One charter critic even argued here for more charters, because he hopes it will result in charter kids failing academically (thereby “exposing the fraud”).
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The Gov
I’ve never met the Governor. No original insights. Heard him speak on this topic maybe 4 or 5 times. My sense from listening is he remains mixed on the wonkish pro/con charter arguments.
He almost always leads with something like “Charters are NOT the panacea.”
Earlier, Opus wrote:
I think many progressives (including Patrick) have become infatuated with charter schools as the panacea for education”
Well, that’s the opposite of I’ve heard the Gov actually say.
Still, I also believe the Governor rejects the “charter people are frauds” narrative. Why?
One difference between him and most of the BMGers: he’s met hundreds of black and Hispanic moms who talk about how their kid’s charter school has changed his life. (Now, I realize that the “fraud” narrative means you think those moms are the tiny minority). The Gov also knows a bunch of liberal black lawyers and other professionals who volunteer at charter schools, and speak glowingly of what they’ve seen in the trenches. Again, you think they’ve been hoodwinked, too, fine. But it might explain why his view diverges from yours. Another reason is personal style. He’s a positive energy guy. I don’t think he sees many people on any issue in such a negative light.
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The Law And The Numbers
There are 54 regular charters in Massachusetts. There are 7 Horace Mann (district-run) charters. There are 1,785 other types of public schools here.
Massachusetts charters have about 20,000 kids.
Districts have the other 939,000 kids.
207,000 of those kids are black or Hispanic.
Under the new law, charters will, over next several years, serve another 9,000 or so of those kids. Plus another 1,000 white or Asian kids. All of this growth is permitted only in cities. And the cities have to be in the lowest 10% of the state on MCAS.
In addition, Mayor Menino might open 3 district-run charters. So, depending on how you count them, maybe add another 1,200 kids to the list.
So charters will go from serving about 2% of Massachusetts kids to 3%. That’s why even charter supporters, like me, don’t think charters are a panacea. How could they be? Look at the market share.
(By the way, Paul Reville has proven prescient on this point. For years he’s said at Rennie Center events that the charter school debate absorbs 75% of the media attention for 2% of the kids. So charter debate absorbed all the oxygen needed to move forward for the couple hundred thousand kids who have terrible education outcomes).
For the 20,000 kids in charters, there’s maybe 800 teachers? (not sure)
All those teachers can unionize by card-check. This was a union sought provision, making it even easier than the normal way, which requires a secret ballot election. Gov Patrick signed it in 2007.
So far one charter has unionized. You can read about their teacher-created contract here. It eliminates seniority or coursework as pay considerations, for example.
Finally, a number of states have lifted charter caps in hopes of submitting a more competitive Race To The Top application. MA did same.
MA is by no means a cinch to win. But if we do, then about $200 million of federal money will flow to the traditional public schools.
* * *
Charter Perspective on the Law
For many charter supporters, the cap lift bill was a half loaf. The preferred outcome was a ballot initiative to eliminate all charter school caps.
We’d gathered all the signatures needed. The polling on it was really high. Part of the deal for the bill that passed was charter supporters would scuttle the ballot measure.
It wasn’t that we wanted to flood MA with charters. Hardly. But the ballot measure would have allowed more charters outside the inner-cities. There are plenty of middle class kids out there who would benefit from a different school experience.
For example, BMGer DaveMB wrote:
We have at least two good, legitimate, innovative charters in the (Pioneer) Valley — a performing arts high/middle school and a Chinese immersion elementary school, who succeeded in the competition for the limited number of charters. We also have, if I recall the details correctly, a collapsing charter in Springfield that chose a convicted felon as its principal.
Does the cap force competition between charter schools that gets us better ones?
Yes and no. The new charter law does not help a Pioneer Valley school grow or replicate. The cap lift doesn’t apply to any schools which serve middle class kids.
Nor does the law create growth by schools that are not “proven providers.” So many charter schools do not, under the law, get any new opportunities to grow.
However, the law does force competition between charter schools.
For example, there might be 4 to 6 charters, like KIPP, that might want to establish networks of schools in, say, Boston. But even with the cap lift, there will not be enough seats to do this. So to some extent, even the highest-performing schools will somehow have to duke it out for the right to open schools.
Finally, MarkBail: the law does introduce a bunch of additional regulations, proposed by charter opponents, that apply exclusively to charters. These will create some operational headaches for us, but the details are fairly mind-numbing.
* * *
Moving Forward
DO YOU REALIZE that in the same law, the Governor just created a brand new in-district opportunity called Innovation Schools? And you (teachers and others) can start your OWN effort to help kids in your district, stay unionized, etc?
I’m still waiting for the call-to-arms “We can do this!” diary here on BMG. This is real.
Back in 1999, our history teacher was working in Attleboro. He and some colleagues tried to create the equivalent of an Innovation School. But there was no mechanism back then for in-district innovation. So he joined our charter school.
Interestingly, as the law was debated, there were 2 competing narratives floating on Beacon Hill about Innovation Schools.
The optimistic view went like this: “If you just give traditional schoolteachers and principals and parents and other citizens the opportunity to create a new program or even a whole new school in their district, they’ll rise to the occasion and innovate!”
The pessimistic view went like this: “Look at what happened with in-district unionized Horace Mann charter schools. Nobody really stepped up to do that. Given a choice between doing something concrete to help kids, or complaining by educators, you’ll get a ton of complaints and little action.”
Patrick and Reville take the optimistic view.
By the way, if any of you DOES want to do an Innovation School, charter folks can and will help you.
Whatever your view, you probably believe at least that SOME folks have started remarkable charters (even if they’re outliers). They’d love nothing more than helping you with your non-charter Innovation School venture. I can put you in touch with any of ’em.
I’ll respond in more depth later. My dog and I are going to meet our friends for a hike.
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p>I’m afraid the Gloucester business has distracted our wonkish discussion of charters. While it reflects some policy issues (ex. how much control should the state have over what happens in school districts), it is largely a political issue.
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p>Charter schools are unlikely to affect my professional or parental life. I don’t think my high school has ever failed to graduate a kid on time due to MCAS. My children attend a small public high school, which benefits from a serious amount of school choice money.
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p>Were the funding fixed (not draining urban districts of money, for instance), I think there wouldn’t be much of a problem with charter schools.
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p>Two reasons I’m not unequivocally against charter schools is 1) I think it’s kind of bourgeois for me to argue against an alternative for folks who live in the city 2) they are a valuable experiment.
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p>Mark
How do you respond to the Stanford study that’s been posted on BMG multiple times which found that on balance charters are more likely to negatively impact their students than positively impact them?
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p>You also assume that this is about the character of charter proponents, which it generally isn’t. Sec. Reville’s actions re: Gloucester were stupid, but don’t really factor in to my opposition. What do factor in are the findings of the actual studies that have been done, vs. your anecdotal evidence which fails to take into account that charters keep out kids they don’t want and encourage high dropout rates so they can pawn off the kids who’ll drag their scores down on the public schools. That, and the fact that charters gut the local public school’s budget when they arrive because we have an insane funding formula. Even if a charter is good for the 100 kids attending, no rational policymaker can support it when it’s equally harmful to the 400 kids left behind.
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p>Some states have made charters work. They’re not inherently bad; they’re just bad as practiced in Massachusetts and most of the states that have them. But you need to fix the policies that make them bad BEFORE you start trying to create more, and most charter proponents refuse to do that.
The Stanford study looked at zero Massachusetts charter schools. How can you cite that with reference to Massachusetts charters?
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p>I’ve cited the Stanford study myself, just to show that I’m open to the national numbers on charters, which are definitely mixed.
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p>But there have been just 2 studies of Massachusetts MCAS scores.
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p>One in 2006. The other in 2009. Both were thoroughly discussed on BMG.
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p>Both showed large advantage to charters.
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p>The 2009 study was more sophisticated. It controlled for both departure (the charge that charters deliberate shed kids) and selection bias (the idea that “good kids” enroll in charters in the first place).
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p>It did this by comparing only charter lottery WINNERS (randomly selected admissions) with losers. Then it assigned kids who had LEFT charters to still be part of the charter score.
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p>On BMG the 2009 study is attacked because it was commissioned by the Boston Foundation.
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p>But the Foundation, if anything, has most aggressively promoted PILOT SCHOOLS. It’s the single initiative that they are most closely connected to. And the same study found NEGATIVE pilot results. Wouldn’t this suggest that they were willing to let chips fall where they may?
I write this often on BMG, but I don’t think I’ve seen you before in the comments: I work for a charter school. Take it all with a grain of salt.
the MTA’s report on attrition of students in charters where it says charters will have to fill vacancies as students leave them?
It’s a complicated issue.
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p>There were 3 sides to that story.
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p>1. From the charter perspective, the #1 cause of departure is a kid who the teachers don’t promote to the next grade. He is then frequently offered AUTOMATIC promotion in a nearby district school.
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p>The Lege considered a provision to require district schools to “honor” the charter grades. Ie, just like a freshman who flunked at Umass Dartmouth can’t go to Umass Lowell and become a sophomore.
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p>However, instead, they just did an advisory to have the district resolve the issue. So we lost on that one.
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p>2. In states where there are UNIONIZED charters, the unions have never breathed a word about attrition. So a question might be: does the union care about attrition or non-union charters?
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p>Notice the MTA study listed no traditional school departure rates. Which are higher than charters!
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p>Think about it. The union is pro-teacher 99% of the time. In this one instance, they want charter principals to overrule their teachers who give kids low marks, in order to avoid attrition. C’mon.
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p>3. The district’s main issue was, I think, more legit. Kids move in and out of districts all year. So a district school gets a kid who shows up midyear.
Since charters follow a lottery rule, don’t get as many midyear arrivals.
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p>The compromise was that in earlier grades charters would take midyear arrivals, but not in later grades.
These seem to be a more union-friendly take on the Readiness Schools that emerged from the Readiness Project. The way the original concept was originally explained made it seem like an invitation to hostile takeovers.
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p>The MTA has a simple summary of the law as a whole. Here’s what is says about innovation schools:
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p>
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p>Maybe over time innovation schools will take hold. I’m not particularly interested myself. Personally, I don’t know many teachers who would be interested. Most teachers want to teach, not run schools. Most of teachers and parents are happy with their schools. Every employee certainly has complaints and preferences as to the way things are run, but it’s quite a jump from not liking how lunch duty is assigned to taking over the management of a school.
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p>One of the problems with this bill, and innovation schools in particular, is the assumption that radical reorganization of schools will cure low test scores. I have my doubts. The law itself says that innovation schools will allow for more “autonomy and flexibility.” I don’t see why we need separate schools for this. Why couldn’t the state ask individual districts or schools to come up with their proposals without going through all this rigamarole?
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p>Mark
The devil is in the details, but it sounds promising. There are a lot of needs in the student body of Massachusetts which are frankly going unfilled at this point.
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p>As for the vocabulary you threw around, GGW, at least the first two were not about “charter people”, but the de facto effects of charter schools.
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p>I’m sorry you’ve never met the governor. In conversation he’s proven rather balanced on education, considering that he has astonishingly limited experience with public education.
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p>I’m glad to see you acknowledge that the cap does force charter schools to compete for public money. I think a fair competition between charters is smart policy, and trying to bring about fair competition between charters and public schools would be as well.
while we disagree on de facto effects of charters, and i’m sure we exasperate each other with our arguments, it’s a legit policy thing.
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p>you’re a student of language. surely you see a change in language on bmg as it pertains to charters.
Outrage at the baffling, extralegal attempt to force a charter school on Gloucester. That isolated incident has inspired the strongest language.<
p>-Strong language on the effects of charter schools in the Commonwealth.
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p>Not of it, as far as I can see, is directed at charter people. A lot of it is from people here quoting others, not using their own words. Frankly, none of it approaches the language thrown around in primary races here.
The devil is in the details, but it sounds promising. There are a lot of needs in the student body of Massachusetts which are frankly going unfilled at this point.
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p>As for the vocabulary you threw around, GGW, at least the first two were not about “charter people”, but the de facto effects of charter schools.
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p>I’m sorry you’ve never met the governor. In conversation he’s proven rather balanced on education, considering that he has astonishingly limited experience with public education.
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p>I’m glad to see you acknowledge that the cap does force charter schools to compete for public money. I think a fair competition between charters is smart policy, and trying to bring about fair competition between charters and public schools would be as well.
you are a student of language. do u think the bmg charter threads have been more inflammatory in past few months? maybe i’m just oversensitive.
Again, much of this is due to Gloucester’s situation.
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p>Reville’s problem is that the story is no longer about the charter schools, it is about Reville. He has become a distraction at best and the problem at worst. It is my view that it would be best if he moved on. Or put another way, he should have been fired long ago.
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p>As for the 2% argument, my district loses $600k in funding next year to a charter. That is not insignificant particularly given the fact that we do not magically have $600k in costs disappear from the budget. It’s the fixed v. variable cost discussion that is a bit tedious, but needs to be understood if you care to really understand charter funding.
You lose $600k in funding, but how many kids do you “lose” as well? I’m not arguing that the enrollment reduction leads to $600k in savings, but both numbers are equally relevant when understanding the impact.
of your Charter School. What is the percentage of students in your school who are on an IEP or who came to your school on an IEP? What is the percentage of students who are Limited English Proficient or formerly LEP? What are the percentage of your students who qualify for free or reduced lunch? Percentage of students of color? How many students do you educate who have a diagnosis of Autism or Aspergers or PDD? Do these demographics mirror those of the public school of the community in which your Charter School exists?
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p>If they do, and you are educating your students at a level as high as, or higher than the public schools, then more power to you. If your demographics are different, then you’re a semi-private school.
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p>The defining difference between public schools and other kinds of schools is that the public schools take whoever lives in that community regardless of the advantages or disadvantages they bring with them, and regardless of the level of motivation and involvement of their parents.
happy to provide the stats, but first i want to question you on the premise.
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p>if we’re required to have a random admission lottery by law, how are we supposed to possibly end up replicating the district averages? particularly when federal law prohibits a “weighted lottery”?
Are you educating the same population as the public schools in which your Charter School exists? Either you are or you aren’t. Pretty simple. If you aren’t (and almost all Charter Schools aren’t) then comparison of test scores to local districts are disingenuous at best, more accurately these claims should be considered fraudulent.
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p>According to the state regs for Charter Schools
So perhaps you could share with us the outreach efforts your school makes that would allow it to attract a student population that is representative of the local community. Does your staff, for example, represent the racial and linguistic makeup of the local community? Do you highlight the MCAS performance of different student subgroups (special education, LEP/FLEP, racial subgroups, and low incomes students) in your recruitment material? I’m sure these things are not discriminatory. In my opinion, they should be required.
I assume you’ll find this totally unpersuasive.
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p>With all due respect, remember when you said that you thought Value-Added assessment was a great way to evaluate charters, and I showed you the Value-Added numbers, and then you stopped talking about that? I feel the goalposts always move on charters.
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p>But it’s a fair question.
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p>Our population is 60% black and 30% Hispanic. BPS is about 35% of each race.
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p>It’s about 70% low-income.
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p>When we started, the worry was that charters would attract middle-class white families. Now, evidently, we see studies by charter opponents that say charters serve too many black kids. Do you think we serve too many black kids?
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p>How about the individual district schools which serve more than the district average of white and Asian kids? And the mostly white and Asian exam schools? Is your concern about demographic similarity true of all public schools, or just charters?
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p>*
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p>We go to churches, community groups, and to district middle schools (to meet their 8th graders). We approach every single district school and ask to see every single kid. We don’t always get in. And sometimes we don’t see each class.
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p>Partly because more of our population is Roxbury-born and Dorchester-born and Mattapan-born black kids, we have fewer Spanish speaking kids.
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p>But that’s true of tons of Boston Public Schools too. I.e., there’s not a SINGLE BPS school that is an exact mirror of the district’s overall numbers.
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p>*
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p>Our MCAS has been 97%+ proficient for past few years. So we haven’t broken it down by subgroup.
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p>*
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p>Now we turn from the variables over which we have no “control” – race and poverty where we are similar to the district – to the ones we do have some control.
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p>As you know, there’s lots of technical stuff around this, so what I write is an oversimplification.
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p>ELL is 1%. But guess what? 25% of our kids don’t speak English as first language. The thing that is crazy is we FOREGO I think about $2,000 per kid that we’d get if we put the ELL label on them. We’re giving UP money to do the right thing (combine high dosage tutoring for ALL kids with enormous parent desire to have kids in regular classes).
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p>So now the new law puts pressure on us to classify the kids at the rate as the district (where 1 out of 2 kids who doesn’t speak English as first language is labeled ELL, and they face legal pressure to label even more kids). If we do that, we’ll get even more money from the district. And get criticized for that.
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p>Again, we DO give every single kid 2 hours of tutoring per day. It’s not like they don’t get great services. That tutoring in high school can rise to 4 hours a day if a kid is struggling. We don’t believe in putting all the pressure on teachers; we have full-time tutors who do all this work.
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p>*
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p>Our SPED is about 10% mild and moderate. Almost no severe. The district is about 10% mild and moderate, and about 9% severe in self-contained classrooms. And a number of parents hide their IEPs from us once the kid is admitted.
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p>But the exact same numbers pertained to the district’s pilot schools. In other words, we all attract roughly the same numbers of mild and moderate kids.
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p>Few parents of severe special needs kids are applying to college prep only public schools, whether charter or pilot. In the pilot school where I’m involved, the only reason they have any severe SPED kids is the district made a decision to relocate some special needs separate classrooms from District School A (teachers, kids, paras and all) to Pilot School B.
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p>The End.
4 hours a day–with a tutor?? WTF.
every kid in our school gets 2 hours of tutoring a day.
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p>then if you’re struggling you get an extra 2 hours. 5 to 7pm, then dinner.
What are you hours?
then 5 to 7 if you’re struggling. if you stay for that help session (about 1/3 of kids), then we serve dinner, too.
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p>fri sked depends on grade.
So, GoldsteinGoneWild, if it is not possible to replicate district averages with random admission by lottery, what do you make of the provisions in the new achievement gap law that are supposed to address this issue? Do you expect the law’s provisions will significantly increase the presence of students with disabilities or English language learners in charters? If not, what does this say about the law’s claim that only providers with a record of success with the neediest students will be allowed to open new charters? Again, which are these providers with a record of success with the neediest? I guess it depends on your definition of the neediest. I tend to think of kids with significant to severe disabilities and limited English proficient students as certainly being among the neediest.
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p>As the person who posted the comment about “supersegregation,” which you include as an example of the debate becoming inflammatory, I wanted to provide the context for that comment. (I also posted information about two new studies that found charters having a segregating influence. Is that inflammatory? Or is it an effort to add scholarly evidence to the debate?)
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p>Quoting myself here with the “supersegregation” context:
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p>
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p>I think this teacher’s characterization of the situation as “supersegregation” had to do with charter schools’ influence on the demographics of traditional schools in the sending districts. By underenrolling and/or counseling out kids with disabilities and English language learners, this increases the proportion of those kids in traditional publics in the sending districts. The teacher was making the observation that such schools face a higher proportion of the most challenging students, fewer resources to support them.
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p>I realize some, probably most, people don’t think of kids with significant disabilities or maybe even English language learners when they think of civil rights, but I do. I think state and federal special education laws that said we shouldn’t be hiding such students away but should be including them with others and working to help them meet their full potential were something to be proud of. I worry that we are trending backward with the two-tier system we are constructing.
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p>It seems ironic that Secretary Reville would lament that “the charter school debate absorbs 75% of the media attention for 2% of the kids.” It seems to me that he, as the chief education policymaker in the state, and the board of education have contributed to this problem in a number of ways, notably including the disastrous handling of the Gloucester situation. And the new law seems to have exacerbated the situation, with its premise that lifting the cap on charter schools in underperforming districts will close achievement gaps.
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p>I think so, over time. But not sure.
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p>(I know you do SPED advocacy. If there are any charter application materials we can send to your org to distribute to parents please let me know).
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p>There’s an aggressive outreach effort right now to ELLs. Flyers, visits, all sorts of stuff. I think Barr Foundation underwrote some of this.
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p>The biggie, though, will be mailing home directly in native language. The law has the district providing mailing lists, and coding the ELL kids. So charters will definitely mail home in the language spoken by the parent. This year we asked but I believe we were told that it takes longer to process the list.
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p>So for next year, big uptick.
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p>But word-of-mouth on charter schools is very strong in the black communities. I think the ELL applicants will be added to the existing mostly black applicants. I don’t think we should (or would be allowed) to cut our recruiting of one black applicants in order to try to get more ELLs.
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p>So imagine a school that has 200 black kids and 100 Hispanic kids in last years lottery. For 50 slots. So 250 disappointed parents (although certainly a bunch get in off wait list later, and some entered more than 1 lottery).
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p>This year they have 200 + 100 + maybe 30?? ELLs (as u know spanish, haitian and cape V creole, vietnamese, chinese). So ELL enrollment will jump by 10%.
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p>But in real life, now there’s 280 flustered parents. Believe me, lottery night is my most unpleasant night of the year.
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p>*
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p>As for incendiary language. I try to tackle your concerns in the comments above on SPED and ELL. And I’m not trying to limit your ability to call em as you see em.
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p>I can’t even fathom why Gary Orfield narrowly applies the racial segregation charge to charter schools (or why you’d buy in, or if you do). His study was cited by some other commenters.
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p>Let me make sure I get it:
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p>1. Boston “desegregrates” 40 years ago and 60,000 white enrollment in the 60s drops to 8000 today.
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p>2. The suburban districts BLOCK black and Hispanic parents from attending, unless it’s 1 kid per classroom via Metco.
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p>3. They further BLOCK low-income families from living there by zoning rules.
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p>4. Boston’s district ends up with a half-dozen elementaries with large white populations, which then feed into the 2 mostly white exam-only schools.
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p>You’re okay with all that?
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p>THEN enter charters.
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p>We serve mostly black kids. And by Orfield’s reckoning, we’re therefore segregationists! How is that not both insane and incendiary?
There’s nothing random about those lotteries. And the idea that you are forced to be a segregated population is twisting language around.
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p>Perhaps this was an anomaly. And yet, looking at the number of special ed and ELL students served by charter schools in Boston, I don’t think so.
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p>Charter advocates sidestep the fact that charter schools are a radical reimagining of public education, one where schools funded by public money get to choose which students they educate and which laws they obey.
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p>2. I spent 3 years of long hours and short pay at an urban charter school, and your implication that if only I stepped out of my white comfort zone and talked to some people of color, I’d be for charter schools is insulting. I met plenty of black and Hispanic moms who were thrilled with the education they got at a charter school. I also met plenty who cursed the school and threatened to sue. I saw tears of joy at graduations and tears of rage at meetings where students were “counseled out” because educating them would have been inconvenient. It’s just not as simple as you suggest.
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p>It is indisputable that charter schools serve some students very well. It’s also hard to argue that this is a significant percentage of students.
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p>Your post avoids the attrition issue, as charter advocates always do. I would love to hear any charter advocate address the appalling attrition rate at charter schools. How can you argue that schools that fail to serve the majority of students they admit are succeeding?
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p>is there another way to read it?
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p>2. you spent 3 years in the trenches, so of course i didn’t mean you; inherently you know 100s of these families. i was referring to the fact that many bmg charter commenters themselves have mentioned, in other threads, that they don’t actually know any charter families.
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p>3. i thought your thread did hit a key nail on the head: “the talent pool for charter staffing is not infinite.” for those who favor charters, i think that is one of the defining challenges in growth.
If the idea is that charter schools know how to do things better, then why don’t we just adopt those practices to the existing public system rather than creating a parrallel system?
If you believe the charter fraud narrative, the answer is easy. Charters have no innovations to offer.
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p>If you believe a more nuanced “charters do not have all the answers by any stretch, they are not a panacea, but there are some interesting things going on”, then stuff like this is happening.
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p>A lot of it is micro, and therefore easily dismissed.
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p>I’ll give you one concrete example I just heard last week. District School X has almost entirely Hispanic population. Principal wanted to provide lots of tutoring. Businessman was happy to write the checks. But how to get tutoring?
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p>Our school has done a lot of work in the logistics of activating work-study college students: dealing with college, transport, choosing them, training, accountability. So I explained how we did that. Boom. He ran with it. Now there’s a college which buses tutors to School X.
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p>Did we invent tutoring? Obviously not. Did we invent work-study? Obviously not. But we did figure out a ton of little things. Yeah.
As far as I’m concerned there are two different but deeply intertwined issues involved in this conversation: the merits of the charter system and how it is being adopted, marketed and implemented; and the politicization and roughshod manner in which the Gloucester charter was pushed through the approval process.
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p>I realize that there are some readers here who think we’re just beating on this drum because we’re against charter schools in general, but really we are deeply troubled by the manner in which this school was approved and the screaming lack of substantive justification for its existence. Frankly, that’s a concern everyone, pro or con, should be concerned about.
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p>The Gloucester charter was approved not for its true merits and viability, but as a politically expedient token to achieve another goal. If it were an application that drew rave reviews from the Charter School Office, was embraced as a saving grace by the Gloucester community and really moved the goal posts of innovation in our district, I could see how one might be dismissive of our opposition — but it wasn’t. Not even close, and the fact that such a blatant political manipulation of the process is allowed to stand should be sounding warning bells in everyone’s ears. We may have grown to expect it, but is this the “business as usual” approach we really want from Beacon Hill?
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p>Even if you believe the charter school movement is the answer to chronically failing schools. Or that they impart fantastic infusions of innovation to their host districts that are then used to raise the levels of all children in the other schools in the district. Or that they are truly egalitarian, taking all children regardless of ability, disability or background. Or that they are not a financial burden on the remaining schools from which they draw their resources. Even if you believe all that, you would have to admit in fairness that only schools that had passed a rigorous evaluation process, were thoroughly vetted by their overseers and embraced by a welcoming and enthusiastic community should be given the go ahead to open their doors… This wasn’t and isn’t the case here in Gloucester and should not be the nail on which the pro-charter movement would want to hang its hat.
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p>Instead of creating something positive, Secretary Reville and Commissioner Chester have made Gloucester the poster child for what can only be deemed a corruption of the process driven not by the needs of the community, but by a political agenda that really had nothing to do with our schools or this application. I’d be happy to be shown wrong on this, but of the 50-plus charters granted in the Commonwealth, NOT ONE of those schools was approved after receiving a “DO NOT RECOMMEND” review. Instead of a school based on merit and need, this was a sloppily arranged marriage of convenience. I predict that now the “ed reform” goals have been pushed forward, the concern over the GCACS’s success will slip to a very distant back burner. The best outcome for the administration would be for this school to simply wither and disappear, the blame for their failure tagged to those of us who’ve been opposing it rather than the fact that it should never have been approved in the first place.
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p>First off, we don’t have chronically failing schools. Should we expect them to improve? Absolutely – but that’s a generalization that can be attached to nearly every single school and district in the state – and perhaps points to the need for a change in mindset in how we view education for ALL children. Was this application truly innovative? That’s clearly up for debate, but many of the “innovations” outlined in their application are taken whole cloth from our existing schools. Certainly the CSO found areas of interest in their application, but their final assessment found the proposal weak and vague enough not to deserve their endorsement. It’s not like this school is a specialized “arts” school offering something truly unique and unavailable — its only nebulous association with the arts is that it will “incorporate the arts” into its curriculum. Unlike a school like a performing arts, or an immersion school, or a super science oriented framework, this school is offering nothing substantially different other than a slightly modified content focus.
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p>Frankly, I’d prefer that we were given the resources to rebuild our own performing/creative arts, foreign language and other programs that have been deeply cut or eliminated over the recent years! Hell, it would be a tremendous step forward to get functioning libraries staffed with qualified librarians in all our schools instead of the parent volunteers on which we rely. I find it confusing that we put our schools on a starvation diet until they reach a point of near collapse and then decide that the best way to show them healthful living is to lavish a feast on select few.
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p>It certainly hasn’t drawn widespread community support — even folks who might consider themselves receptive to charter schools in general are deeply troubled by the financial impact this school will have on our district. If the goal of the charter school movement is to raise all boats, which frankly I doubt, it certainly can’t be accomplished by further underfunding and handicapping the remaining schools. There is a simple math equation here that can’t balance out without closing a school, or two, further impacting existing programs and increasing class sizes — I’m a little unclear on how this will increase performance in our schools in general.
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p>I get it that there are communities so deeply damaged by inattention and other factors that they view charters as a lifeboat in the storm. I get it that there are some success stories that are brilliant and used to paint with a very broad brush the success of charters in general. But from my perspective otherwise rational decision makers are allowing the “sizzle” of a very few success stories to shape their thinking rather than addressing the larger social, funding and other issues impacting our schools. As the evidence continues to mount that charters do no better in aggregate than other public schools, and in fact sometimes do worse, despite their ability to selectively retain their students and operate with no local oversight or influence I predict the shine will eventually wear off and we’ll be left with the fallout of yet another failed experiment.
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p>Should the approval process be allowed to be co-opted to suit a political agenda? Clearly that’s what happened here. Gloucester has already been chalked up as collateral damage — which one of your communities is next?
There is, to my mind, something which may be being ignored by both sides of the charter debate, which is that some of this whole argument proceeds from a false assumption. It seems axiomatic in every education debate that if only a school is good enough, it can educate any and every child to the desired level in the required timeframe.
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p>I submit that this assumption may be incorrect. Some people simply take longer. This isn’t a reflection on them as people; it’s a fact about them as people which I think needs acknowledging. But we’ve structured our society such that when you reach 18 (and have used up your free education credit, so to speak), you are expected to get out there and achieve with the rest of your class, when you may not yet be ready, and could not have been made ready in the time allotted.
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p>I admit I am unhappy that charter schools use public funds to educate selected, easy to teach students, reducing the funds available for other students who are harder to teach. That’s a narrative I’d like to see addressed, as I have not seen a refutation I trust yet.
you’re a physician so i’d urge you to simply read the actual study done by an eminent harvard economist and MIT economist on charters. they refute the “easy to teach” student argument.
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p>you’ll recognize the research design. it’s similar to some in your profession. takes advantage of random admission lottery of charter schools. examines your concern.
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p>did find roughly a 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviation between the kids who attend boston charters (almost all black and hispanic, and poor) and the district. so there is a little selection bias.
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p>a typical boston charter has kids who arrive at roughly the 25th percentile in the state. the typical district kids are about the 20th percentile.
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p>but then the charter lottery winners vault above the 50th percentile within a couple years.
Isn’t it true that the study’s conclusions are based on 26% of the charter sample (0 out of 5 charter elementary schools, 4 out of 13 charter middle schools, 3 out of 9 charter high schools) that HAD waiting lists (most of the rest had poor records or no waiting list). The schools with good records and waiting lists are the higher performers, while the lower performing charters were not included in the lottery study.
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p>Isn’t it significant that the study did not reflect all charters, only the ones doing well enough to have waiting lists?
absolutely fair point and the authors addressed it.
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p>remember, they did 2 studies, rolled into one.
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p>one used the waiting list design. the other looked at all the schools but couldn’t use the waiting list design.
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p>from the very first page, they write CAVEATS.
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p>Then later (page 11)
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