Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Massachusetts Charter Public School Association…Listen Up!

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Massachusetts Traditional Public Schools are Number 1 in the Nation.  Boston Public Schools is the Number 1 Urban School District in the Nation.  We are stuck with the charter schools we now have, and they have proven to be a drain on our public education system and especially in urban school districts like Boston.  Charter Schools are the segregation academies of Massachusetts, and have created a two-tiered system of “have and have not’s” in our urban cities.  Reform needs to start with the charter schools we now have.  Here are my suggestions feel free to add yours:

  • The state, not the city or charter school, needs to take over the “charter lottery” period.  This will prevent charters from their current practice of prescreening applicants and dissuading families from applying.  This way the state will be able to generate accurate numbers and be able to ascertain the actual interest in charter schools.
  • One short, no nonsense, application, no lengthy gatekeeping application, no required onsite visits.
  • Charter school students need to be “level” not “average” funded for the students they enroll. In Boston, a regular ed charter student receives $3,372 more in “tuition” than a regular ed traditional public school student.  This figure doesn’t include the “non-tuition” revenue that charters also receive.
  • Charter student population needs to reflect the demographic of the sending schools they are taking students from, no more excluding Students with Disabilities or English Language Learners.
  • If a charter school student is found “not to be the right fit” for a charter schools.  Their option should be to go to another charter schools with an empty seat for the remainder of the year.  The following September let the student and their family decide if they want to remain at the new charter or return to a public school.
  • If a student “transfers” or is “counseled out” of a charter school, their MCAS score needs to remain as part of the sending charter schools record for that “transitional” year.  No more dumping low scoring charter kids back to traditional public schools a week before MCAS bringing down the scores of the accepting traditional school.
  • End “Forward Filling” in charter high schools.  Charter schools 4-year graduation rate is dismal. One of the Massachusetts DOE’s criteria for AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) is high school graduation in 4 years. Only 59%   of Boston’s charter high school students graduated high school within four years, 10 percent fewer than those at traditional public schools! A traditional public school with that kind of graduation rate would have been closed, deemed “Level 5,” or taken over by the Blueprint Schools Network like The English High School in Boston.  Why are charter high schools with this low 4-year graduation rate, year after year, still even opened! 

Considering the lifetime costs to a student and to society when a student has to repeat a year, we need to see dramatic increases in charter high school 4 year graduation rates. With all those extra days, and all that extended daily time, there is no reason a student, who has passed MCAS, shouldn’t graduate in 4 years!  One way to “motivate” charter schools to graduate students within 4-years, is to pay charter schools for the 4 years the students attends.  If charters are motivated to retain a student for additional years, let it be at their expense!  I’m sure charter vendors would rise to the occasion and provide those services that would allow a student the opportunity to graduate with their class.

  • Charter School Foundation “Transparency.”  All documents need to be current and posted on the schools website. Charter schools are a vehicle that investors use to make and keep their money at the expense of urban children. Charter schools have foundations that often own the building the school resides in and pays rent to the foundation. Bonds and Federal New Market Tax Credits, which provide a 39%+ Tax Credit to investors, is often used to build or renovate these building.

    If the state revokes the schools charter, the state cannot claim ownership of the building or school assets because they are owned by the charter schools foundation! There are many philanthropic “consulting” groups whose goals are to “strategically” place clients charitable donations where these clients can benefit financially from it. Let’s see what charter school investors are making big money by investing in the $11,786,000  Qualified Zone Academy Bonds (QZABs) and 130,000,000 in New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) that were awarded to Massachusetts!

Finally, before any new charter school is allowed to open or increase seats in Boston, or any other urban school district that has been decimated by charter schools, “Parent Choice” needs to be extended to include the toney suburbs where those who are investing in QZABs & NMTC live.  Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School got shot down when it wanted to open a regional charter clone and accept students from Newton, Brookline, and Weston! The Asian student population in Newton is 16.8%, Brookline’s is 18.2%, and Weston’s is 12.6%. You would think that with such large Asian populations they would welcome the opportunity to give “parents choice” of an Asian themed charter school. But no two-tiered school district for those toney suburbs.

Andover said no to STEAM Studio charter’s proposal. Good for them!  The Andover School Committee believes that funds available for education should be invested wisely in their existing schools in order to move Andover’s Strategic Plan forward.

Elected officials in these suburban communities are saying no to charter schools. They understand how a charter school would drain resources from their traditional public schools. Charter schools would cause a downturn in the cities or towns real estate values! Who wants to buy a house in a community with a two-tiered system? Who wants to risk their child’s education on a chance that their child might win a seat in a charter lottery or be the kind of kid that is the right fit to stay there?

 

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Comments

  1. The Globe ran a story last spring about this claim. If I had my child apply to 4 charter schools, that is counted as 4 applications.

    Also, according to the story, if my child is accepted into one of the charter schools, they will still be counted as “applying” to the other schools for a few more years. Basically the charter schools are cooking the books and (successfully) misleading people.

    • of empty seats from the inevitable attrition of charter school students?

      One way to look at the high school attrition rate is to compare the number of students enrolled in grades 9 and 12 in a given year. In Boston’s five charter high schools in 2008, there were only two seniors enrolled for every five freshmen — a reduction of 57 percent. By contrast, the senior class in BPS high schools that year was four-fifths the size of the freshman class — a reduction of just 19 percent.

      Looking at it another way, how many students leave Boston’s charter high and middle-high schools from the year they enroll (generally grade 9, but earlier in some schools) until the start of their senior year? Again, the loss is dramatic.

      For example, the MATCH school is often cited as a success story since the school claims that 99 percent of its graduates are accepted at four-year colleges. However, that is 99 percent of a greatly diminished pool of students. For the class of 2009, 72 students were enrolled in grade nine but only 34 were enrolled by grade 12, a loss of more than half of MATCH’s students.
      The report also provides new details on the major differences in student characteristics. It has been reported previously that charter schools enroll fewer special needs, English language learner and low-income students than their sending districts. This report breaks down the data further, showing that the special needs students enrolled in charters have far fewer disabilities and that their low-income students are less poor.

      ELL: ELL students comprise one in five BPS students — 19 percent — but only one in 50 (2 percent) in Boston charter schools.
      SPED: Twenty percent of BPS students have special learning needs compared to 15 percent in the charters. More significant, however, is that the charter school students on Individual Education Plans have milder special needs.

      • People who are interested in the issue of how accurate charter waiting lists and lottery figure are should look into some of the data that emerged regarding the failed Gloucester charter school.

        For example, from an article I wrote for Citizens for Public Schools’ Backpack (February 2013):

        For three years in a row the school’s “pre- enrollment” figures grossly overstated actual enrollment. For example, the school cited a pre- enrollment of 212 for the current school year in its August 2012 annual report to the Department, but reported actual enrollment of 124 when it opened in September. While state payments to the school eventually reflected actual enrollment, these pre-enrollment claims were used to determine the year’s first payment from the Commonwealth to the school. This provided the school with an interest-free loan and distorted municipal budgets as officials were forced to address the diversion of hundreds of thousands of dollars of state aid to the charter school for what turned out to be nonexistent students.

      • Or is the demand simply for “good” schools, which so many parents believe, sometimes rightly, does not describe their public schools.
        Sadly, the more resources are siphoned away from public schools and directed to charter schools, the more this demand will grow, in part from the further deterioration from the resource-starved public schools.

  3. The charter school movement is a hoax, all based on cooked numbers: the number of applicants on waiting lists; the number of lucky children who win a random lottery; the number of lottery winners who actually get to enroll by passing further admission requirements; the number of enrollees who get to the end of the charter school’s grades; the test scores of the schools as represented by the students who manage to stay the course. Most nefarious are the studies that “prove” charter schools perform better. These are produced by charter advocates and funded by corporations and institutions pushing privatization and union-busting, and their methodologies are invalid — but the flaws are never discussed by the mainstream press. The Boston Foundation Study, “Informing the Debate,” actually admits that its two methodologies are skewed, although that doesn’t stop charter advocates from citing it as proof of superiority. And the 2013 Walton-funded “update” of the Stanford CREDO charter study study suddenly finds that charters are superior in Massachusetts and especially in Boston in schools’ year-to-year score gains — but does not acknowledge what is logical: that this is likely to be simply the result of the initial difference in admitted students from a self-selected applicant pool, compounded by attrition over the years of lower-scoring students from the charters. How do we get this information off the BMG corner and into the mainstream media, to the parents who don’t know to forage here? The politicians don’t care; even when the state legislative committee hears expert testimony about false charter success reports, they plow forward to raise charter caps and give them money, because it’s politically advantageous to do so — they can please the desperate parents who seek a “choice” and will vote for charter supporters, as well as their cynical campaign donors — and Pres. Obama, with his Ed Reform Traitor-in-Chief, Arne Duncan, who supports privatization to please his donors. The state hearing hall is packed with kids in charter shirts and their parents — sent there by their schools to support themselves. How do we mobilize the parents to stop the destruction of their public school system? How do we get the right information to where it will be more than an echo chamber on the left websites and a fruitless attempt to talk logic to online extremists on the right?

  4. And this is all on top of the fact that test-prep is not real education, and test scores are not measures of real education. The charter advocates have promoted test scores as an easy measurement of “performance,” one which can be manipulated to “prove” charter superiority, close (and take over) public schools, fire teachers, promote “merit” pay for teachers, and profiteer from automated, robotic low skill/experience-required classroom teaching using commercially profitable curricula and online courses collecting money for hundreds of students and employing one unskilled “teacher.”

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