Basically there are two charter narratives, a pro and a con. Back then I wrote:
But the tenor of the con has changed, IMO. Used to have more of a wonkish “my study is randomized and yours isn’t type of flavor.
More recently, the more prevalent anti-charter narrative on BMG: charter people are bad. “Fraud.” “Ugly.” “Segregationist.” “Supersegregationist” (!) “Degrading public education.”
Naturally, being on the receiving end, I prefer the more wonkish attacks.
Still, I comprehend the anger that makes it feel personal. And one aspect of it is the media-driven love of conflict that applies to everything. In charter-district world, it tends to create a perception of more conflict than exists.
1. Charter teachers and administrators in the trenches do not see district educators as the enemy. Many of us have spouses, parents, and siblings working in traditional public schools.
2. I personally spend lots of time collaborating with district folks. For example, this year I helped a Big City Supe launch a program which hired and deployed 250 full-time math tutors to help kids in 9 failing schools. I do a bunch with Boston Public Schools, too.
And just at the gut level, I was hanging with a buddy today who teaches in arguably Boston’s toughest school (Madison Park); I deeply respect what she does every day. It’s tougher than my job, for sure. Our whole charter reason for being is a reaction against some nner-city schools where many systems do not work — teachers are not put in a position to succeed.
3. So while BMG critiques sometimes go to the motivations of people involved, there are also many legitimate policy critiques of charter schools.
For handy clicks — here are some of the older charters-are-bad/misguided threads on BMG.
And here is a pro-charter website discussing some of these issues.
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The Gov
Governor Patrick engineered an Ed Reform bill that established in-district turnaround schools and allowed more independent charter public schools.
Whenever I’ve heard him speak, 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 may think they’ve been hoodwinked, too. Fine. But it might explain why his view diverges from yours.
I do think it’s fair to say that the Gov was influenced by President Obama’s full-throttle embrace of charter schools. I think (?) he has said as much. So some of the Gov’s supporters were understandably upset by that.
They wanted the cap on new charter schools to remain in place. And they felt, when he was elected in 2006, that the cap would likely remain as is. The President’s push — both personal and political through Race to the Top — was an unwelcome pressure on the Gov, from their point of view.
Did I mention that charters are not the panacea? But there is value, I submit, in replicating proven high-performing schools — wildly imperfect ones, without question — but schools where kids make massive gains.
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What I wrote back then:
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.
All this has happened. Mayor Menino will open 3 charters as part of the district. Another 8 independent Boston charters have been recommended by the Commissioner, as well as some in Lawrence and Springfield.
Back to last year:
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 independent charter has unionized. Conservatory Lab. The contract is union but 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.
MA did win Race To The Top. And $200 million will indeed flow to traditional public schools here. So the new charter schools are also connected to the infusion to district schools.
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Pro-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 corr
ectly, 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. Even if there is parent demand.
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.
Again, this came to pass.
There were 25 new Boston charter schools proposed. The Commissioner’s recommendation is that 8 of the 25 get approved.
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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.
That was then. Later, Reville wrote a BMG blog precisely about innovation schools. Many of the folks who decry charters also decried innovation schools, which surprised me.
So far as I know, 3 Innovation schools opened, with more slated for fall.
Here is the Revere Public Schools Superintendent describing his district’s (in collaboration with the union).
* * *
Okay, MarkBail. That’s all I got for now, good sir. My invite back to you:
Let’s check back in a year, have you visit these new schools, and then issue your report card on BMG. Cheers, GGW.
As a GAL for education, I picked up the broken pieces of the failed education of several kids who came back to public schools from Charter schools who could not or would not deal with language processing disabilities, sensory integration delays, and emotional challenges.
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p>As an advocate, I find the divide and conquer, us against them funding a problem. If Charter Schools had their OWN line item, and did not draw down the funding of public schools around them, I would consider the Charter School movement far more honest and far less problematic.
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p>Even a broken clock tells the time once a day – I am sure that there are times when by being a change of place, time, and culture a Charter School is helpful – and there is no need for an Education Advocate or court appointed guardian when things have gone well so my sample would be the worst failures – but those failures ARE out there.
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p>Further, the pitting of special education against regular education, and the reality that the Commonwealth has broken all its promises with regard to funding its mandated special education makes the push for charter schools all the more divisive and distasteful – at least to me.
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p>2. On a non-charter note, you raise an interesting point about “the pitting of special education against regular education.” Many of the Boston charters, at least, use teaching techniques usually reserved for special education — and apply to all students.
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p>For example, Jerry’s Special Education blog takes the national best-seller on teaching techniques written by a former charter school principal, Doug Lemov, and profiles each one — he argues that these are perfect techniques for reaching special ed and regular ed kids.
of the communities in which they live, then they may lay claim to being part of the solution to Ed Reform as opposed to being part of the problem. That means that the percentage of ELL, Special Ed, and low income students should reflect the local community. The current “non-discrimination” policy actually discriminates. Of course, as Deb points out the funding problem needs to be fixed as well. Until then, I believe, Charters remain a GOP talking point and not a potential solution.
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p>Any school; public, private, charter, innovation or religious that takes on the most difficult to teach children and helps them to achieve at a high level is the model to which we should all aspire. Right now Charters don’t fill that roll. Some of them may be able to, given the correct reforms.
There’s nuance there, though.
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p>Charter schools in Boston, and district-run pilot schools, both enroll the same fraction of special education and low-income students. There are differences there, compared to the district as a whole.
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p>For example, charter and district-run pilot schools both have about 66% low-income students, while Boston as a whole is around 74%.
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p>But it’s hard to fix that while there is still a random lottery.
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p>If the random lottery is changed to some sort of weighted system, some parents are likely to self-report poverty in order to gain an advantage. Remember, poverty is entirely self-report: no schools look at tax returns.
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p>Our particular charter school had proposed a school ENTIRELY composed of English Language Learners. 100%.
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p>We were told that is not permitted under the law. We are permitted to do aggressive outreach in other languages, so that’s what we’re doing, and then a pure random (public) lottery of whomever applies.
Forget about random lotteries — it’s the application process that is the segregator. Until students can be randomly assigned to charter schools — without the ability to counsel kids out — there will be no way to compare charters to public schools.
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p>You’re using voodoo math here. I’m sure your number is spot-on, but the majority of students in the state are not in districts where charters are allowed, and even if charters were allowed in those districts, I doubt that many parents would choose them because they already spent enormous amounts of money choosing to live in communities where they like the schools — Winchester, Wellesley, Dover, etc.
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p>So you can’t use numbers from the entire state, you have to focus on the communities where charters exist. In those communities, the percentage of kids in charters will increase at a much higher rate. Springfield has 2,355 students in charters, about 10% of the student population. [With $23 million removed from the district budget.] Adding another school will add another 324 students to that number — so it will go from 10% to 12%. If even half of the newly proposed charters had been approved, the number would have been closer to 20%.
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p>I will agree with you that charter schools help many individual students by offering a better alternative to public schools. But they are able to do that because they don’t have to play by the same rules as public schools.
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p>* Does a charter school accept kids mid-year? Some urban school classes see 50% of their students change from September to June.
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p>* Does a charter school have students assigned to it? Or do the parents choose the school, increasing the likelihood that the parents are engaged in education?
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p>* Can a charter school remove children for disciplinary reasons? Does the charter have to provide an alternative education for those students, or do they just throw them back to public schools?
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p>The Massachusetts public school system is already heavily based on the concept of tranching — slicing and dicing up students, grouping them so that they are homogeneous, with the best students in the best schools, etc. Charter schools simply repeat this plan in communities where parents have fewer economic resources to have already done that. For those parents, it’s a great thing, they get to “escape” schools that are already overburdened with problems. However, the students left behind are harder and harder to educate — a single needy student in a classroom of otherwise good kids is manageable. A class of 25 needy students is an insurmountable goal.
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p>What adds insult to injury is the arbitrage that is being performed with respect to funding — the charter receives the “average” amount spent on students in the sending district, but takes the “above average” (less needy) students, leaving less than sufficient funds for those who remain — monies that are already disgustingly low, when you consider that wealthier districts spend anywhere from 75% to 150% the amount per student than poor districts, does anyone really believe that on the high end, it only takes 25% more to educate a class full of needy students versus a class full of well-prepared students?
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p>I can see why charters are attractive — they are easy, they are sexy (fitting in with conservative talking points about eliminating bureaucracy and unions) and they appeal to people who need their own problems fixed. However, they are overall bad for the health of the entire education system because they allow some people to do better at the direct expense of others.
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p>Want to “fix” bad public schools? Easy. Assign the neediest kids to good schools in other districts. If those schools suddenly become “worse” (which they almost undoubtedly will unless the needy kids are sufficiently spread around instead of concentrated), then recognize that the problem is not the school, it is that classrooms full of needy students are not compatible with our current education model; they perhaps will need much more money spent on them than what we currently offer. And even then, I’m not sure it is even possible to educate a homeless student who moves in and out of 3 or 4 different schools in several different communities in a single school year without an approach that crosses town lines.
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p>You already anticipate the challenge in your proposed solution — assign needy kids to suburban schools. With METCO, the reaction has been precisely to “spread them around,” precisely 1 black kid per classroom in Wellesley et al.
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p>The data shows that these schools never manage to close the gap. Even 10th graders who have been at the school for 11 years get the same deal: low scores on average.
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p>2. Don’t agree that charters get the average. About 16% less than traditional district schools.
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p>I do agree that charter kids, on average, are slightly less needy.
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p>The Boston Foundation study found 8% lower poverty.
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p>Or by another metric: 0.2 standard deviations academically better upon arrival; the typical Boston district kid is at the 20th percentile in the state, but the typical Boston charter kid arrives at about the 25th percentile in the state.
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p>Slightly less money per kid, slightly less needy.
So if you take an underperforming kid from an “bad” school and assign him to a “good” school, and the kid still underperforms, then isn’t that a pretty good indication that the school is not the problem? So then does it make any sense to label a school as “underperforming”? (These labels have actually added to the sorting process because they have given responsible parents a strong signal as to which schools and communities to avoid even though that signal is more about the student makeup than it is about the school and its teachers. They are also a strong signal to teachers as to which districts to avoid due to the threats associated with them.)
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p>I also think there is a strong distinction between “poor” and “needy”. There are both responsible and irresponsible poor people. If a parent can’t get his or her act together enough to have the same apartment for 6 straight months, will such a parent meet the charter application deadline? No way. So what is the chance that such a parent is going to make sure his child is educated properly?
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p>So although a study found 8% less poverty in a charter school, charters have 0% students whose parents are not responsible enough to fill out the charter application. That’s the sorting process in action. A child whose parents don’t value education is usually far “needier” than one whose parents that do. That’s why lauding the success of charters is a fiction.
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p>Charters are allowing people in certain school districts to have another option — I can appreciate that this is a positive thing. But they are making the problem worse for those left behind as both funding is removed from the district, as the ratio of good-to-bad gets worse, and as the public becomes less and less willing to help schools that they perceive as “getting worse”.
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p>The problem I have with the charter model is that there simply is no feasible solution for those left behind. No one talks about them. Again, this is just further application of the “sorting” method of education that is entrenched in this state via town-based school districts. The solution, in my opinion, is to reduce the segregation. Charters simply increase segregation.
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p>Though I am both a former employee of Pioneer Institute and a former charter school administrator, I’ve asked the same questions, because I do believe the answers to them bias any comparison between charter and district schools.
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p>However, I don’t believe a comparison of charter schools v. district schools should be the issue. Personally, I believe the issue should be whether parents, particularly parents who live in neighborhoods where underperforming schools are concentrated, should have greater choice about where they send their children to school.
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p>I am also wary of the funding argument. Yes, some funding follows students from district to charter schools. But, presumably, so do some costs. Clearly, despite the formula, the reduction in marginal costs associated with losing one student are not nearly as great as the loss in funding for that student. For example, a school would not employ one less teacher simply because it now enrolled one less student.
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p>But when we’re talking about a larger number of students, such as the 10% to 12% of the students in Springfield, we’re also talking about a significant cost shift. So, the questions I would ask include:
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p>* What percentage of the district’s overall budget does the $23 million the Springfield public schools lose in funding to charter schools represent?
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p>* Is there a percentage of overall enrollment at which opponents of the current formula would admit that districts should begin to lose funding? In other words, if a district lost 50% of its students to charter schools, would they still argue that the district should not lose any funding, even if it were only educating half the number of students?
I believe the larger issue is the one I raise about average costs. I’m sure you can agree that some students need more help than others. As such, they have higher costs associated with them — some monetary, and some associated with time and effort that won’t be spent on the other kids in the room. I surmise that those costs tend to increase exponentially in a classroom because at some point the kids feed off each other. I also believe that the number per classroom is fairly low before the class becomes severely degraded — maybe even at 3-5 of such kids per classroom.
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p>As charters slowly peel away the better students, the odds of the remaining classrooms being left with more and more of such kids gets higher and higher. What is the solution? Maybe the solution is to not remove any funding from the sending district, instead simply reducing the class sizes. Sounds radical, but if you’re only taking away the good kids, a classroom with a higher percentage of problem kids is just much harder to teach, so at that point consolidating the classrooms makes each classroom that much harder to teach. Is there a stomach for that? Of course not. The prevailing argument is that funding for urban districts should be lower because we’re rewarding failure with higher funding. That’s an absurd argument, but it is actually a pretty common view — a lot of people believe that the correlation between more money spent in urban districts is a causation that spending more leads to worse performance.
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p>I totally understand the point about giving parents more choices. I think that is an “eat your young” type plan though because in this state, communities live and die by the reputations of their school systems. Although giving current resident parents the option to escape a bad neighborhood school is good for that parent, as the public schools get worse and worse the population willing to live in the community also gets marginally worse and worse. It is a death march for these communities — and no one moves to Springfield so that they will have a chance in a charter school lottery.
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p>I don’t have any skin in this game except wanting my community to get better. Knowing how a community’s reputation is tied to educational reputation of public schools, I see charter schools resulting in worsening reputations for urban school districts, and therefore worsening reputation for urban communities in general.
I don’t know if I’ll get to tour a bunch of charter schools, but maybe one or two.
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p>I have friends who send their kids to the Chinese Immersion and Performing Arts Charter schools. The former’s parents has reservations about the schools non-Chinese curriculum and the high teacher turnover, but likes her first grader learning Chinese. The latter’s parents have no complaints about the school and two sons seem to have thrived there.
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p>NoPolitician makes a good point about the percentage you bring up. 2-3% of the Commonwealth’s kids are in charters, but the percentage of city kids in them is probably more the issue. Remove the financial hit that the Springfield Public Schools takes from charter tuition–hundreds of thousands dollars–and I don’t think you’d hear complaints from public schools.
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p>Adding more charter schools has good and bad points. The Boston Foundation study indicated that several charter schools in Boston, including yours, were outperforming the BPS on standardized tests averages and college acceptance rates. Having read the study multiple times, along with the CREDO study and criticism of Hoxby’s NYC study, I’m inclined to think that those Boston Charters–about half the total–are doing a good job. I also believe you and the teachers that work in them are like any other good educator: you care about your kids and want them to succeed. So there are good charter schools out there doing good work. Adding more charter schools, however, will increase the odds of more poor and mediocre schools.
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p>I still reject the ideas that of important effects on public schools of competition with and innovation of charter schools. Public schools have as much to teach each other as charter schools do, and innovations, when its not legally prohibited (ex. pushing kids out for bad behavior), are not always novelties or workable in public schools.
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p>I still believe the biggest argument in favor of charter schools is that they allow people living in the city to send their kids to schools that have fewer problems than the public schools. I teach in a suburb and live in a rural town. My kids don’t have to deal with the problems that arise from the poverty in cities. It doesn’t seem fair to condemn parents and their children of city to bad educational experiences.
Thanks for the note.
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p>You wrote:
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p>”Adding more charter schools, however, will increase the odds of more poor and mediocre schools.”
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p>I agree. Governor Patrick actually created an unusual law. Only the schools you mentioned were permitted to grow: what he called “proven providers” using value-added gains compared to lotteried-out admission losers.
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p>I’m not sure how I feel about that. The good news is it ameliorates your point — while there is still plenty of execution risk, I’d bet a lot that the new KIPP Boston or Roxbury Prep school, for example, is good.
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p>The downside is innovators can’t easily now get charters, chicken and egg, not proven so can’t become proven.
are like yours and the other good performers in Boston.
As long as charter schools are not required to fulfill the obligations of public schools, anything short of extraordinarily superior performance is a failure. If one basketball team only has to hit the rim to score points, the don’t get my admiration for winning 55% of the time and having some fans.
I wonder what the view of charter schools would be if the enrollment was opened up to all communities in a region — make all charter schools regional, and allow them to be sited in any community. When toney districts start losing more and more better students (and funding) to these charters, maybe at that point people will stand up and say “wait a minute, is this the right way to do things?”.
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p>I know that we have some charters like this already in Western MA — the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter and the Pioneer Valley Chinese immersion charter — but they are far away from the urban districts here in Western MA since both are in Hampshire County (no poor urban districts in that county).
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p>The performing arts charter school, located in South Hadley, has 400 students; about 35% of the students come from Amherst and Northampton, two of the wealthier, more desirable, and more educated communities in Hampshire county. 13% come from Springfield and Holyoke, the two worst performing urban districts in Western MA. I’m sure the lack of transportation is a big factor there.
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p>The Chinese immersion charter school is just 210 students; it is located in Granby (again, far away from the urban districts), and again gets about 36% of its students from Amherst and Northampton, and 53% when you kick in South Hadley and Hadley. About 10% come from Springfield/Holyoke (24 kids).
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p>I think those two schools are a little bit too niche to appeal to a wide variety of kids, and I don’t think many poor kids from urban are that interested in Chinese immersion. Their remote location essentially makes them charters for the wealthier communities in Hampshire County.
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p>This might be an interesting way to break out of the entrenched local school district model; it would also offer many poor students the chance to truly break out of the community-based silos that they find themselves in. Of course, the elephant in the room is racial/ethinc — if a school is perceived to be too “nonwhite” or too “urban”, I believe it will quickly become segregated as white suburban parents just won’t apply there.
Northampton may be desirable, but it isn’t particularly rich. It’s schools have suffered budget problems the affluent suburbs unlike Amherst, which is very costly to live in.
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p>The Chinese Immersion school is in Hadley near the malls, not Granby. You may be confusing its location with Macduffie’s eventual destination, a former seminary that more recently housed Holyoke Catholic.
Keep in mind that the integrity of the approval and granting process has been badly tarnished since Commissioner Chester’s politicized granting of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School in 2009. The performance of this school since then hasn’t done anything towards mending the reputational wounds Reville and Chester inflicted on themselves and the BESE/DESE as a result of this massively flawed process:
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p>http://www.gloucestertimes.com…
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p>Since its granting, this school barely opened by its 19-month window with barely half their enrollment – a number that has since declined – and was nearly immediately placed on probation for two months. It has been found in violation of public bidding and procurement laws as well as multiple open meeting violations, and apparently hasn’t been able to fulfill its obligations to SPED students OR at least some of the 8 conditions that were imposed on it when its probation was removed in Dec.
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p>The response by the DESE when concerns about missed deadlines were raised was that they were too busy with approving other schools to worry about their missed obligations, that they’d get to them later….
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p>It seems to me that before they start adding more charter schools to the mix, they’d want to get a handle on the ones they already have…