Charter schools drain millions from public schools, turn over a high percentage of teachers every year, lose half of their students by graduation, charter schools present an important problem for the Commonwealth: approval and oversight.
Charter schools must apply for charters, but charters are granted at least sometimes for political reasons. Other times, those approvals are ill-advised.
Most recently, DESE granted a charter to a school that lacked a premises. New Heights Charter School of Brockton was judged capable of educating children, but lacked the competence to find a building to house itself. Their approval was contingent on its being located in Brockton, but they struggled to find a location for the school. When they finally found a site, the renovation of their building was halted by the Brockton Building Department because they lacked the proper building permits. Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester eventually approved the charter school’s temporary move to Norwood, which increased the commute of its Brockton students by a half hour..
BROCKTON – The new Brockton charter school that began its inaugural year on Thursday at a temporary site in Norwood has been at least 40 students shy of its proposed enrollment during its first two days of class, according to attendance figures submitted to state officials.
The New Heights Charter School of Brockton, which opened at the former Kehillah Schechter Academy in Norwood, following construction issues at one location in Brockton and permitting problems at another, had an attendance of 272 students on its first ever day of class, said Jacqueline Reis, a spokesperson for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. On Friday, there were 275 students in attendance, Reis said.
The school has long claimed that it would open with 315 students, it’s maximum enrollment for the first year, for Brockton, Taunton and Randolph youth in grades six through eight.
Brockton Public Schools reported that some of the students originally enrolled in New Heights Charter School decided that they want to stay in a traditional public middle school in the city.
As of Tuesday, when classes began in Brockton Public Schools, the district reported that 49 students once enrolled at New Heights Charter School were back in a traditional public school in Brockton, at the request of their parents.
New Heights Charter School previously said it quickly replaced students who changed their minds with others who were on a waiting list.
As embarrassing as it is for the school and inconvenient for the students, there have been more egregious examples of charter school approval failures. The most infamous approval fails being Gloucester Community Arts Charter School¨and Robert M. Hughes Charter School. The most curious being the growing network of schools associated with sketchy Turkish imam Fetullah Gulen.
Gloucester Community Arts Charter School was granted a charter because Education Secretary Paul Reville thought it was politically important to approve a new charter. “Our reality is that we have to show some sympathy in this group of charters,” Reville wrote in an email to Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester, “or we’ll get permanently labeled as hostile and they will cripple us with a number of key moderate allies like the [Boston] Globe and the Boston Foundation.”
Robert M. Hughes Charter School was granted a charter because its applicants were politically-connected. Aside from the corruption, the hiring of a convicted felon to run the school, there was a widespread cheating scandal that brought the school down.
In my personal review of the applications and approval documents of the Hampden Charter School of Science, the Pioneer Charter School of Science I, and Pioneer Charter School of Science II, DESE demonstrated no knowledge of the schools’ ties to the sketchy Turkish imam Fetullah Gulen, though they are included in lists of the 155 or so schools owned and operated by Turkish nationals, written about in The Atlantic, and classified cables from the U.S. Consulate in Turkey.
If Question 2 is approved, we can expect an influx of more charter schools and more failures in the approval system. Whether it’s Texas, New Orleans, California, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, more charter schools bring more corruption and more problems. As the Washington Post recently reported,
There is a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California. For example, a report released recently (by the ACLU SoCal and Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group) found that more than 20 percent of all California charter schools have enrollment policies that violate state and federal law. A Mercury News investigation published in April revealed how the state’s online charter schools run by Virginia-based K12 Inc., the largest for-profit charter operator in the country, have “a dismal record of academic achievement” but has won more than $310 million in state funding over the past dozen years.
Race to the Top, abbreviated R2T, RTTT or RTT, is a $4.35 billion United States Department of Education competitive grant created to spur and reward innovation and reforms in state and local district K-12 education. It is funded by the ED Recovery Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and was announced by President Barack Obama and Secretary of EducationArne Duncan on July 25, 2009. States were awarded points for satisfying certain educational policies, such as performance-based evaluations for teachers and principals based on multiple measures of educator effectiveness (and are tied to targeted professional development and feedback), adopting common standards (though adoption of the Common Core State Standards was not required), adoption of policies that do not prohibit (or effectively prohibit) the expansion of high-quality charter schools, turning around the lowest-performing schools, and building and using data systems.
Several states changed their education policies to make their applications more competitive. For instance, Illinois increased the cap on the number of charter schools it allows from 60 to 120; Massachusetts passed legislation to “aggressively intervene in [its] lowest-performing schools,”
was terrible education policy. I don’t know whether Massachusetts education policy got worse under RTT or just stayed on the same track. The great failure of the Democratic Party has been its education policy. It came out of the biapartisan, neo-liberal consensus of United States governors in the post-Nation at Risk years.
When it comes to education policy, the sins are bipartisan.
…charter schools may not use funds for buildings or premises, and must rent space until they can purchase with funds derived elsewhere. They cannot apply under the School Building Assistance program. Lighthouse spent its first 10 years in a shopping mall, Sturgis is in a failed furniture store. Since they are set up to be tenants by law, why is there shock and horror that a lease or renovation changes premises?
And your continued continuing referrals to a ‘sketchy Turkish iman’ after is has been demonstrated there is no direct connection with the MA schools is more racist than Trump.
It seems there is a link between Imam Fateh Gulen and three Massachusetts charter schools.
http://turkishinvitations.weebly.com/list-of-us-schools.html
In defense of mark-bail, the quote “sketchy Turkish Imam” seems to have started with Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester. I am not a fan of charter schools but I hasten to add that I am generally more pro- Gulen than most people and think Erdogan’s war against him is totalitarian BS.
He’s complete crap, and his war against Gulen is also crap. Erdogan’s a dictator in the making. Pure and simple.
The evidence of Gulenist forgeries in the Sledgehammer trials, however, was incontrovertible. If he truly believes what he preaches, I’m not as bothered by him, but he’s raised lack of transparency to an art form. My best friend is from Turkey. He’d enjoy a Turkish cultural center, but he avoids the one in Boston because it’s Gulenist. My friend, like Dani Rodrik, is educated and secular. He hates Erdogan and hated the military dictatorship. The secularists don’t like Gulen anymore than Erdogan does.
Still, I think it’s really weird that we allow a foreign, religious organization to build charter schools all over the United States.
building secured before they start a school. Period. This is actually a common problem elsewhere in the country.
Racist? You can do better than that. Turks are not a race. They can’t be identified by color or feature. If anything you should be accusing me of Islamaphobia or xenophobia, but you know I’m neither.
Hampden Charter School of Science, the Pioneer Charter School of Science I, and Pioneer Charter School of Science II are all run by Gulenists. They typically deny this. There are no non-Gulen Turks coming to the United States to open up charter schools. The movement itself is sketchy in Turkey and here. The Turkish Cultural Center in Boston, for example, is connected to Gulen. You won’t find it mentioned on their website.
Here’s one of the less crazy magazines on your side (2011):