The top officials in Massachusetts are gaga for charter schools and eager to see Question 2 passed in November. Question 2 would allow 12 new charters to open every year forever. Dark money is pouring in from hedge fund managers to push the spurious idea that expanding charters will help public schools, when we know from experience across the nation that more money for charters means less money for public schools.
Andrea Gabor has been following the drama of the Brockton Charter School, which was passed by state officials despite the strong opposition of people who live in Brockton. The charter was supposed to open this fall but has encountered delay after delay. Now it has been authorized to open 22 miles away. As Gabor explains, that is only one of many problems.
After multiple construction snafus that kept a controversial charter school from opening in Brockton, MA, the commissioner of Massachusetts public schools granted conditional approval yesterday for the school to temporarily move to a site in Norwood, 22 miles away from Brockton.
The decision to allow New Heights Charter School its last-minute move to Norwood is “political,” wrote Sue Szachowicz, the recently retired long-time principal of Brockton High, in an email. It shows how badly the Massachusetts department of education “wants to be sure that this school gets its opportunity.”
Adds Szachowicz:
“This will be interesting to see what happens. Norwood is a pretty affluent town, and not particularly easy to get to. Parents who thought they would be sending their kids to school in downtown Brockton will get their kids to school over twenty miles away in Norwood??? I do not understand this one! Politics, politics…”
Mitchell Chester along with Jim Peyser, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education and Gov. Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, are all major proponents of an upcoming ballot initiative, known as Question 2, which would raise the Bay State’s cap on charter schools.
Chester did impose a number of conditions on New Heights, according to The Enterprise, the local newspaper: The school must offer two days of childcare to make up for pushing back the start of school. It must also establish occupancy in Brockton by January 3 or face charter probation or revocation. The school also must issue daily reports on student attendance on each of the first seven days of school, followed by weekly updates on enrollment counts, staffing and monthly financial statements.
“While it is not unusual for a new school to have challenges with a single site, it is rare to have it happen at two places,”said Jacqueline Reis, a spokesperson for Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “Nonetheless, this is not the first charter school to open temporarily outside its region. … While a temporary site is not ideal, families appear willing to try to make it work.”
The Enterprise writes:
There will not be any additional taxpayer cost from the move, Reis said. Based on the maximum first-year enrollment of 315 students from the sixth to eighth grade, New Heights is receiving $3.96 million in combined state and local funds for its first year, which it supplements with grants and privately raised money.
Here is more background on Brockton-now-Norwood charter fiasco from an earlier post:
Amid an escalating battle over a statewide ballot initiative, this November, that would lift the cap on charter schools in Massachussetts, the Brockton charter mess highlights the greatest fears of charter skeptics, including:
–A sloppy approval process, and this in a state that prides itself on having the most rigorous charter approval process in the nation.
–A political establishment that ran rough-shod over the wishes of the local community.
–As families give up on the charter, which has enrolled about 200 students so far, well below its expected first-year enrollment of 315 students, for grades six through eight, they have already begun to return back to the public school system, wreaking havoc with enrollments.
Read the rest of this valuable post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We need much more common sense on board at the Massachusetts Board of Education. All we get is
political patronage. This school should never have been approved. Add this to the PARCC conflict of interest and it just might be time for Mr. Chester to step down.
Massachusetts continues to expand charters despite the fact that they have little need for more charters. The hedge fund managers want to institutionalize charter expansion by lifting the charter cap. While there is no evidence based educational reason for this, there is the intent to create a corporate welfare stream of revenue for favored players. Voters should vote against Proposition 2 which “Question 2 is fundamentally not about whether charter schools are good or bad. Rather, Question 2 is about what 12 new charter schools per year would do to the publicly accountable education sector and whether we think that’s a good idea.” http://scholar.harvard.edu/jmnoonan/blog/schools-open-schools-close-charter-schools-and-ties-bind
In her set of articles about the Brockton schools, Andrea Gabor makes a compelling case concerning improvements that have been made in the past 15 years at the High School and questioning the value and impact of the new charter school. But some elements of her arguments don’t cohere all that well internally, and with external evidence.
This year Gabor wrote:
“The result, says Sharon Wolder, the new principal and long-time Brockton educator, may be larger class sizes, which for many subjects already average around 35 students per class.
“Even though New Heights Charter School will be relatively small compared to the overall number of students in the district, funding for the charter school could have a large ripple effect. That’s because when New Heights draws, say, 100 sixth graders from Brockton, the losses won’t all come from a single school. Instead, the losses will be spread over more than half-a-dozen middle- and K-8 schools, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to consolidate classes.”
https://andreagabor.com/2016/02/27/is-politics-not-school-improvement-behind-brocktons-new-charter/
And one is left somewhat quizzical. Are we to assume that class sizes are all currently perfect as is, and whether they get larger or they get smaller that would be a problem?
And where (2012) she wrote:
“Susan Szachowicz, the principal of Brockton High, the largest public high school in Massachusetts, is determined to do better. Brockton High, as readers of this blog may recall, is one of the most enduring turnaround stories in public education; under Szachowicz, Brockton went from being one of the lowest performing schools in the state to one of the highest”
https://andreagabor.com/2012/10/29/will-brockton-highs-principal-succeed-where-mayor-bloomberg-failed/
How does that reconcile with what we find more recently in the Brockton Enterprise:
“That followed a move by the state to drop the New Heights plan after Brockton rose from the state’s lowest 10 percent for achievement.”
http://www.enterprisenews.com/article/20150112/News/150119422/?template=printart (January, 2015)
“Brockton High School remained a Level 3 school. The Level 3 designation is reserved for the lowest-performing 20 percent of schools in the state. Nine other public schools in Brockton were also classified as Level 3 this year.”
“The state accountability report said Brockton High School has “persistently low graduation rate for one or more groups.” That includes a 59 percent four-year graduation rate for students with disabilities in 2014, which was an improvement from the 50 percent graduation rate the previous year but still far from the goal of 80 percent. English language learners at Brockton High had a four-year graduation rate of 68.5 percent in 2014, nearly a mirror of the rate from the previous year, while the school’s annual goal for this group was 80 percent as well.”
[…]
“Overall, the Brockton school system retained the Level 3 district rating it was given last year. The system has more than 17,000 students, most of whom come from families that are below the poverty line, along with many families that do not speak English as a first language.”
“The school system said special-education students are a ‘valued’ subset of its student population. But this group accounts for 3 percent of the Brockton High School students, including those with profound disabilities preventing them from graduating within a traditional time frame, the system said.”
http://www.enterprisenews.com/article/20151216/NEWS/151216749
Note that Massachusetts’ system of 5 levels relies on a blended score combining “narrowing proficiency gaps, growth, and graduation and dropout rates”.
Where Gabor pointed to Brockton High as one of the highest performing schools in the state, it wasn’t clear to me on which measures she relied to arrive at that conclusion. Best I can tell, she’s referring to a phase where under Dr. Susan Szachowicz’ superb leadership, results on standardized tests shot up from shockingly poor to roughly average where they have stabilized. And not entirely due to teaching to the test:
“While scores have improved, Szachowicz insists that the school’s literacy initiative is not aimed primarily at improving test-taking. In fact, early on, Brockton did try to gear its literacy program to the test; the effort, which began with an attempt to improve the students’ dismal performance on the portion of the test that during the previous three years had required them to interpret a Shakespeare sonnet, became known as the Great Shakespeare Fiasco. For an entire school year, Brockton teachers force-fed sonnets to their students, only to find that the next state test didn’t include any sonnets. ‘This cannot be about what’s on the test,’ insists Szachowicz. ‘It has to be about what kids need to know, about their thinking routines.'”
https://andreagabor.com/2011/09/30/a-school%E2%80%99s-decade-long-literacy-obsession-and-how-it-transformed-brockton-high/
Dear Mr. Ronan,
Thank you for your comment–though, I must begin by pointing out that it is based, in part, on erroneous data, as well as a selective reading of Brockton’s data.
To put it simply, but for a statistical quirk, Brockton—the biggest, and one of the poorest schools in the Commonwealth—would be a Level One school, i.e. with the highest rating in the state. What do I mean by this? If you look at the chart at the bottom of this comment—and I hope that this is legible in the comments section—Brockton has far outperformed its chief accountability measure, or PPI score, on almost every indicator. (In case the chart is not visible in comments, please see the following link http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/school.aspx?orgcode=00440505&fycode=2015 .) PPI is a complicated aggregated measure of performance; if you meet your “target” scores, you receive a PPI score of 75; a score higher than 75 means that you exceeded your targets; below 75 means you fell short of targets. Brockton received a score of 86 for “all students”, a score of 97(!) for high-needs students, a score of 84 for African-American students, a score of 79 for Hispanic students, and a score of 93 for white students. For English Language Learners, Brockton received a 76, slightly above the 75 passing cut-off. It was only for students with disabilities that Brockton received a 73, slightly below its target score.
That “73” for students with disabilities is what relegated Brockton to a Level Three. Why? Because a dip below 75 on any PPI automatically relegates a school to Level Three on a five-level scale.
Here’s why Brockton has a particularly high bar to meet for students with disabilities: All students must take the MCAS in order to graduate. Students with “intellectual” disabilities, of which Brockton has an increasing number (more on this later), take an “alternative” assessment, but in doing so they automatically receive a failing score and are designated as “non-graduates”; thus, both the disabled student and her school is penalized for her disability and consequent failure.
Ethan Cancell, the executive director of accountability in Brockton, explains that because Brockton High is so big, the school educates relatively high numbers of highly disabled students who in other smaller schools would be referred out to programs that specialize in students with disabilities. Such referrals automatically take the “failing scores” of disabled students off the books of the sending school! This helps explain how Brockton fell just shy of a passing score on its PPI for disabled students.
Two final points: First, Brockton’s overall special needs population is about 12 percent, , NOT 3 percent. About 7 percent of its total IEP population takes the alternative assessment, according to a district representative.
Second, Brockton High is in the 35th percentile of Massachusetts schools up from the 29th percentile. Brockton High also outperforms 63 percent of all schools in Massachusetts on the performance of its English Language Learners. (This even though many of Brockton’s kids come from Haiti and Cape Verde, and arrived in the U.S. with no English and had schooling interrupted, often for years.)
As Cancell puts it: Relative to a comparable school full of poor, immigrant kids, most of them black or Hispanic, Brockton’s performance is “pretty impressive”. For a school of Brockton’s demographics AND size, its performance is “unprecedented.”
So how has Brockton been rewarded for its performance? The state broke its own chartering rules—not once, but twice—by allowing New Heights to apply for a charter in a district that is NOT in the bottom 10 percent. (New Heights’s first application was turned down.) And the state now seems determined to “save” this bumbling charter.
How did Brockton become an education battle ground for the second time in 25 years years? Stay tuned for my next post and my upcoming book from the New Press.
Thank you very much indeed, Ms. Gabor. I really appreciate your trying to help me better understand Massachusetts accountability data and how it may apply to Brockton High; my present understanding remains far weaker than I would wish.
It’s likely a minor point that doesn’t weaken your principal argument, but what you write here seems incorrect:
“That ’73’ for students with disabilities is what relegated Brockton to a Level Three. Why? Because a dip below 75 on any PPI automatically relegates a school to Level Three on a five-level scale.”
Compare the graphs at the hyperlinks here:
Brockton: Level 3 “Persistently low graduation rate for one or more groups – Focus on Students w/disabilities”
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/school.aspx?orgcode=00440505&fycode=2015
with these here:
MATCH charter school: Level 2 “Not meeting gap narrowing goals”
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/school.aspx?linkid=31&orgcode=04690505&
Clearly, it wasn’t a failure to score 75 on every measure that kept Brockton at Level 3.
I think what you’re alluding to is that a failure to score 75 on just the top two items (“all students” “high needs” students) in the narrowing proficiency gaps graphs would result in flunking the “narrowing proficiency gaps” goal, as MATCH did.
Brockton passed that test with flying colors, regardless of its 73 further down the page. MATCH failed that but still made Level 2. Failing on that score didn’t push MATCH to Level 3, but did prevent it from being classified as Level 1: “For a school to be classified into Level 1, the cumulative PPI for both the ‘all students’ group and high needs students must be 75 or higher.” http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/aboutdata.aspx
From the Brockton Enterprise article I quoted from in my prior message, I surmise that the key factor keeping Brockton at Level 3 had, instead, to do with a 59% graduation rate over four years for students with disabilities. That article combined with this:
“Schools are classified into Level 3 if they are among the lowest 20 percent relative to other schools in the same school type category statewide, if one or more subgroups in the school are among the lowest performing 20% of subgroups relative to all subgroups statewide, if they have persistently low graduation rates (less than 60% for any subgroup over a four-year period)”
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/aboutdata.aspx
It seems plausible that much of the explanation you offer re: students with disabilities is highly relevant to graduation keeping Brockton High at Level 3, rather than anything to do with proficiency gap narrowing.
I would be interested in a more precise understanding of how Brockton was calculated as being at the 35th percentile in respect to “overall performance relative to other schools in the same school type” while MATCH was calculated as being in the 66th percentile.
Do you have a good understanding of that, access to a formula or set of formulas? Does any absolute measure of achievement on standardized tests figure into it?
Perhaps relevant to that, I see:
10th grade math
Advanced Proficient
35% 29% Brockton High (64% A or P)
53% 25% Statewide (78% A or P)
63% 25% MATCH (88% A or P)
10th grade ELA
Advanced Proficient
34% 51% Brockton High (85% A or P)
49% 42% statewide (91% A or P)
36% 57% MATCH (93% A or P)
Good to hear from you that Brockton “outperforms 63 percent of all schools in Massachusetts on the performance of its English Language Learners” though I’m curious how one could make such comparisons accurately since classification practices vary so widely. Or is that a measure of performance based on Ever-ELL rather than current ELL status?
If I understand this correctly:
Click to access 2016capanalysis.pdf
the entire Brockton school system ranked 273 out of 280 districts statewide in achievement. But a much more impressive 72nd out of 290 in “growth”. Do you have a sense of how that “growth” is measured?
As you likely know, it’s combining those scores with a 75% weight for achievement and 25% for growth that is used for defining the “school districts ranked in the lowest 10 percent of all statewide student performance scores” that affects various charter siting/expansion/seat capacity matters. It’s on that key measure where the Brockton public school system as a whole moved out of the lowest 10% and up to a rank about 17% above the lowest scoring district.
http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/enrollment/capincrease.html
I’m curious as to what the implications might be if Boston were to move out of that bottom 10%.
Finally, where DESE describes the PPI as assessing “the improvement of each district and school toward its own targets”, I don’t have a clear idea of how much latitude schools have to define their own targets and what the incentives may be for creating relatively easier-to-reach or harder-to-reach targets. Do you have a sense of that? Hard to compare schools if you don’t have a precise idea of what their targets are? I get the impression that they’re all being pushed to make steady progress of some sort and perhaps in constructing those particular goals they all pretty much go only just as far as pushed?
Thanks again, for anything you may be able to add to my understanding.