MA Ballot Initiative Roundup Part the Second: Should the voters authorize the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to release up to twelve charter schools statewide annually, and place them in municipalities at its discretion?
Question 2: NO
1. While it’s technically possible to argue that districts do not lose money to charters, the reality is that the “price per pupil” metric obscures the real costs to school districts who lose students and money to autonomous commonwealth schools operating in-district.
2. The state has largely abandoned the original mission of charter schools as incubators and innovators meant to work with districts.
3. Relatedly, local governments and school committees will have no ability to object or refuse to the placement of a charter that will sap district resources, while providing diminishing state mitigation for the losses, which can lead to instability within a district.
4. While there are indeed long wait lists for charters in certain urban districts, there are similarly long wait lists for spots in high performing district schools as well. Parents want good schools, they don’t care if they’re charters or district.
5. Studies can be cited to support either position on student outcomes at charter schools compared with district schools. The sum and average of the studies suggests that the difference in the dueling impact studies is a wash.
6. Charters are not inherently bad for public education policy, but Q2 is not a responsible way to raise the cap while supporting all students.
Okay, this is one of the “big ones” of this election. Yes, I’m a public school teacher, but I don’t oppose Q2 because I’m some union shill looking to protect my interests on the public dole. In fact, I’m not pleased with the intransigence of the MTA’s leadership over the last two years with regard to negotiations with the administration and the legislature. The MTA is partly responsible for this issue getting punted to the voters in the first place. As I’ve said, the ballot initiative process allows policy negotiators to stonewall one another, giving them an incentive to obviate their responsibility to negotiate in good faith. Charters, school-funding, and other public education policy is much better left to lawmakers than confused voters.
That said, now that we’re here I find the parameters of Question 2 to be a clear NO.
One of the major claims of Yes on 2 is that district schools aren’t actually losing any resources to charters, because of the “price per pupil” formula. The idea here is that if the student is no longer going to the district school, the state money allocated for that student should follow that student to the charter school instead. That’s technically true and logical, but it misses the point that district schools have overhead costs that will stay constant even if the district loses enrollment to charters.
PPP funds don’t “follow” students as an earmark the way Yes on 2 frames it, it’s an abstraction of the state’s education subsidy formula that is reimbursed to district schools as a lump sum for general instructional needs. Yes on 2 advocates point out that the state provides mitigating reimbursements to districts, but that honeypot has been underfunded since 2013.
This gap in funding leads to shortfalls that can fall unevenly throughout a district, leading school consolidations, school closures, teacher layoffs, etc. more difficult to manage in a responsible way, which can further destabilize the district schools, which can then be used to strengthen the charter advocates’ arguments. It’s disturbingly similar to the GOP “we break it so you hate it” model of governance. As long as we fund education the way currently do – with a mix of local taxes and state subsidies – this zero-sum game will not go away.
Charters in Massachusetts were originally intended by the state DOE (now DESE) to serve as incubators and innovators that would operate in parallel to the district schools and have more flexibility to try out new instructional, organizational, and other practices that can be hard to implement in districts with lots of institutional inertia. The state’s role was to be to oversee these charters and facilitate an exchange of best practices between the district and charter schools, as well as investigate scaling successful charter policies to the district level. The state has neglected this function in lieu of taking a more adversarial position with district schools contra charters.
Unless the state recommits to this project in a meaningful way, the addition of charters will only further destabilize, rather than strengthen district schools. In an environment that lacks interscholastic collegiality and state facilitation, expanding the commonwealth charter system opens the door to accelerating the decline in certain district schools and leading down the path toward back-door privatization.
Over 190 school committees in the Commonwealth have come out against Question 2. These are not the local unions, but the elected administrators of the school districts. These elected bodies understand that their district budgets and their communities’ tax bases can’t accept the burden that potential charter schools would create. Local voters, who fund a substantial portion of their district’s school budget would likely see increases in property tax assessments and more override votes if a charter came to town.
As mentioned, charters do indeed have long waiting lists in urban districts, and studies show that MA charters have higher rates of graduation and college enrollment than their peer district schools, but this data is no more valid than the long waiting lists at high performing urban district schools and studies that show such district schools with higher rates of college retainment beyond four semesters. Are there district schools that are failing in Massachusetts? Absolutely, but expansion of charters is not a panacea to solve such issues. Charters regularly do not reflect the demographics of a district, particularly with SPED and ELL enrollment. They are also not obligated to serve such populations the way district schools are, and yet, are judged on the same performance metrics.
Ultimately, given the deep complexity of these issues and the potentially disruptive ramifications, the voters of Massachusetts should vote NO on Question 2. Leave current law intact and signal to the legislature, governor, MTA, and other major players that they need to get their act together and pass an education package.
