Today the Joint Committee on Education voted on a one-week extension on bills dealing with turnaround and charter schools. Over the past few months, stakeholders from all sides of this issue have been hard at work coming to compromises on various aspects of a composite bill, and we have come to agreement on a number of issues. We are down to the final aspects.
I continue to fight to find a balanced third way that breaks from the us-versus-them mindset when it comes to district and charter schools. All are public schools and both are needful of our attention and advocacy. I have been on record in both words and actions that I am committed to getting a bill out of committee that continues to close the gap between populations served by charters and districts, mitigates the financial stresses that even the best charters present for district schools, and allows targeted expansion of good charters. To that end, I’ve offered multiple proposals for balanced compromises. These proposals have been met with consistent “no’s” from the charter advocate community, with no counter proposals that bring us toward a compromise. While I am disappointed that we must resort to a one-week extension today, I remain committed to forging a resolution. My door is wide open to anyone who has ideas about how we can move forward on a middle path that treats all kids with compassion and fairness.
I also want to be transparent that, should we be able to reach resolution and report a bill out of Committee, there are still key decisions about funding fairness that will be made over the coming months through the budget process, which occur outside the Education Committee. These decisions will impact the effects of any bill on the schools in which the majority of students remain and therefore will be large factors in my ultimate vote for or against a bill on the Senate floor.
###
Well, I’m glad that Sen. Chang-Diaz realizes that there isn’t much room for compromising with this industry, but I’m disappointed they’re given another week to sell their snake oil. My concern is that the middle ground between supporting an accessible and accountable public education system for all, and an unregulated industry profiting off children, is far from the best the Commonwealth can do for education.
… for subjecting herself to another week of constant badgering from the charter school industry.
From the charter school lobby:
Her district likely has a decent number of parents that feel they’d benefit from charters or lost their lottery and feel hurt by the cap. I think she is holding the line for strong public schools and by insisting that only good charters get funding and that they don’t act as funding parasites off the district she would score a victory. Paul Toner’s letter on this issue also sets the tone we need to take. Charters have both parties, the media , and even NPR. The way to beat them back is to adopt their language and show why they are the extremists. Senator Chang-Diaz is striking a measures, and in my view, correct tone on this. Their letter was very threatening so we should let her know we have her back.
tough, smart, progressive… and absolutely right to stand her ground on this issue.
They are relentless. They push, badger, and insult without any desire to compromise. And why should they? In every aspect of their world, they have an advantage over the public schools.
They get premium, protected funding. They get funding based on a generous calculation of the sending district’s expenditures and the money is guaranteed by formula. It is garnished directly from the municipality’s Chapter 70 disbursement, regardless of the fiscal health of the town or the legislature’s generosity (or lack thereof) in awarding local school aid.
They have an exclusionary enrollment process. Want to send your child to a charter? You need to apply, and perhaps jump through hoops to apply. Wait list? It’s real easy to get on that, because they don’t move. Children on alleged wait lists sit there, even if there are empty seats. Meanwhile, the children who don’t fit in are packaged up, gift-wrapped, and sent back to the public schools.
They have an unaccountable governance structure. They take money from towns without being reviewed in the annual appropriation process. Town meetings and city councils have no power to review the budget, and no say in the establishment of a charter school. Boards of trustees are self-appointing.
They really don’t care about their impact on the public schools. It seems as if they want to deliberately inflict damage. They just want more, more, and more, and will not compromise. Bur, why should they? They get their way every year.
According to the charter school lobby propaganda,
No, the studies don’t “prove” that at all; they are not methodologically valid. The Boston Foundation study admits up front in a written disclaimer that both of its methods are fundamentally flawed — one doesn’t account for self-selection factors like motivation (a key omission), and the other doesn’t include any but the high-score charters that are over-subscribed (and thus need lotteries) and that also keep complete records (that report also has nothing to say about why charters might be superior to public schools). The 2013 CREDO study, finding charters in Boston’s inner city way better than public schools — is invalid because it compares aggregate (not individual) year-to-year score gains, which of course look better at charters because they screen out the students who don’t score well as they go along. Obviously, if you start with a self-selected applicant pool of highly motivated families, immediately screen out 20% of the winners who might be a drag on the scores by demanding “parent contracts” and counseling out kids (e.g. severely disabled, English Language Learners, behavioral problems) for whom the school’s program is, alas, “not a good fit,” and then annually throw back into the public schools the kids who don’t test-score brilliantly without backfilling the vacated seats, you will end up with an ever-smaller group of carefully sifted gems, and every year’s gains will look more and more wonderful — and then you can credit union-busting with this fabulous educational outcome. Until then, there are no known “good charters.” This trick works best, of course, in “troubled inner cities” where the sifting process produces especially stark contrasts in student populations — and where there is so much more demand from desperate parents for the magical charter elixir.
If public schools could work like this, they’d look excellent, too — but…. where would they dump their tens of thousands of rejects?
This is what charter schools are: a clever hoax, designed to give desperate urban parents the illusion of a hope of escape from a system their public officials have abandoned, and to deprofessionalize teaching to pave the way for hedge fund investors and corporations to profit by collecting public facilities and tuition money for huge classes of kids led by a quick-trained Teach for America temp.
Let’s make charters part of the regular school assignment system without any distinction, require them to take — and keep — exactly the same population as the public schools and follow the same rules of public accountability, and then see how they do. That’s a real “study,” Mr. Grogan. Then if they produce stellar effects (and of course we should be gauging educational “performance” by more than easily manipulated standardized test scores), we can ask them to share their teaching best-practice “model” so we can all be equally wonderful. That model is unlikely to be union-busting, because that’s not making the suburban schools of Massachusetts so outstanding. Hey, why don’t we go to those superb suburban public schools and see what makes them so successful? Oh, wait….we don’t really want that answer, do we…..We can’t really replicate what they have, can we. Well, we could just regionalize the schools and then those excellent institutions will also be available for city children to be assigned to! And their little gems could come here, and enjoy our cultural diversity and vibrancy! Right, Ed Glaeser?
Just blocking charters because they drain money from the public schools is not a good strategy; it simply invites the Waltons and Bill Gates and Eli Broad and other conservative/neoliberal “philanthropists” to pour money into the charters, knowing that once they metastasize like a cancer, they will destabilize the public system and accomplish their goals of privatization, corporatization, segregation, and — the holy grail — voucherization to subsidize outright (no more charter-pretending) private schools — accompanied, of necessity, by a booming network of private reformatories and specialized new prisons to catch the products of a country-full of drop-out factories. Public education, the next great investment frontier!
A message worth repeating…ShirleyKressel Says It Best!
Smart, savvy,passionate articulate and brief summation of all the best arguments.