracts. Secondly, by pushing for more charter schools they are directly threatening teacher unions. (I would ask the Secretary why he doesn’t embrace the idea of unionizing charter schools, but that’s a discussion for another day.) Finally, the current ed reform bill as I read it gives school committees the ability to create in-district charter schools where administrators have more power over teachers.
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p>Where in your plans, Mr. Secretary, have you specifically set aside money for teachers to get the resources they need to be more creative? To allow for more meaningful evaluations? Instead, you’re tinkering with structure – more charter schools, more this kind of school and that kind of school. You’ve completely missed the mark.
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p>So, Mr. Secretary, if you care to respond, I’d love to hear how you plan to empower me (and other public school teachers) to teach less to the test, and give me the support to be as competent, confident, and creative as I can be?
I’m really digging the cut of Opus’s jib. Real innovation and reform in education involves more than cookie cutter slogans like those Obama and Patrick now espouse. The sad fact is that the government gets more mileage out of blaming teachers for a system in complete dysfunction than it does out of promoting real reform.
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p>As a progressive, I am deeply disappointed in Deval Patrick’s cowardice on this issue. And that’s what it is…plain old cowardice.