Two agenda items of the “Education Reform” crowd are showing up as issues in Boston’s mayoral race. I’d like to look at the first one: raising the cap on charter schools in Boston.
And I can see why this is at the top of the agenda. After all, charter schools in Boston have consistently proven that refusing to educate special education and ELL students leads to marginally higher test scores and a lower graduation rate than Boston Public Schools! Let’s throw money at them!
But seriously, folks. Someone has decided that this is an issue that all mayoral candidates should address. Given the fact that the Globe, Boston’s business community, and the Board of Education are all in the tank for charter schools, the cap is probably going to be raised.
The goal here is, I assume, ensuring that those many children on charter school waiting lists can be saved by the brave entrepreneurs of the charter school movement and not have to fall prey to those self-serving public employees who staff and administer regular public schools.
But surely it’s an inefficient use of the public’s money (and all that Gates and Walton money as well) to open new buildings and hire new administrative teams. Why not just admit these students to existing charters whenever they find the space? Say, when the originally admitted students start leaving! Like, in the case of high schools, in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades. This would serve the goal of getting more students into the benevolent embrace of charter schools without occasioning a bunch of new overhead costs associated with starting a new school.
I am sure charter schools will welcome this change, for it would allow them at last to compete with regular public schools on a relatively even playing field. Real public education means educating whoever shows up, including the kid who just moved from Brockton or Baltimore or Bani last week.
Indeed, the only way for Boston charters to rationalize their embarrassing attrition rates is to believe that any student who spends any amount of time with them is better off for having done so. Even if they don’t wind up graduating. If this is true, then why couldn’t that year be 10th grade? 11th grade? Or 12th grade?
Sure, those students might wind up dragging the test scores down, but that’s a small price to pay for giving them a taste of charter school excellence.
I mean, surely this is all about the children, right? If a charter school education is such a boon, how can charters justify their refusal to backfill seats lost due to attrition?
I await the charter schools’ enthusiastic embrace of this proposal and hope Boston’s mayoral candidates will offer this as the smart way to raise the charter cap in Boston.
I would be in favor of lifting the charter school cap in Boston, in exchange for two simple reforms:
1. Boston charter schools enroll students under the current Boston Public Schools student assignment process. Let BPS assign students to available seats under the city’s controlled choice assignment plan, and let BPS fill seats vacated by exiting students off the waitlist.
2. Fund Boston charter schools through the BPS budget – equity between charters and city-run schools.
Outside of Boston, we should fund charters in the manner we fund regional vocational schools. State sets a foundation budget, a minimum local contribution from sending communities, and let city councils and town meetings choose to appropriate above its minimum local contribution at its discretion.
Reform funding and governance, then lift the cap.
Like many a thoroughfare in Boston, this is a one-way street. Subject both types of schools to the same rules and funding sources – perish the thought!
Massachusetts can’t afford to lift the charter school cap and, unfortunately, we are stuck with the charter schools we now have.
1. I would never let the sending school district handle the placement of charter school students! I feel that random selection of charter students should be done electronically by the Massachusetts Department of Education. The selection process could be computerized to factor in the Ell and Special Education students so that a charter schools population would reflect the demographic of the Boston Public Schools or the sending school district.
Given the tension between charter and traditional schools about the artificial numbers of wait listed students, the most transparent way for student lottery selection and registration would be to let the State handle it. The State has successful with the Massachusetts Lottery, so the manpower and expertise is there. Removing the district and charter middlemen will remove any question of impropriety.
2. Charter schools should be “level funded” by the student demographic they actually service. The “average funding,” that is currently budgeted for charter students, means that regular education students are getting substantially more money, which is coming out of the sending districts budget slated for SPED and ELL students remaining in district schools.
I wrote more about charter financing here at BMG.
…but I think we should be far more honest, jp-iac, than you are being here.
It would not be hard to get stats that show that charters do, in fact, accept ESL and SPED students. Should they accept more? Sure. But hyperbole isn’t necessary.
My understanding of the charter regulations is that it’s actually currently against the rules to admit new kids after others leave. That’s a regulation that should change, but it’s not the school’s fault for not doing something improper.
The attrition rate is horrendous and disappointing. The old version was that the schools simply expel poor students to boost their school stats. The reality appears to be that students who are not meeting school standards are told they will be held back. In most of those cases, students transfer to the traditional schools which will happily move them up to the next grade.
There is plenty to dislike about charters. Let’s stick with what’s truly bad, acknowledge the fact that for many kids it actually does offer a way out and way up, and have a more honest conversation about how we begin the long-term plan of fixing our traditional public school system that doesn’t rely on pulling more kids out of it.
I can say from personal knowledge the the ESL rate in charters is a small fraction of the rate in traditional BPS, and SPED students much more likely to transfer out than non-SPED students.
The “against the rules” to admit new students thing is the most transparent trick in the book. Rig it so the students who are tougher to educate are gone by MCAS time, stick only with the top portion of the incoming class, then brag about superior performance. Special trick in this vein: when four-year graduation rates don’t work, cite six-year graduation rates. Make sure you count kids who started at your school, but graduated somewhere else.
Charter reform would eliminate the “rules” that allow charter operators to game the system. If a charter school can gain better results with the same budget and same student assignment rules as the publicly governed schools, then we can celebrate their success. Some will meet the challenge, others will fail miserably.
DESE assembles all this stuff in school profiles:
For Boston Public, 71.7% was low income, 19.2% special education, and 30.7% ESL. Attrition rate is 8.1%
Charters are carefully broken up to make it harder to assemble the info, but anyone with the time to make a spreadsheet can assemble the stats. Maybe I’ll do that at some point soon…
Charters alleviate the inherent socio economic and racial biases in funding public schools via property taxes. Some students via lottery will be assigned to schools that may give them better results than their chronically underfunded traditional counterparts. It’s a way of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it’s leaving far more children behind than its lifting up. The same “centrist” consensus that brought us Iraq and is pushing entitlement reform instead of stimulus is the very same crowd trying to privatize our schools. In my city, a historic record breaking number of schools are getting shut down due to “underfunding” while the wealthy enjoy huge tax breaks to build hotels and occasionally fund some charters. It’s a vicious cycle, and one out industrialized counterparts aren’t a part of.
It’s simple. Hire more teachers, pay to train them and sustain them professionally, pump money into schools that need it rather than threaten them, eliminate metal detectors and other prison guard techniques, extend the school day and school year, mandate (and pay for) uniforms and up to date textbooks and computers, and put actual fucking educators in charge of the schools instead of corporate drones and party hacks. Massachusetts should be leading the way with truly public and truly equitable schools not following the Ed reform lemmings off the cliff.
Good call. It’s all on profiles.doe.mass.edu. Once you find the school or district you’re looking for, click on the “students” tab up top and then the “selected populations” link on the left.
It’s worth noting that the Commonwealth lumps all “students with disabilities” together, so this number includes both students on 504 plans who get testing modifications as well as profoundly disabled students who require a one-to-one aide. When I worked at a charter, we used to refuse services to students whose IEPs required a .4 placement, which is substantially separate classroom education. BPS, of course, must serve these students.
Here are some numbers from high-profile Boston charter schools as a point of comparison:
match (grades 6-12): students with disabilities: 17.4% ELL: 2.1%
City on a Hill: (grades 9-12): students with disabilities: 17.5% ELL: 6.2%
Academy of the Pacific Rim (grades 5-12): students with disabilities: 18.3% ELL: 0.2%
Brooke Charter School (grades K-8) : students with disabilities: 6.0% ELL: 0.4%
Boston Collegiate Charter School (grades 5-12) students with disabilities: 17.6% ELL: 4.8%
Codman Academy (grades 9-12): students with disabilities: 21.8% ELL: 2.0%
Roxbury Prep (grades 5-8) students with disabilities: 14.9% ELL: 4.0%
Conservatory Lab Charter School: students with disabilities: 8.3% ELL: 20.6%
Compare with sabutai’s numbers for BPS above. Only Codman Academy is serving a percentage of students with disabilities equal to BPS. (And, indeed, theirs is higher, so hats off to them.) None of these schools serve anywhere near the numbers of ELL students that Boston does.
thinkliberally is correct to accuse me of being hyperbolic, but I do think these numbers show pretty clearly that any comparison, especially on tests with any language elements at all (i.e., not just ELA tests, but word problems on the math tests), is simply not fair, as the populations these schools are serving are significantly different than the population served by BPS.
Actually, charter school are not legally prohibited from backfilling empty seats (p.4). They don’t have to in the last 3 grades they service (usually MCAS grades). For example, a 5-8 charter school does not have to fill seats in grades 6,7,8. A charter 9-12 high school does not have to backfill seats in grades 10,11,12. Charter Schools don’t “choose” to backfill those empty seats because “it would change their community.” If they wanted to fill those seats there is nothing legally preventing them from doing so, providing it was from their wait list if there was a lottery.