Lisa Guisbond, executive director of Citizens for Public Schools in Massachusetts, reports that the state of Massachusetts is set to compel the public schools of New Bedford to divert $15 million to a low-performing charter school that wants to triple its enrollment.
Two years ago, the voters of Massachusetts decisively voted against a measure to lift the cap on charter schools. The elected officials of New Bedford do not want the charter in their small city to grow from 450 to nearly 1,200 students. As we have seen time and again, democracy is an impediment to the voracious charter industry. As we learned in an earlier post, local leaders fear that the charter expansion will set back the progress that the New Bedford public schools have made in recent years. In this curious episode, the public schools are more successful than the charter that wants to expand.
She writes:
“The request by Alma del Mar charter school in New Bedford to add 1,188 seats to its current enrollment of 450 is mind-boggling. Such an expansion is exactly what voters in New Bedford and nearly every other community statewide said they opposed.
“Thanks to a vigorous grass-roots campaign, Massachusetts residents who cast ballots in 2016 had learned the basics of the charter school system: Privately run schools that have found ways to include some students and exclude others drain public funds away from schools that educate all children…
“While current Massachusetts charter regulations do allow for more charter school seats in New Bedford, the community has no appetite for what Alma del Mar is serving. The people elected to represent the views of the community—city councilors, school committee members, state representatives, and New Bedford’s mayor—have forcefully opposed this expansion as well as a smaller proposal from the Global Learning charter school to increase its enrollment by 100.
“It is easy to understand their opposition: Why shift $15 million from schools that educate all children to private operations that do not perform as well as many of the public schools, and do not dazzle in any way?
“Claims that Alma del Mar, which enrolls students in kindergarten through grade 5, is somehow exceptional are dubious. Even the state’s own narrow accountability system finds Alma del Mar is not meeting targets, while more than half of the elementary schools in New Bedford are meeting theirs. New Bedford Public Schools have far more certified teachers in their classrooms; last year more than 94 percent of the teachers in New Bedford Public Schools were fully certified, compared with fewer than 63 percent of the teachers at Alma del Mar. Also last year, Alma del Mar sought to send some of its students to public schools for courses the charter school was unable to offer…
“The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, not the New Bedford community, will decide the fate of Alma del Mar’s expansion as well as the fate of all the students who would be forced to withstand the devastating repercussions of New Bedford losing so much state aid for public education.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m now teaching in a school in in a small city in Western Massachusetts, and I can assure you that we are not exactly drowning in excess resources here. New Bedford, which arguably died with the whaling industry that once supported it, is in, I am confident, similar circumstances. Do these people at Alma del Mar, to paraphrase Joseph Welch, have at last no shame, no sense of decency? The people of the Commonwealth have made themselves clear about their faith in their public schools, and the fact that they don’t want charter schools here.
So why don’t these people, as they say in the UK (and forgive me the barnyard epithet), just piss off?
Because they are getting paid to piss on, not piss off?
Probably so, SomeDam. But I could never have hoped to put it quite so poetically…;
EXACTLY RIGHT, SomeDam Poet. Sickening people 🤮.
POSTED AT https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Students-at-Wilder-High-Sc-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Learning_School-Reform-181129-711.html#comment718145
my comment with links to this blog post.
Charter schools that don’t work, online-leaning that fails to teach?
No surprise if one realizes that LEARNING is what kids need, and only professional teacher- practitioners.know how to facilitate and enable the acquisition of SKILLS—THINKING SKILLS!
THE HUMAN BRAIN NEEDS A PROFESSIONAL TEACHER JUST LIKE THE HUMAN BODY NEEDS A PROFESSIONAL PRACTIONER OF MEDICINE.
AND HERE IS THE REFORM FRAUD IN Massachusetts” all part of the war on our schools playin gout in 15,880 separate school SYSTEMS IN 52 STATES — so that we have an unskilled ignorant citizenry which can be fed fear.
Lisa Guisbond, executive director of Citizens for Public Schools in Massachusetts, reports that the state of Massachusetts is set to compel the public schools of New Bedford to divert $15 million to a low-performing charter school that wants to triple its enrollment.
Two years ago, the voters of Massachusetts decisively voted against a measure to lift the cap on charter schools. The elected officials of New Bedford do not want the charter in their small city to grow from 450 to nearly 1,200 students. As we have seen time and again, democracy is an impediment to the voracious charter industry. As we learned in an earlier post , local leaders fear that the charter expansion will set back the progress that the New Bedford public schools have made in recent years. In this curious episode, the public schools are more successful than the charter that wants to expand .
Our school kids will no the kids for long… just as the adits in this nation whoa re being fed the constant media noise, know little about history or the reality what is happening. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/opinion/trump-the-monster-who-feeds-on-fear.html
“He wants us to be afraid, for it is fear that divides us, that sets us one against the other. If there is anything frank and bold about this presidency, it is Mr. Trump’s ability to invent falsehoods out of fairy dust and marzipan, solely to make us afraid — of immigrants, of transgender people, of one another.
“It doesn’t matter to him that most of the things he urges us to be afraid of pose no danger. What matters is that his paranoid inventions suck up our attention and make us focus, week after week, upon him.”
“Those of us in the media devote endless hours to refuting the latest barrage of hooey emanating from the White House. But even in this, we’re still amplifying his noise and nurturing, even in the process of refutation, the fear on which the man thrives.
“All of which makes covering this White House very difficult indeed. When Jim Acosta’s press credentials were suspended recently, the British journalist Jane Merrick suggested a mass boycott of the briefings. But as Masha Gessen in The New Yorker observed, this action “would mean walking away from politics altogether, which, for journalists, would be an abdication of responsibility.”
“So we can’t ignore him, and we can’t report on him without engaging in his game. In so many ways we’re trapped — which is, one suspects, exactly what this president wants.”
Diane I think old ideas die hard. Either that, or someone is making plenty of public hay, aka money, behind the scenes.
The old idea is that private schools are better schools. And of course in some situations, it’s true, and WAS true at times and in places in the past. Though public schools have weathered through change for the better as a general rule, the old idea has held on (MY child goes to private school) and then been taken-over and transformed into the idea of “charter schools.” This vague idea of “private schools are better schools,” then, has been grafted onto the also-old and very-American idea of “freedom of choice.”
Many here have documented the long-term effort to “snow” the American Public by oligarchs and the severely-distorted right (religious and otherwise) to defy democracy.
That said, from your note (and others here), it sounds to me like many savvy parents and school boards have broken through such mythical slop to find the fuller meaning of maintaining a vibrant public school system and schooling for their children. I read this morning that in Rhode Island some have openly claimed that students have a right to a civics education and are formally suing for it. (I teared up when I read that.) Diligence. CBK
In this post, Diane makes us aware that Mass.’ government, whether democracy or oligarchy, will be determined by the charter school funding decision.
Bill Gates is on the side of oligarchy.
Billigarchy.
And Gates himself IS the oligarchy: those who are sucking up overwhelming, unheard of amounts of money are very clearly choosing to manipulate society at their whim. Gathering up ever more money has become ALL.
Ahhh the soul of the ocean school maybe they can recruit octopus
Lisa Guisbond: Why Will the State Force the Public Schools of New Bedford to Spend $15 Million to Expand a Second-Rate Charter School?
Would she prefer that the state force them to spend the money on a third or fourth rate charter school?
I bet the state would be more than willing to accommodate the latter.