Boston Marty Walsh, a supporter of charter schools, explained in an opinion piece in The Boston Globe why he will vote NO on Question 2, the referendum to increase the number of charter schools by 12 per year indefinitely.
He wrote:
“My reasons are clear. Question 2 does not just raise the cap. Over time, it would radically destabilize school governance in Massachusetts — not in any planned way, but by super-sizing an already broken funding system to a scale that would have a disastrous impact on students, their schools, and the cities and towns that fund them.
“This impact would hit Boston especially hard. Twenty-five percent of statewide charter school seats, and 36 percent of the seats added since 2011, are in Boston. Each year, the city sends charter schools a large and growing portion of its state education aid to fund them. This funding system is unsustainable at current levels and would be catastrophic at the scale proposed by the ballot question.
“For one thing, state reimbursements to cover the district’s transitional costs have been underfunded by $48 million over the last three fiscal years, a shortfall projected to grow into the hundreds of millions if the ballot question passes.
“In addition, our charter school assessment is based on a raw per-student average that does not adequately account for differing student needs and the costs of meeting them. This system punishes Boston Public Schools for its commitments to inclusive classrooms and sheltered English immersion, as well as everything from vocational education to social and emotional learning.
“If those factors don’t tilt the playing field enough, there’s a kicker. Because our charter school assessment is based largely on the district’s spending, the more high-needs students are concentrated in district schools — and the more we have to compensate for withheld reimbursements — the higher our charter payments grow. Currently, our charter school assessment is 5 percent of the city’s entire budget. Under the ballot proposal, it would grow to almost 20 percent in just over a decade. It’s a looming death spiral for our district budget, aimed squarely at the most vulnerable children in our city. It’s not just unsustainable, it’s unconscionable.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I guess I’m a very petty and vindictive person, but I love the thought of how this must be making the so-called reformers chew their livers.
And, wow, to finally hear a mainstream Democrat use the word “unconscionable” in relation to charter schools!
Maybe the worm is finally turning, and the greed and deceptiveness of so-called reform is finally making its way into public awareness.
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Michael, YES! If the billionaire reformers lose in Massachusetts and Georgia, they will have to slither away and find another way to undermine democracy.
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They already have that tool. The brand name is ALEC.
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Maybe Warren plowed the road for him. Hopefully others will follow Nation wide.
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I think Prop 2 is a classic case of political over-reach. The Reformsters COULD have moved their piece down the chess board a bit, but they decided instead to bite the hand that feeds them. They got Mayor Marty worried that HIS legacy would be damaged and become “the mayor who presided over the destruction of the Boston public school system.” NOT GOOD for any future political aspirations.
In terms of the larger political effect of the mayor’s position, it will lend wimpy go-along politicians a bit of backbone to NOT go along with what is so OVBIOUSLY bad for their own public school systems.
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Mayor Marty Walsh cares and, he’s a brilliant politician.
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There was legislation that would have allowed a lifting of the cap — called the RISE act, I believe. However, it also included requirements for greater government oversight over and transparency from charter schools … and the charter industry walked away from the table.
They wanted a lifting of the cap, PERIOD … with no such demands, so they went to the initiative process.
Well, the latest polls show that the “NO on Q2′ — to keep the cap on charter school expansion, or let’s just keep things the way they are — is running ahead 48%-41%:
http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/10/question_2_the_charter_school.html
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More work remains if 41% of respondents still think lifting the cap is a good idea. Too many people do not understand what is at stake.
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Yeah @ JB2, many Bostonians would disagree with both parts of that sentence.Walsh is definitely late to this party, bringing in Tommy Chang from LA to move along the privatizer agenda, but the economic impact cannot be denied. Walsh’s Chief Financial Officer has a devastating look at what the passage of Question 2 would do to the city’s budget and school system:
View at Medium.com
Here’s a taste:
“Based on a level of student growth associated with 3 new schools per year, with grade levels rolled out over time, and a consistent tuition rate increase based on a five year average, Boston could be paying $26,000 per pupil, or an $800 million assessment by FY28. To put that number in context, while today charter schools are 5% of Boston’s budget, Charter Schools could comprise almost 20% of Boston’s Budget in FY28. Under this scenario, charter schools would likely become the City’s 2nd largest expenditure by 2024. Unlike other major expenditures, such as BPS, the police and fire departments, pensions, and debt service, charter school costs would be dictated by decisions made by a state agency, and the City would have no ability to manage these costs…
Question 2 would in practice nullify community caps and create a nominal statewide cap of an additional 12 schools a year or 1% of the state’s student age population (an additional 9,500 seats per year). Although the ballot question would technically authorize the state to add a number of charters nearly equal to the number of current Boston Public Schools, we have modeled a conservative scenario under Question 2, in which three additional schools with 795 students each were opened in Boston each year. This is equal to 25% of the Question 2 cap, which is consistent with Boston’s current share of the statewide charter school population. If Boston added three schools per year, Boston could see an additional 20,000 charter school students added between FY18 and FY28. Because Question 2 creates a statewide cap, any Boston enrollment under the Question 2 cap (line shown below) is possible. In 10 years, the swift growth of the cap could essentially allow for Boston’s entire school district to attend charter schools.”
Question 2’s author is Marc Kenen, executive director of the MA Charter School Association. At the Askwith Forum at Harvard on September 27, Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson called out Kenen, asking why he had not written the ballot proposal to include a funding mechanism. Kenen gave no direct answer. It seems that the last sentence quoted above is the end game Kenen envisions.
The current charter law is carefully phrased so that when a school district raises its budget, charters receive more funding, as it is a percentage of school spending. In the “lower performing” districts, up to 18% of school funding can be re-directed to charters. Budgets do go up from year to year, of course, due to collectively bargained raises and employee health care costs.
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charter schools are a form of rationing: they choose who they think deserves resources and lavish …. meanwhile they weaken the K-12 under the school committee and superintendent’s direction/supervision. The intent is part of the test and punish strategy.
learning from history:
….pilots in World War II were given a mission in modified “Mitchells” (plane type). The man in charge wasn’t even a soldier but a sailor, Lieutenant Miller, who announced they would be lifting off from a five-hundred -foot taxi at 50 miles/hour. A Mitchell, fully loaded, required a thousand feet to launch, the pilots asked Miller if he had ever done this himself. Lieutenant Miller admitted that he’d need even seen a B-25 before.
This is the feeling I have with the “ed reformers” coming in from Fordham Institute, Gates, Walton, and even the State Department of Education expecting teachers to “do things with limited resources” because some guy paid a lot of money tells them to. With common core we had these circumstances (but granted it was not as severe as conditions of W W II) on the home front. My brother was in WWII and he would understand what I am saying if he were alive today; he could fly a plane, was flight engineer and could get out and fix the $@!* thing if the engine broke down. My father drove an ambulance in France during WWII and he was chosen because he could get out and fix the $@!* thing when it broke down. Why do they blame the teachers for the muck-up in flawed policy and implementation design and regulations from the federal and state levels?
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Rationing at best, looting at worst…
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A woman in Greater Boston posted this morning: Dorothy comments: ” A YES vote on 2 expands opportunities to students in hard hit areas. New schools have new libraries. My kids go to a charter school. It has a fabulous, well-supported library. These scare tactics divide us. Let’s do what is best for educating ALL children.” this is the lingo from the yes charterchatter (appearing as if it comes from a parent , but who knows.) Meanwhile even our local public libraries cannot open on Saturday any more and I wouldn’t call the public school library “fabulous” and “well-supported” so I wrote her a responding coment… will attach below.
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responding to Dorothy on MA Library FB page… “that is the problem because the public schools do not have those new libraries; and the city and town libraries don’t have funds to pay staff to be open on Saturdays …. it is a form of rationing of resources; the charter picks out a handful and says “youu deserve resources; those other kids don’t'” as a parent in a charter , do you see what is happening to the other kids? do you think they deserve less? why? Do you realize the Mayors are having a difficult time when the budget is “shorted” and they have to pay fire department, police department and our police officers are serving without a contract (defending US)? (end comment)
I remember Tom Rivard who was Superintendent of Chelmsford MA Public Schools and he said to me: “Jean, I have to make tough decisions ; do I buy microscopes for the high school or reading workbooks for first grade?” This has gotten much worse (in both towns and cities)…. when the state withholds resources etc… (I think I’ve typed this a thousand times starting when Romney was governor and now we have been through a recession and years of austerity).
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these comments are to express my outrage at Dmitri Melhorn and Stephen Ronann (who is back on Lowell Sun and Commonwealth attacking the “teachers unions” ) Dmitri and friends, I hope you are reading here.
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Jean, you’re accusing me of “attacking the ‘teachers unions'” somewhere else, without providing anyone adequate means of verifying your accusations. Kindly provide a quotation and link to what you’re referring to. Thanks.
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from a Worcester County parent: “Did you know that there was a proposal for a new charter school that would serve Grafton students from grades 6-12? If you look at the name of the proposed school you can see it most likely would NOT have served low-performing students.
I learned this at a town discussion on the ballot questions; thankfully, this charter school was NOT approved by DESE.
I say, “thankfully” because it would have been funded by our tax dollars and would have skimmed off some of our TOP performing students from our Grafton public middle and high schools.
Skimming off these particular students can make the overall test scores LOWER for our already excellent schools in town. Essentially, it “corrupts” the data and makes our schools look like they are not performing as well. Get it?
Food for thought: Sometimes the data we get in the news and other sources is just plan “corrupted or junk data”, yet so many uninformed citizens place a great deal of trust in that data. Opinions are formed and votes are cast based on numbers which oftentimes hide the actual agendas.
We in Grafton passed prop 2 1/2 recently, to support funding for our own great schools and teachers. We did NOT choose to dive deeper into our pockets to fund a local charter school.
Will a charter school eventually be opened in or near Grafton? Time will tell, but it HAS been proposed and blocked for now.
Charter and public school COMPETE for the same tax dollars. Your real estate taxes should not fund NEW schools when great schools are already in place and thriving.
Your tax dollars should not support new common core standards and testing either, when the standards and testing MA had in place for decades led MA to be number one in the US on those tests (NAEP etc).
We in MA are loosing local control to private billionaires in this state and in our country. Vote NOT to lift the cap on charters.
See through the data that sways your vote. We need to FIX those underperforming schools in our state. State receivership already covers that. Charters are not necessary
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