When the Indiana legislature held hearings about education, parents drove hours to testify and sat for several hours as the imported “experts” spoke. Many of the parents had to leave after waiting for five hours.
Look at what happened in Massachusetts when the Legislature held hearings about lifting the charter cap.
The politicians danced in and out; some left early. The parents waited.
The foundations testified. The parents waited.
The school committees testified. The parents waited.
The heads of charter schools testified. The parents waited.
The charter parents in their matching T-shirts testified. The parents waited.
After hours went by, and almost no one was left, the parents spoke.
Look at the photo. It tells the story.
Who owns the public schools if not the public?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Last year when Boston Public School parents organized to oppose lifting the cap on charter spending (even though it would automatically increase 1% a year for 3 more years) they came armed with a detailed understanding of Mass. and BPS school finance and were able to argue against raising the cap by showing cuts that would have to be made in public school programs, staff and teachers as a result. The MA House raised the cap (they’re a huge disappointment because they’re in the pocket of the business lobby) but MA Senate did not and by a huge majority. They asked, Why are we building two parallel schools systems? and Where does this end? It didn’t hurt that Boston Schools have had a lot of improvement on test score gains and progress in areas that goes unmeasured. Boston schools have a greater rate of college going graduates than Boston charters, and a greater rate of college graduates.
We fought the expansion. We said “Our kids. Our taxes. Our Schools”.
Now we have a Republican governor who had a hand in lobbying for the original charter school bill 20 years ago plus former venture capitalist and current MA Board of Ed chair Sagan, and Sec of Education, the former New School Venture Ventures Fund CEO Peyser want to turn Boston into a 100% charter district 12 schools a year. The mayor wants 30 charters. Not one of the members of the appointed Boston School Committee showed up for the legislatures Joint Committee on Education hearing to say a word in approval or opposition. No one is speaking for the parents except the parents. And when the parents speak, everyone else has gone home, including the co-chair of the Joint Committee Sen Sonia Chang Diaz. She is on the right side of the issues mostly, advocating for pre-k, foundation budget fix, and 100% reimbursement for charter tuition.
We hope to win this fight.
“We” won Market Basket.
We won Boston 2024, a bid to host the Olympics which was another neoliberal asset grab– land and taxpayers funds in amount of $800,000,000+ before cost overruns.
We want to beat unified enrollment and get GatesCompact repealed.
And we want to save Boston Pubic Schools, the oldest school district in the US.
A local take:
https://digboston.com/charter-tank-a-roundup-of-arcane-and-ongoing-school-reform-snow-jobs-in-mass-and-beyond/
Wow. That photo. Could ed reformers make it any more clear to public school parents that their schools are the last priority?
Hopefully The Movement won’t capture your entire legislature or you’ll find public schools completely disappear from any debate or discussion. Once the “choice” mania takes hold it’s like public schools no longer exist.
To answer the question: Probably not! Too much lucre in it for them.
On one level, I don’t get this at all. I can understand the elected legislators of Louisiana going along with this type of abysmal, anti-public schools bill.
Or Florida. Ohio. North Carolina. Even Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.
But The Commonwealth of Massachusetts?!?! The first state in the country to offer free, universal public education to ALL children, regardless of their family income or connections? The state with the highest per capita income and level of education?
How could this be happening?
Well, the short answer is that charters were seen as a “progressive” and “innovative” when they first came on the scene almost a quarter century ago, when this ersatz Bill of Goods was sold to the public as something positive for education. What few saw then was how large and well-funded private interests were already planning on using charters as a wedge—a backdoor way of discrediting and defunding our public schools, and a means by which right-wing interests could finally achieve their decades long dream of phasing out public schools, one district at a time, coast to coast, ultimately leaving us with a fully privatized “system”, one that will allow us a “choice” between several bad alternatives for our children’s education, and destroying the community school supported by the surrounding neighborhood of parents and taxpayers.
And, with several billionaires and hedge funders ultimately bankrolling the PR campaign for charters, the old adage about “money talks” holds truer than ever. They can “throw money at it”—meaning the privatization campaign, of which charters, Common Core and constant testing are merely stalking horses and tactical implements—which conservatives only ridicule and criticize if it’s something they don’t like.
They’re more than happy to “throw money”—rapidly and lots of it—for anything they like, such as the privatization of our public schools.
Now, with a quarter century track record, people are becoming much more saavy and knowledgeable, about both charters and the powerful, megawealthy influences behind it.
And THIS tale in the Bay State is a lesson for ALL states, everywhere, that already have, or might be considering charter “schools”; they’re not to be trusted and they’re clearly not about education. If they were, proponents would be sending their own precious progeny to these supposedly “superior” charters, instead of in almost 100% of the cases, having the chauffeur bring them back and forth, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, to one or another private, elite secondary “academy”—such as Sidwell Friends or The University of Chicago Laboratory School.
Hold tight, citizens of Massachusetts—my former state and a place I truly love. Hopefully the opponents in the legislature can hold tight, and keep the cap on as tightly as possible. We’ve all seen the horrible outcomes in other states that expanded their charters. And we can only hope that Massachusetts see that too, and rejects any such attempt to revive the rotting corpse of charter “schools.”