This November, a number of powerful people, such as Governor Baker, intend to spend $18 million to raise the cap on charter schools, and opinion leaders like Globe writers tend to support this. Polls seem to predict this expansion will pass. However, this ballot initiative has deep flaws in it that will harm public schools not just in Boston but in smaller communities. So, the progressive choice in November–the choice for sustaining quality public schools in our Commonwealth–is to vote NO on raising the charter school cap.
And since the polling indicates the progressive choice is behind in the polls, I urge you to ask your neighbors to vote NO in November.
That’s the gist of my post. But for those who want to, let’s consider the details of what we the people will actually vote on. This ballot initiative does not affect the currently existing charter schools but instead raises the cap so that the state’s board can create 12 new charters every year, taking up to 1% of the population of school children, every year for all time. Proponents will point out that the board will give priority to putting up new charters in places where test scores are low, but they don’t have to limit themselves to those districts. So a district with good public schools and good oversight by the local school committee can still see a charter school pop up there, taking dollars away from the public schools. The state board who decides whether to approve a new charter school does not consider at all whether a new charter will hurt existing public schools in a community. If they don’t have to consider whether it hurts public schools, then public schools will be hurt. Note how this “only 1%” mechanism can chip away at our system of public schools overseen by elected school committees. In ten years, 10% of the school age population can be in charter schools. Like Prop 2 1/2, this could have long term negative consequences for a public service that is as essential as clean drinking water. We should be wary when we are asked to reduce local oversight of a public good for the people in the locality who need that public good. This year’s ballot question of raising the cap will use one election to gradually undermine local democratic government for every year thereafter.
And that is something anti-Commonwealth about this initiative. A few wealthy donors and their lobbyists are spending $18 million not to give computers, art supplies, musical instruments, or books to Massachusetts kids but to unravel a system that is actually improving already.
Therefore, I ask you to vote No in November, and ask your neighbors and friends to vote No, as a way of preserving a public good in our Commonwealth for future generations.
…we aren’t being asked to vote to roll them back. I’d vote yes to that in a heartbeat!
Kids in METCO, parochial schools, and yes those who win the charter lottery tend to do better than those that are left behind in our lackluster inner city school systems. Fixing Chapter 70 and the funding formula by actually following the Education Reform Act requirements are critical components of a successful education policy. I sympathize with Porcupine and my sister who had sons that did far better in voucher or charter programs than they did in the traditional public environment.
Raising the cap isn’t the ways to fix this. It does nothing to address the funding inequity, the real problems with accountability and transparency, and it exacerbates for profit management of charter programs. So, I say keep the ones we have and govern them better and fix the funding. Pablo had some reasonable pragmatic suggestions for how this could be accomplished. This bill isn’t it, and is another example of our legislature refusing to do the heavy lifting.
As charley points out, if a school isn’t meeting a child’s needs, it may be that the school is not getting the resources to meet those needs. Or it might be under regulations that prevent it from meeting such needs.
There’s one town in Massachusetts where a charter opened up as a Chinese language immersion school. So, when that charter drew money off the public schools, those public schools had to drop their world language offerings.
A yes vote would be more complications like this.
Pablo’s plan was good, this plan isn’t it. This plan makes the unworkable status quo permanent and less sustainable.
is in my neck of the woods. I’m not familiar with it killing off other schools’ world languages, though it might have. The fact is, it’s been very hard to find qualified people to teach world languages in public schools.
I don’t know whether it was Amherst or Northampton that dropped their world language offering–probably Amherst. The fact is, there really aren’t many serious world language programs in Western Mass.
… To teach foreign languages in school, the best way by far to teach a foreign language is to immerse oneself. It’s such a vast difference there’s barely a comparison.
Sorry, I mean “to learn a foreign language”
…most aren’t going to have that luxury. We should start teaching second languages at the elementary level when kids can more easily pick them up.
Maybe charters are, but not this question.
The left was more than willing to engage in an expanded charter debate and offered up a very good compromise, but that compromise asked charters to take in the same kind of students and have he same 4 year graduation rates that other district schools had.
Charters say they can be better. All the opposition said was, “okay, prove it.”
They took it to the ballot instead, because they know they have lots of money, good marketing… but not such a hot product.
It is simply amazing to me that we consistently have the best K-12 school system in the country — and one of the best in the world — and we’d put it to risk with this kind of a wild, likely irreversible change.
The Senate came up with a bill that was a worthy beginning for a discussion about charter schools. It contained many poisonous pills that would have forced charters to justify their ways of doing business. It wouldn’t have resulted in a pure win. There would have been some additional charters, but the public would have been more educated. Now the MTA will be fighting against an unscrupulous adversary with 2 or 3 times the money, trying to oppose a policy that the electorate doesn’t really know much about and for which there is still a lot of support.
As it is, the MTA shitcanned the senate bill by refusing to support it it in favor of opposing the ballot question. THE LEFT is firmly in control of the MTA, and it has stuck us with an all or nothing battle. If the question goes down, then I’ll happily stand corrected, but choosing not to back the senate bill was one of the stupidest decisions I’ve witnessed.
The Left my ass. They accepted the risk of “this kind of a wild, likely irreversible change.”
The people who swift boated John Kerry are being paid millions and millions to tell us so.
liberal elitists who don’t want to dirty their hands by working their way up from the teaching. They do a couple of years at Teach for America and then become managers in the charter school industry.
The promotion comment observes “It’s a morally tricky issue to keep kids in ‘bad’ schools, too”, and asks “How do you square that circle?” In my view, the way to “square the circle” has been obvious and known for decades — our “liberal” electorate simply refuse to do it.
The way to square the circle is to increase taxes on the wealthy and very wealthy and use the resulting increased tax revenue to:
1. Increase local aid to schools — specifically focusing on towns with schools that are “bad”.
2. Increase our investment in the fight against poverty, especially in our “gateway” cities and in Western MA.
Like it or not, most of the issues with our schools are directly or indirectly related to poverty and wealth concentration.
Raising the charter school cap is only going to make matters worse. We need to instead DRAMATICALLY increase taxes on the wealthy and very wealthy. Here are the two most important tax changes that are needed:
– Significantly increase the capital gains tax rate, accompanied by an increase in the personal exemption to protect the 99%.
– Significantly increase the gift/estate tax rate, for estates above some generous threshold ($5M?).
And actually I think it has even more to do with your #2 than #1. He kids carry into school whatever’s going on in their neighborhoods. If that’s wealth, education and privilege, then that’s what the schools get; if it’s poverty, deprivation, hunger, grief and violence, then they get to deal with that.
On test score etc. And Adding more of them only means more competition for the same public dollars, meaning quality goes down, both in the charters and in the public schools.
The New York Times has a long article about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html
I totally get your argument, but I think you have a bit of a blind spot. You seem more annoyed at charters being created in districts that are “good public schools and good oversight by the local school committee” than in “places where test scores are low”, but your blind spot is that you seem to accept the premise that test scores are low because the schools are “not good” or because they don’t have “good oversight” by local school committees. This is, in a way, a very conservative argument – “good schools are good because they work harder and are better managed, bad schools are bad because they don’t work as hard”. In other words, you deserve your lot in life.
It shouldn’t even be debatable anymore that schools rank according to the demographics of their students. We have largely stratified our cities and towns by a parent”s ambition for their children. Even in a town like Winchester, there are differences in property values based on the assigned elementary school. That’s a town that ranks among the top in the state for public schools, further stratified.
Perhaps opening up charter schools to all communities will show the entire state how damaging they can be to the public school system. Maybe, if people in Winchester started losing students to charter schools – and you could make the argument that a parent choosing a charter represents a parent not being adequately served by the public schools – voters in Winchester would vote more accurately – because right now their vote impacts only students in poorer communities.
zero students from Longmeadow, East Longmeadow, and I would venture to guess, Wilbraham and Hampden.
Charter schools happen in the cities for a couple of reasons: 1) lack of political opposition (and often political support from the city ruling class) 2) a lack of money, combined with serious socio-economic problems, opens city districts to any available excuse, I mean, innovative strategy.
And you hit the nail on the head, it doesn’t matter how much improvement cities make, they will never make enough.
There aren’t many students from Longmeadow, East Longmeadow, and Wilbraham sending their kids to charter schools. Part of that may be geographical, part may be parents wanting to keep their kids away from “Springfield kids”, part may be that, at least in Springfield, preference is given to Springfield students. As it stands, there are just 12 students out of 1,574 in SABIS that are from outside Springfield, and just 25 nonresident students are in Springfield charter schools out of 3,020 total students sent.
Chicopee has a charter school that is 57% Springfield kids, 23% Chicopee, 13% West Springfield, and 6% Ludlow. That seems odd since Chicopee schools aren’t particularly great, but the school isn’t primarily attracting Chicopee students. Their geographic region is declared as those four communities, and they provide transportation from them, and also give preference to those communities.
The really interesting Charter schools to look at are Pioneer Valley Performing Arts and Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion. Neither of those schools have geographical preferences, and they are very geographically diverse.
The largest contributing districts for PVPA is Springfield (15%), Amherst (15%), Northampton (11%), South Hadley (10%), Belchertown (9%), Chicopee (7%), and Holyoke (5%).
The largest contributing districts for PVCIS is Amherst (26%), Northampton (10%), Springfield (10%), South Hadley (9%), Gill/Montague (7%), and Easthampton (6%).
Those schools have very distinct missions, which may explain their ability to attract a more geographically diverse group of students. That geographical diversity translates into balanced racial diversity, which is likely an attraction. PVPA is 70% white, 7% black, 12% Hispanic, 3% Asian. PVCIS is 56% white, 18% Asian, 7% Hispanic, 5% black. Compare that to the Holyoke Community College Charter school which is 90% Hispanic, 6% white, 2% black, and 0% Asian, or the Baystate Academy charter school in Springfield, which is 61% Hispanic, 31% black, 6% white, 1% Asian. Very few white people will send their children to a school that is 94% not white.
On a side note, I found it interesting that different charter schools seem to get different dollar amounts from students from the same community. PVPA gets $18,371 per student from Granby; PVCIS gets $13,594 from Granby, and Phoenix gets $15,016 from Granby. I don’t understand the method used at all because the state supposedly uses this methodology:
That implies that the rate should be the same for all students from their sending district. I was a little shocked that they add the “above foundation spending” into this rate – why should PVCIS get $19,895 from the 5 students from Leverett, simply because Leverett spends an astounding $10,748 above their foundation rate on their non-special-ed students? It is also interesting that Springfield’s reimbursement rates are among the lowest in the region, implying that a lot of its reported high per-student spending is going to special education.
suburbs I mentioned is the perception that their public schools provide a “good” education. Many graduates go to the best colleges. Violence is negligible. There are no gangs. The schools can have activities at night without fear. The expectations of these middle-class parents are met. They also feel like they can affect the direction of the school by getting involved. And the school committee and personnel are generally responsive. These parents worry about their kids having too much work.
Parents of kids that go to charter schools in Springfield perceive that Springfield schools are bad. They don’t want their kids to see the fights or the girl performing oral sex behind SciTech (in spite of having that behavior addressed by the administration) disruptions. They don’t want kids around the gang activity or to walk through dangerous neighborhoods. I hear a lot of good things about Central, but I hear a lot of disturbing stories from my friends who have worked at Putnam, Sci Tech, and Commerce. There are other things that cause problems for public education, but these are a few that would have me considering a charter school if I lived in Springfield.
Springfield has a lot of potential students to draw from. PVPC and Chinese Immersion draw people from our area, which is less concentrated in population. It would be hard for a school to thrive based on one community. The two schools I mention offer truly different educational experiences. Other charters have “themes” rather than the innovative strategies. There’s very little of positive appeal.
And the Chicopee charter? It’s part of a network run by Gulenistas, the followers of a Turkish cleric. My understanding is that they draw a lot of students of Turkish descent.
I totally understand the realities of Springfield public schools – I have several relatives who teach in them. Part of the problem is perception, much of it is reality. When I was a kid, only Longmeadow was seen to have an above-average public school system. Now most communities are viewed as above average, pseudo-private quality, and Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee have become the systems that you avoid at all costs. This is a direct result of MCAS and the public grading/shaming of schools.
Charter schools offer an escape hatch for Springfield residents. Parents get to send their kids to a school that they perceive is going to be better than the “general public” public schools. And it is free – which I think is one of the reasons for the demise of the Catholic school system, including Cathedral – down from a population of 2,000 to a population of 200.
Those motivated students leaving the public school system definitely leave the public school system worse. The stories about its “badness” get amplified. When people talk about “Springfield schools”, they don’t envision the 3,000 students in charter schools in the city – they envision the 20,000 students in the public schools. That makes the city far less attractive to them.
What would happen if the charter cap was lifted in Springfield? It is possible that Springfield would become more desirable because a parent would know that they can put their kids in a charter school – no lottery, no waiting list. They could avoid the dreaded Springfield Public Schools. The public schools would become even worse, they would become nothing more than supervised babysitting/incarceration. The wisdom would be “why would you continue to send your kids to the public schools if you care about them? Parents who care send their kids to charters” (mirroring the current wisdom that “parents who care don’t send their kids to Springfield public schools).
Schools like PVCIS and PVPA (and even Hampden School of Science) are attractive to a lot of people specifically because of their themes. The Springfield charter schools are not nearly as compelling.
SABIS, Springfield’s first charter, has a theme best described as “we’re not the bad public schools”. It is the charter school that white Springfield families try to get their kids into (and if they don’t, they move).
Martin Luther King charter school is “follow the values of Dr. King” – again, ambiguous and hardly “themed”. For better or worse, when you name a school after the most famous black leader, that is a signal that the school is a “black school”, so the school isn’t going to attract a diverse student body – whites won’t go there.
Phoenix Charter Academy is for kids who have failed at public schools. That isn’t at all attractive to the middle class.
Veritas Prepatory theme is “a rigorous college preparatory curriculum and character education within a structured learning environment [with] … an extended school day, school year, and data-driven instruction to drive dramatic gains in scholar achievement.”. Again, a highly ambiguous theme that amounts to “we’re better than the public schools”.
Baystate Academy’s theme is “a rigorous college-preparatory school with a focus on healthcare careers”. That school has some promise because of its stronger theme. It is new and hasn’t developed a reputation yet, but is heavily under-advertised and is limited to residents of Springfield.
Springfield Prepatory is only a year old, but again has a completely ambiguous mission: “a school that prepares all students for success in high school, college, and life, through a focus on rigorous academics and character development”. Isn’t that what schools are _supposed_ to do? They give priority to Springfield residents.
What could make Springfield more attractive? Maybe a charter school that was _heavily_ themed – perhaps something like “computers, robotics and technology”, or even some kind of foreign language (besides Chinese, of course – that one has been done). Maybe a Culinary Arts charter school. Or a school for art/architecture. Set aside 50-75% preference for Springfield residents, but make it open to other communities – strive for geographic diversity which would bring it a racial/ethnic balance.
That is why I am torn on charter schools. MCAS has already labeled Springfield a community that people should avoid. Chapter 70 has been sliding towards total failure for years – the foundation budget has become a joke since all decent districts spend many thousands above it per child, and the state won’t revise it because that would mean spending a lot more money on cities like Springfield (who spend _at_ the foundation level). So maybe unleashing a whole slew of themed schools wouldn’t make things in Springfield any worse, and could potentially counter that “bad city” label, with a wide variety of themed charter schools without fear of being denied admission making a community like Springfield desirable again.
Boston is gentrifying, but that’s because it’s Boston. If this is happening in any gateway cities, I’d love to know. Aside from cheap homes, what would make Springfield or Holyoke attractive to a young family?
I had a friend–a Holyoke girl–who started a family in Holyoke. She sent her children to public school. Her daughter was invited to a birthday party in the Flats. She didn’t let her go. I think this is more how parents think.
I understand your pain. At ELHS, we just hired two teachers: a history teacher from Central and an English teacher from Chicopee High.
Charter school themes, unless they are extreme, don’t attract many students away from functioning public schools. They don’t have that much to offer. Public schools are the center of communities for people with kids of school age. Charter schools can’t replace that.
To clarify, I don’t believe schools with low average test scores are “bad,” have bad oversight, though I have heard people make such statements. I was aiming to echo the reasoning that a person might use to justify voting Yes to raise the cap. I should have been clear that that is what they say.
Like you I think that the combined histories of the students are a huge component in the vector sum of a school. (You call this demographics but like mathematical metaphors.) Do families have lots of books at home? Do kids have a quiet time and place to study at home? Are there family members who can help with homework or just be an example that working hard in school leads to a better life? Is there enough food to go around and easy, affordable access to healthcare?
I’m not a fan of moralizing based on a person’s poverty or wealth–I’ve seen enough of both and enough moral and immoral behavior by people on every rung of the ladder. People don’t always deserve their lot in life.
But I will say this: Massachusetts is a Commonwealth, and we have a proud history of working in common to assure each child has a fair shot in life. And it does not make sense to vote Yes to undermining the best public education system in America and the world.
Accelerationism is always a cynic’s good idea, but in practice this means dramatically breaking something not so easily fixed.
Once all those charters go in, does anyone realistically think they’ll all just go away? Even if, after 10 or 20 or 30 years, we all realize this was a terrible mistake, does anyone think politicians will sit the mass shutting down of those schools? With the thousands of angry parents and disheartened students that would be bused into the state house, put on TV, etc?
At best, if this bill passes and we later come to our senses — some decades later — we’ll put a new cap in place. Maybe, just maybe, demand some new accountability measures from the charters, to make things a tiny bit less broken.
But the damage will have already been done.
Everyone: this should be our #1 priority in MA between now and the election. This is not a complicated thing to explain to people if you have personal conversations — chiefly that this question is on the ballot because charters were unwilling to agree to be held by the same standards as traditional public schools on admissions or attrition. Please get out there and have those conversations.
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have legs are those that liberals don’t typically make:
1) we are using tax dollars to subsidize foreigners who set up charter schools here (SABIS, Gulen); this just seems weird to me. (I can’t bring myself to broadcast the fact that Gulen is a Muslim cleric, but that would have legs with some. There’s no indication that the schools have anything to do with Islam).
2) this is the best argument we can make: we are taking tax dollars away from cities and towns to subsidize private schools. Don’t argue about whether or not charters are private schools. Leave that to the charter proponents to prove.
It is currently trending on Facebook that the SJC has unanimously blocked a question which would have asked voters to reject Common Core, saying the question was too broad for the ballot. Some of the posters on this matter seem to not quite know how this works. They refer to the AG as a “he” and seem to think the special interests got to the SJC as if they are elected.
too many parts. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t merely eliminate the Common Core, but also limits some officials from doing things. The legal idea is that “in scrutinizing the legal language, the court feared the multipart question would have put voters in the “untenable position” of deciding “two separate public policy issues” with a single yes-no vote.” The Common Core thing is weird. Conservatives see it as a federalism issue. Liberals dislike the corporate development and lack of democratic process in their development. Educators dislike the fact that some standards are not age appropriate, and the tests are geared to make kids do poorly.
I really worry that we are so STEM focused and career oriented in our education goals that we are excluding the key humanities and social sciences that produce a truly educated citizenry. Poetry, literature, and civics shouldn’t take a back burner.
just as there were on the MCAS. But there are no required texts.
Until we see MCAS 2.0 tests, we won’t know what to do.