In such excellent detail, I thought it was worth quoting her entire email here (sadly, no link):
I hope you’ll join me in voting no. Here are some reasons why:
1. Question 2 is extreme
It sounds modest: an increase of just 12 schools and only 1% of student enrollment. But that’s 12 schools every year; far faster than in the past 23 years, when 80 charters have been granted. And it’s 1% of the whole state’s student enrollment: 9500 new seats a year, mostly in a relatively small number of districts. That’s a rate of new seats five times faster than previously.
Some strong supporters of charter schools are against Question 2 because they believe it goes too far. It sets no limit at all on how much public school money can go to charters.
Boston Mayor Walsh, for example, wants to raise the current limits on charter school spending, but he’s against Question 2 because it would “wreak havoc on municipal finances.”
Bay State Banner editor Yawu Miller says in an interview, “What I’ve noticed in the debate in Boston is that people are not against charter schools. They think that there is a place for them. They think that charter schools work well for some people, maybe for their own children. But they don’t want to see the kind of expansion that’s being proposed now. They think there’s a threat to the district school system if that happens. You hear a lot of people saying *I’m not anti-charter. I’m against this ballot question.* I think the funding issue has caused a lot of people who pay attention to the schools to come out strongly against this.”2. The money to fund charter schools comes from district schools.
If a new charter school opens, the district has to either slash programs or close a school. You can’t spend the same dollar twice.
Question 2 backers say new charters cause the state to increase its aid to schools, but that’s misleading. The money they are talking about is temporary reimbursement that the state gives districts to soften their charter losses. It allows districts to avoid slashing programs or closing schools immediately. They have about a year to make those tough decisions. After that, the state money is gone.
If Question 2 passes, that stop-gap funding could cost well over $100 million a year. That money could otherwise be spent to meet other important state needs.
Is charter expansion a better use for $100 million than pre-school for low-income children, a proven way to reduce the achievement gap?
3. Many charter schools don’t educate the children who need the most help.
This photo shows Gov. Baker announcing his support for eliminating the charter cap in front of the Brooke Charter School in Mattapan. Notice the signs in Spanish. But inside the school, only 3.6 percent of the students are English language learners, compared with 30 percent in the Boston district schools.
Brooke also has half the percentage of children with disabilities. And suspends twice as many students as district schools.
Despite that poor record, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education awarded Brooke 700 more seats last year.
4. Local people have no control over the opening of a new charter school or how it’s run.
The day the state board awarded those 700 seats to Brooke (and 400 more to other Boston charter schools), the chair of the Boston School Committee begged them not to. He pointed out that their plan would force $17.5 million in painful, new cuts for the district schools.
He came away “dumbfounded” to learn that the board does not consider the impact of new charter seats on the school districts they draw from.
State board members say the law requires them to ignore the harm to district schools when they approve a new charter.
School committees have limited budgets. When districts lose students and tuition dollars, they have to cut programs and eventually close schools. If a proposed charter had been granted in Somerville, for example, it was projected that we would have to close a popular elementary school. Some families would get a new choice; others would lose theirs.
In a recent radio debate, former state Rep. Marty Walz, representing Yes on 2, was asked about an Annenberg Institute analysis that showed many charter school boards are dominated by financiers and corporate executives, and that 60 percent of the boards have no parent representative at all — especially schools with mostly minority children. What about democratic control? she was asked.
Her answer: “It is local control that got us into the situation that we’re in. The reason charter schools exist is because local school districts have wholly failed to educate far too many children in this state.”
That reminded me of something Winston Churchill said: “Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others.”
Yes, there are schools that aren’t doing the job, but many more are excellent, despite the challenges they must cope with. And taking away their money isn’t going to make them better.
Having financiers and corporate executives run our schools won’t solve our problems. Local, elected School Committee members may make mistakes, but they are accountable to the parents, voters, and taxpayers of their district and their job is to improve education for all of our children.
5. Cambridge, Medford, and Somerville would be directly affected by Question 2.Question 2 would let the state board open or expand up to 12 new charter schools with up to 9500 seats, every single year, in the small number of districts that are close to the current charter “cap.” For most districts, the cap is 9 percent of district school spending. Most of that money comes from local property taxes.
Cambridge, Medford, and Somerville are all close to the 9 percent limit. (Winchester is not, so Winchester can lose funding to a new charter with or without the ballot question.)
You may have heard that Question 2 would apply to “low-performing” districts. But the ballot question only says the state board should give “priority” to low-scoring districts. If 8 schools open in Boston, that will leave 4 available in higher-scoring districts.
And since test scores largely reflect social class, you may be very surprised to find out what “low-scoring” means. A quarter of the districts in our state, educating 40% of the students, are deemed “low-scoring” by the ballot question. This is in the state with the highest achievement scores in the country.
Just a few days ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced that she will vote No on Question 2. She said, “I am very concerned about what this specific proposal means for hundreds of thousands of children across our Commonwealth, especially those living in districts with tight budgets where every dime matters. Education is about creating opportunity for all our children, not about leaving many behind.”All the School Committees in our district, along with over 130 others, have passed resolutions opposing Question 2.
thank you, Senator Jehlen, for shedding light instead of heat on a subject many voters find confusing.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Thanks Bob.
Boston, Lynn, New Bedford, Chelsa, et al, already receive extra money via the corrupt Ch. 70 Education Formula whose legally required re-examination in 2003 is still pending. Several of these localities are also on the preferred list for charters, as in the lowest performing systems – which just goes to show that extra money for decades can’t buy everything.
At one point, some cities like New Bedford were receiving more than 100% of their city education budget from the taxpayers of the Commonwealth and using the surplus to buy fire trucks. A bill that required no municipality should receive more than 85% of their school budget – making them responsible for 15% of their school funding – was squashed like a bug by urban Democrat insiders.
NOW this is an issue? Because THEY might find some of that money redirected to a charter?
You can yell “Get off my lawn” as much as you want, but the question is a radical change in charter school policy. Urban schools, which have never received the money need, will find themselves redirecting unlimited amounts of money to an unlimited number of charter schools. It takes more than a school system to help poor students.
And there will still be the charter cap.
impoverished children? Nope.
A charter cap of 12 schools a year? As opposed to what we have now?
The Foundation Budget Review Commission actually did review the formula for how much is required to educate students adequately last year. We found that the districts that educate the poorest students are funded the least adequately. As porcupine notes, those districts also have the lowest test scores, so their cap on charter tuition is twice as high as others (18% vs 9%), and they are on the “preferred list for charters.”
(State funding is inadequate for everyone, but most districts are able to spend extra money from local property taxes.
There is an almost 90% correlation of MCAS scores with income.
The lowest income students attend schools with the least adequate funding.
The “lowest-performing” schools have the least adequate funding.
For the data and footnotes for this information is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVaYe_JTGkw5Nwb4BzPNz9j1fA2yN94DUHsX_KO0j-k/edit
One system on Cape, Dennis-Yarmouth, is also on the low performing list, and Provincetown has been in the last two years. Yet these towns receive negligible amounts of Ch. 70 money, compared to a place like Chelsea that gets extra millions annually.
BUT – over 50% of the children in those systems are on the Federal School Lunch program, a neutral measure of poverty, and the percentage of poor children is HIGHER than some of the officially favored systems in the Ed formula. But Boston thinks we are all rich and continues to budget based on stereotype and anecdote.
The mandated review is almost 15 years overdue. Would you support finally enforcing the law?
Fully implementing the report of the Foundation Budget Review Commission would take about $1 billion a year. That’s unlikely without more revenue. The Senate voted to commit to moving toward full funding of that report at the same rate as expanding the charter school cap.
…is AG Maura Healey per FB.
In the town of Dracut, an amazing 6% of the kids have enrolled in charter schools even though no charter is located in this town. That’s because the schools are spending very little on education and have been subject to major cuts in recent years… and the insurance for retirees from the school system is eating up a larger share of school spending than it should. This is leading to further erosion of the schools.
It is insane that the state “rewards” bad performing districts with more charter schools because the presence of those schools merely drags down those districts further, if they can only afford to fund schools at minimum levels of school spending. Boston can afford to fund at greater than the minimum while new bedford and worcester and lowell cannot.
Cities under Chapter 70 do get decent funding with the sole exception of Boston which has its own source of good tax revenue from unbridled commercial development. Ironically, if a city (like boston) raises its school spending (through, let’s say, a tax override) to try to catch up to the charter school the formula now gives an automatic boost to the charter school funding. So the city almost has a disincentive to raise its school budget which is the opposite of the benefit charter school advocates claim.
There is an extremely dangerous impact on educational equity when a charter school opens up serving multiple towns. Surely the companies know how to exploit the loophole.
Take an education poor town like West bridgewater, and then open up a charter on the border of the town with Brockton. Now Brockton provides $14,214 per pupil for education. West Bridgewater proves $11,750.
What the charters will do is open up a school on the border of the two towns. They will adopt a dress code so the kids have to wear uniforms, thus drawing in parochial school parents and driving the Catholic schools out.
For the Brockton kids it is an escape from the innercity schools and they get to go to a school that is maybe 50% white and has things that Brockton schools lack. For the West Bridgewater schools they get to go to a school with a baseline school spending far above the level of any West Bridgewater school without having to move out of their town.
Take 1000 kids out of west bridgewater schools and “move the money” and guess what, you only have enough $ to pay for the charter tuition of about 800 kids in the charter (which has far higher per pupil spending that W. Bridgewater)
Obviously the system allows separate but unequal schools to be established. Such a thing would never be allowed to happen in a typical regional school district, which is set up in a way as to not compete directly with the schools serving the same grade levels in the participant towns.