With the exception of our vote for president, our most important vote on November 8 will be the one we cast on Question 2. Most of our school systems are already short of money. In January or February, there’s also a good chance that Governor Baker will cut money already promised to us in this year’s budget. These Chapter 9C cuts will likely increase the deficits many of our school systems already face (in the past, special education circuit breaker and regional transportation funds have been cut). There will be more pressure on our property taxes. And for what?
The proliferation of charter schools. And why? That’s the billion dollar–and I mean billion dollar–question. Charter school proponents, largely the business community and billionaires:
- Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation[6]
- Democrats for Education Reform[6]
- Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance[6]
- Alliance for Business Leadership[7]
- Billionaires
Proponents of the question pitch this question in Orwellian fashion:”Lifting the cap on public charters is a social justice issue. … Massachusetts may have one of the best public school systems in the nation, but for too long the achievement gap has prevented our kids from reaching their true potential.” Advertising by proponents is almost as disconnected from the truth as Donald Trump, claiming that the bill will bring in more money to public education. If charter schools were public schools–rather than some weird quasi-public hybrid–this might be true. The fundraising done by new charters will bring more money to… charter schools. Presumably through donations, since charter rely on both public and private subsidies.
The Commonwealth spends almost half a billion dollars a year on charter schools. Money that would otherwise go to the public school districts. Some of this money reimbursed, but to public school districts that are already underwater, the reimbursements still don’t allow them to breathe. Cash-strapped school systems like Holyoke, Springfield, and Boston lose millions in funding. Smaller school districts lose less, but the loss is no less painful. As a selectman in Granby, I witnessed our school district try to deal with an $800,000 budget gap. It was finally reduced to $350,000 and paid for out of our shrinking stabilization fund. We’d already raised taxes by 7.7% to pay for a very necessary school building project. The $223, 000 we lost to charter schools would have come in handy.
Voting NO on Question 2 is NOT a vote against existing charter schools. It’s a vote against adding up to 12 more a year forever. It’s against adding additional siphons to every public school in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
…that voting no on two won’t phase out/shut down existing charter schools. It is an experiment that needs to end.
That way each school would have over sight from the legislature and the funding for each Charter School would not be created by bleeding local public schools and public school students. Let each Charter School advocate for funding for that Charter School’s line item and be required to show its support for special education students, etc each year. If the Charter School really is good and meets a need, it might well receive superior funding to what is now received, while having “where the money goes” looked at. Are there excessive salaries that actually work like profit? Are “difficult” students weeded out? Between bleeding public schools and lack of accountability, I think my proposal has heft and merit. And yes, I do plan to vote NO on Question 2.
Rural areas outside the Sacred Chelsea Ten favored by Mr. Moskowitz’s deeply flawed formula get bupkis now! Having a line item where the legislature would have to part with some money would be great!
Unless it’s like regional school transportation, where the state promised to fund transportation in perpetuity as a reward for municipalities bearing the extra costs of transit between towns and districts, only to find the line half funded, or even entirely unfunded, leaving the municipalities to resort to overrrides to fund another broken state promise?
You do know that absent a contract, a legislature can’t bind a future legislature, right?
into law.
even under a general law, like the one that says that the state will reimburse towns for some of the cost of the salary increases that police officers earn for furthering their professional education, the towns have no power to force the state to pay. The law is not self-executing, and an appropriation is required. Which is one of the reasons the budget process is a bigger deal than it might be otherwise.
Charter schools are funded by a formula, as a garnishment of a district’s Chapter 70 aid. If state aid does not keep pace with costs, or is level funded, or is cut, the charter school formula prevails.
All we need to do to reform this is to do a couple of things:
1. Fund charters like regional vocational districts, with direct appropriations from the state Chapter 70 account and from sending communities.
2. Create commonwealth charters in a manner consistent with regional vocational districts, in which towns vote to join the district.
If those two simple reforms were enacted, I would have no problem with eliminating a charter cap.
And one the charters would be wise to adopt if they (hopefully) lose this question.
We’ve got a lot of work to do to educate MA voters about this. Most either haven’t given it much thought or have a vague sense that people should have good options. Once they hear the facts, they tend to scoot over to the Vote No on 2 side of things. Point being, spread the word to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues. As Mark said, this is a critical vote! If you want to help, or get a bumpersticker or lawn sign, click here.
…Your statement, that is, not the existence of charter schools.
Yeah, this money would “otherwise” go to traditional public schools… but then again, “otherwise” the students would also.
The amount of money, by law, going to charter schools is a function of the number of students attending charter schools. Assuming the population P of students in the CommonWealth is both finite and stable (for a given, reasonable, time period) the half a billion dollars now being spent on charter schools represents funding for C number of students attending charter schools leaving funding for T students in traditional public schools. ( it really isn’t this simple because traditional public schools are funded en blanket by local property taxes and not, as the charters are, by number of students so there’s already some inequalities inherent to the system… plus any charter school funding can’t be applied to facilities)
I’m sympathetic to the argument that all schools need more money but I’m not very sympathetic to the argument that traditional schools need more money to teach fewer students in order that charter schools teach more students with fewer funds.
The thing is, students and funding are not in a linear relationship. It’s hard for me to explain, but if you work with me, I might be able to convey it, even if you still oppose it.
Here’s one problem: A public school has 100 students and 5 teachers. A charter school takes 25 kids. Now, I need to cut a position because I don’t have the money to pay for the teacher. The problem is, each teacher teaches a separate subject. Which subject do I eliminate? Now multiply this problem.
It’s complicated and hard for ME to explain, but you can absorb some of the student losses by increasing class sizes, but over time, if you’re Springfield, you end up with class sizes of 40. Hiring additional teachers with money going to charter schools can be used to lower those class sizes.
I don’t know if you can understand what I’m trying to say because my ability to say it is stretched about as far as I can stretch it. I think it would be better explained with some mathematical concepts.
Basically, the cost of one student is not directly relate to one teacher. I think this an accurate statement. It doesn’t cost any more money for me to teach 25 kids instead of 23. But if you take money away from the school, even if you take kids out, you start to lose teachers.
part of the problem is that what is paid to a charter school is the average cost of a student to the public district from whence they came not the marginal cost.
In additional to the example given above – there is the facilities issue. That school with 100 kids who losses some to a charter school probably still has the same facilities cost (light, heat, maintenance, janitorial staff) but less money with which to pay those costs. The money has to come from other places.
.. I think I understand the problem space well enough. I tried to hint as much in my parenthetical, but I guess I edged over into the more simplistic, and zero-sum, explanation… It’s not zero-sum, and there are trade offs on both sides, but I was just trying to counter what I saw as your notion that the schools would be left with less money facing the same need. Yeah, it’s not linear but there is a function: funding charter schools is not simply defunding traditional schools.
Your explanation could creditably be boiled down to “the traditional public schools aren’t flexible.” Irony notwithstanding, I’m not convinced they should be that flexible. Institutions is as institutions does, I guess… and there’s merit to that. But the space should be big enough to allow charter schools to be flexible without creating resource contention… and that’s the fault of how we view and fund public schools altogether, not how we take money from traditional to give to charter…
Specifically the Boston Foundation.
The role of the Barr Foundation in this was addressed earlier on this site.
As can be seen here and here, TBF supports increased charter schools, and given the activist community’s dependence upon their resources for funding (and the lack of credible opposition on the ground in the Commonwealth’s urban communities as I write this) …
We get it from both sides. I don’t know much about the Barr Foundation, but Democrats for Education Reform are neo-liberals that came from the DLC. The Boston Foundation is disgusting. I wrote a post a long time ago about philanthrocapitalists and discussed them. Paul Grogan is odious.
There’s an elitism involved with the Democratically-oriented charter school people. They convince themselves that their noblesse oblige extends to the poor, but the not the middle class. They picture themselves above teachers and as an entrepreneurial/managerial class that believes they can manage education without much experience through test scores. They aren’t the extremely rich, but they make their money by serving their interests. When we talk about the liberal elite, this is them.
…and is arguably much more militantly pro-charter school than TBF.
A useful overview can be found here.
It’s ludicrous the bulk of district funding tends to come from local property taxes. We really should set aside a wider chunk of money for the state to balance against poor districts earning less on property than richer districts and we have to update and actually enforce Ch. 70 to do so.
Pablo had a great idea to fully fund charters outside the funding pool for public a so that this debate can finally focus on pedagogy and curriculum rather than having both sides view the other as leeches. My sympathy is with public teachers and schools since they hear the brunt of the charter expansion, but it would be nice if charters would actually meet the union in the middle and find new ways of funding along with basic protections for their employees.
The charter schools in my area are unionized. Not sure about others.
anything, according to https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/09/23/charter-school-unions-lose-ground/nXsau4M2zw9KStzJWUdR3H/story.html. Charter schools have an indirect effect on public teacher jobs, but the money, not the unionization, is the real issue.
The problem isn’t so much unions as it is cities and towns losing money. The unions are the only organizations with the organization to oppose things. The MMA or the superintendent or principal’s organizations have little clout. Teachers definitely have a dog in this fight, but we speak for public schools that are suffering. We didn’t have much of a reason to fight for the minimum wage increase, but we did.
Would do better to simply acknowledge that they exist to protect their members. There are always a few teachers that don’t teach, even in good schools, and that frustrate the heck out of teachers that do. My own anecdote, as a child, was a teacher whose class was “going up and down rows reading aloud from the textbook” and whose handouts and tests referred to President Kennedy in the present tense–in 1980. My anecdote as a parent is a teacher that “got sick” most weeks, generally on Fridays and Mondays. In both of those instances, it was not a complete deal-killer because the school was otherwise pretty good. I can say that, as a parent, making a huge stink about substitute teachers two days a week was quite unavailing. What could they do? She had months and months of accrued sick time, all of which is earned. If the union’s role were the education of kids, then that teacher would be gonzo, seniority notwithstanding. But that isn’t the union’s role. The union’s role is to be sure that its members are paid a professional wage, and don’t have to rely on AFDC to make ends meet, as teachers did in decades past.
These kind of things are a FAR bigger deal when the rest of the school is not great enough to make it all worthwhile. When those parents make a stink about poor performance, it is similarly unavailing. If they don’t have the dough to go private, then charters or school choice are one of the very few options.
Compounding this problem is that charters, like privates, need not enroll disciplinary problem kids. Publics can’t, and now can’t really even do suspensions. For any parent that gives enough of a damn to actually investigate options–be it private, charter, or school choice– that is a VERY big deal, and point in favor of charter.
So, in the big picture, charters drain public schools of needed funds, and often the schools that need those funds the most. But at the micro level, eliminating charters requires telling parents “tough shit” which makes it a difficult political position.
Yeah, it’s the damn unions that are at fault. Truth be told, big money wants to kill another union group, that’s what’s behind a lot of this. Sure, the reason some schools do so poorly must be those unions.
So let’s look at some data? There are 20+ nations whose test scores all surpass those of the USA in reading, math, and so on. Of those nations, virtually ALL are staffed with union teachers. The nation with the strongest union, Finland, consistently ranks in the top three if not #1 every year.
Please, stop this propaganda. It’s not the unions.
have to defend all of their members, even if they suck. I can’t say I understand exactly why we aren’t more up front about what we do. And it really isn’t just about our jobs. Union locals are explicitly interested in jobs. The MTA is to an extent, but they are more concerned with lobbying, not just for ourselves but for our students.
The liberal elite say we put our interests before the students, but this really isn’t true. Our interests aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they overlap quite a bit. Most of us care about our students and the job we do. What we said about MCAS twenty years ago has come to pass. Parents don’t like it either. We are the only group with clout that lobbies on behalf of public education and its students. I’m not really sure why we don’t take more credit for that.
That’s their job. My family has paid a lot of teacher union dues, and collected teacher pensions, to know their value. And also to know the limit of their value: $150 per month, and most of that is spent on flyers that are trashed without being read, designed to get us to vote for politicians we would never support.
Those unions are not necessarily an obstacle to school difficulties, but they can be in certain circumstances. And it rankles me when they pretend to be some sort of agent looking out for the good of the students, because they aren’t.
you. Locals advocate for their locals. The MTA primarily lobbies for teachers and education issues. Except for full-time employees, union officials are all teachers. And we care about our students. Our self-interest and student interests are not generally mutually exclusive. They just aren’t.
High-stakes testing. Education funding. District determined measures. All of these things affect my working conditions, but they also interfere with the education of our kids. Parents are increasingly concerned with the amount of testing their kids are put through and question the need for it. But aside from the MTA and NEA, who has clout and is voicing these concerns? Not mutually exclusive.
It’s no different than your self-interest as a voter. You may vote for your self-interest, but I’m willing to bet you balance it with the common good or someone else’s good. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
In your last paragraph, first sentence, I suggest a minor edit so that it reads: “It’s no different than your self-interest as a Democratic voter.”
The remainder of that paragraph applies ONLY to Democratic voters.
I started a Question 2: Vote No Facebook page. If you’re so inclined, Like it or Share it.
I’ve been posting short things on charter schools.
https://www.facebook.com/KeepTheCap/
n/t
but I don’t typically use it. YOu think I should?
I don’t do Facebook but do use Twitter, and there are others like me. 🙂
I’d likely retweet any information that was sent out.
KeepTheCap
@VoteNoQuestion2
I’m not much of a tweeter, so I don’t know how I’m doing. I linked Facebook with Twitter with an app. Not sure about hashtag management.
When you look at the findings of the State Auditor’s report on charters schools, it is hard to understand why we should expand a costly program characterized by inadequate oversight and failure to deliver on a key promise of promoting educational innovation. Also, the first finding of the report was that “waitlist counts by municipality are significantly overstated”.