It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s some actual reporting from the Boston Globe! Today’s above-the-fold expose by James Vaznis shines some much needed light on one of the worst kept secrets in charter-land: that incredible, ever expanding charter school wait list is more fiction than fact.
The story follows on the heels of this devastating expose in Chicago in which a reporter dismantles claims of a 19,000 charter wait list in Chicago, the length of which is now being used to justify charter expansion even as public schools are closed in that city.
Today’s Globe story doesn’t go into nearly the detail as the Chicago piece (alas that would be too much to hope for…) but it does raise some major questions about the depth of demand for more charters, not to mention the apparent failure of state officials to live up to new charter oversight obligations established in the 2010 education law. Here’s the five minute version.
A numbers game
The first thing you need to know about the charter waiting list is that it counts applications, not students. Which is why a student who applies to four charters gets counted four times. That’s a key distinction because as this guidance counselor told the Globe: “If a family is applying to charter schools, they are applying to all of them,” said Susan Trotz, a guidance counselor at the city-run Curley K-8 School in Jamaica Plain. So while there may have been 50,000 applications submitted, there is currently no way to tell how many students actually submitted those applications. Was it 10,000? 20,000? We’ll never know…
Up, up and up
Nor is the waiting list adjusted as students enter a charter school or any other school for that matter. According to the Globe, some charters keep students on their waiting lists for years. An appropriate analogy might be if Harvard began referring to the 32,994 students it didn’t admit this year as a “waiting list,” then added that number to the 32,270 it didn’t admit last year, giving it a “waiting list” of 65,264, or a strong case for lifting the Crimson Cap.
You can get on but you still can’t get in
A true waiting list would also be connected to available seats within charter schools, so that a student who applied would have the option of attending in the extremely unlikely event that another student leaves the school. But because unlike truly public schools that must accept any student who appears at any time, charters in Massachusetts don’t have to accept students after the start of the school year, or in grades 10, 11 and 12.
State of confusion
Complaints that the charter wait list is wildly inaccurate are nothing new. The 2010 law that doubled charter school seats in Boston and other urban districts required charter schools to submit the names, addresses, and grade levels of the students on their waiting lists to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in order to weed out duplicate counts. But according to the Globe, “the department never executed that statutory provision.”
Meanwhile, the charter wait list continues to grow. I predict that by the time charter advocates, not to mention the students who will be taking the day off to pack the State House, gather on Thursday for the annual Liftin O’ the Cap ritual, the list will have risen from 53,000 to 63,000.
Of course there is duplication on charter wait lists. Parents increase their odds of getting their kids enrolled by applying to multiple charters. The unfortunate thing is there are so few seats available they become multiple losers in the lotteries. And that’s really the point of highlighting the existence of a wait list, whether it be 50,000 or 30,000 kids. The story doesn’t really dispute the fact that there is overwhelming demand for charter schools; it just questions whether the head count is actually 50,000 kids, which no one though it was to begin with. The Globe claims to have done an “analysis” but offers no actual analysis other than general opinions that there is duplication, which we already knew. Did they review each school’s wait list and determine how many are duplicates? No. DId they offer an estimate based on a partial analysis of individual wait lists? No. They offered a general opinion, which even the charter people have always admitted, that some of the names are double-counted. And then buttressed their claim with the usual cast of anti-charter commentators. The real story here, which was missed, is that even if the wait list is 25% smaller – it will only grow from here because the state caps the number of charters allowed in particular districts. Boston, Lawrence, Holyoke and other districts are now at the cap, so if you’re on the list, you’ll be there until the Legislature lifts the cap.
The Globe piece that you point to actually takes pains to point out that some schools do in fact purge their lists regularly and require re-applications yearly. So, at best, you’re being deceitful by virtue (sic) of using the broadest possible brush. At worst, you didn’t read the entire article and are merely regurgitating your own (overly snarky) talking points.
… statutory requirements to weed out duplications were never done.
Oh.
So if actual administrators of charter schools duly submit their information to the Ed Department and the Ed Department falls down on it’s statutory requirement to weed out duplications…
… why does that redound to charters? What about those who, perhaps in good faith, submitted their numbers to the Dept of Ed and thought, apparently incorrectly, that the due diligence had been done?
Given the provisions of the law that you cite, what if I assumed that the numbers given were numbers processed by the Dept of Ed (weeded of dupes)? How does that make me, as a charter advocate, somehow underhanded?
From today’s Globe story: “While some schools purge their lists annually and ask those students to reapply, others keep students on lists for many years without knowing whether they are still interested, or add names when parents merely request information about the school.”
I DID read the entire article, more than once as a matter of fact, so surprised was I to encounter something like actual reporting in a paper that turns to jelly in the mere presence of the charter lobby. To both of your comments, I have the same response: you can’t on the one hand use the length of the charter waiting list as “proof” of skyrocketing demand for more charters and then turn around and argue that it doesn’t matter how many kids are actually on the list. I happen to agree with you that the state has completely fallen down on the job of providing an accurate tally. Btw: the state is also supposed to be calculating how much charters owe their sending districts in excess tuition, another responsibility it was handed under the 2010 law and hasn’t yet gotten around to implementing.
However long the waiting list is, let’s agree that it’s much too long and that we should do whatever it takes to reduce the number of students who are currently languishing on it. I propose that any charter that currently has fewer students enrolled than it has capacity to educate welcome some of the students on the waiting list effective tomorrow. Presto! The list just got smaller. See how easy that was?
… not under the acceptable conditions found by “do[ing] whatever it takes…” ??
Your reasoning is approaching circularity: At first you call the charter waiting list a “game” even going so far as to say it is, and I quote “more fiction than fact”. But, when called out, you say, “oh, but yeah, it’s too long so let’s do whatever it takes,” without taking note of the irony. Unless charters are a priori dishonest and playing “games”, then lifting the cap ought to be part of the “whatever it takes” consideration.
Hey all you charter school debaters, I understand charter schools will be the hot topic on Dan Rea’s WBZ 1030 radio show tonight at 9 p.m. Guests: MTA President Paul Toner and likely someone from the Pioneer Institute.
The web site says the call-in number is (617) 254-1030.
Two years ago, the Boston Globe wrote of the heartbreak felt by Betty Legendre, whose daughter didn’t get a Boston public school assignment in the preschool and kindergarten lottery. The Globe followed 13 families negotiating the city’s assignment system, and five were disappointed with the result.
Charter school proponents often talk about large wait lists, which have been dispelled by your report of many duplicate names on these lists. Policy makers need to see the entire picture, and that includes the parents who are on wait lists for public schools in Boston and other cities with a in-district choice assignment plan.
Now that Boston has embraced charters as a choice, it’s time to have one unified student assignment plan that will allow parents a level playing field in school choice, and will allow for comparable data to be collected for public and charter schools. Only with this consistency of data collection will policy makers be able to use parent choices and waiting lists to inform policy decisions.
Stop assigning kids all over the place and simply assign them geographically. That’s what most communities do and there’s almost never a question of which children belong to which schools.
Adopted by Cambridge and I believe by Boston was a way to allow for some busing without as much controversy. By geography alone would lead to segregated schools. But I would agree it would make sense to make sure all schools are equally good so the neighborhood school, a pillar of the community, is just as excellent as one across town.
Busing is so 1970s and should have been a temporary fix on the way to true equality of access. The town I sub in is finally closing the school that is so obviously inferior to the others which the numbers let them get away with and will give more kids access to the resources of the better schools. The fact that busing still happens says to me that the problem was never really solved.
serve disadvantaged youth?
If the disadvantaged kids can get mixed in with more advantaged kids, research suggests they’ll likely do better; however, it all depends on where these kids end up.
Populations affect learning, but buildings don’t.
I believe much higher free and reduced lunch rates, to use one indicator, and yes they will be mixed with more advantaged kids as a result. However, in this case the building absolutely is a factor. It is a small early 20th century edifice not much better than a one-room schoolhouse in many respects. It does not have adequate facilities for the arts, physical education, computers, and library. The larger schools have these things and it comes down to fundamental fairness and the current situation is the epitome of separate and unequal. I sub throughout town and can see the disparities and am very grateful that I happened to live in the part of town growing up served by the largest and newest school.
Buildings do affect learning, if they are bad enough.
My wife was substitute teaching in our elementary school. She went to kill a bee on the window by putting her shoe on it. She didn’t hit it, mind you, just went to push it. The glass fell out. We still manage to educate kids in the building, but teachers have computers that don’t work well, if at all. The heat can’t be controlled in some rooms. It’s in tough shape.
The closing schools thing can be a canard. Splitting up kids from tough schools can improve the learning for those kids, but it can also be a quick fix for administrators who want to improve an “under performing” school.
Boston has 23 charter schools, most are located in the “Circle of Promise” neighborhoods of Dorchester, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Roslindale, and Roxbury. This has left the traditional neighborhood schools in those communities decimated and lacking “quality.” (I hate using that term almost as much as I hate using “the children”) Instead of adopting a “unified school system model, which would have strengthened Boston Public Schools, the district adopted a “portfolio” model, then outsourced students in the name of Parent Choice. This outsourcing of students to charter schools and METCO has made it impossible for those communities to return to quality neighborhood schools. The students are the “data” where they are placed will dictate the “quality” of a school.
Sounds like right wing social engineering to me.
I don’t have any experience with them, but this sounds like another point in the negative column for charters. I was refering to traditional public schools.