The November referendum on charters in Massachusetts has raised important questions. The measure would permit the addition of 12 new charter schools every tear into the future. What problem does that solve?
It pits group against group, reduces the funding available to Boston public schools, diverts funding from public schools to charter schools.
This is a crucial election. The billionaires are throwing in $20 million or so because if they can sell charters to the most successful state in the nation, they can sell them anywhere.
This election has national significance. Will Bay Staters agree to privatize public schools or stand together to reject privatization? Privatization always produces segregation. It never produces equity.
Mercedes Schneider has been following the money trail in Massachusetts, where voters will decide whether to allow charters to expand by 12 a year indefinitely. The issue is Question 2 on the November 8 ballot.
Some of the money supporting charters is “dark money,” bundled by committees that are not required to identify their donors publicly.
“To date, the ballot committees in favor of Question 2 have raised just shy of $14.5 million in unique dollars** to expand charters in MA– with $8.6 million of that amount (60 percent) coming from New York-based Families for Excellent Schools– and being dumped into the coffers of Great Schools Massachusetts.
“In contrast, the single ballot committee opposing Question 2, Save Our Public Schools, has raised $7.2 million– just under half of the amount raised by the pro-charter-expansion camp.”
“Thus, the total money spent on MA Question 2 is currently at $21.7 million. By comparison, as of October 05, 2016, the marijuana legalization ballot measure has a total of just over $4.3 million in funding ($3.7 million, in favor, and $634,000, opposing)– or only 20 percent of the amount of money behind Question 2 on charter expansion.”
Are the people of Massachusetts prepared to turn their public school dollars over to private corporations? Can they be fooled by expensive propaganda to privatize their public schools?
The public schools of Massachusetts are the best in the nation. Don’t let he privatizers buy them or steal them?
Ring doorbellls. Call your neighbors and friends. Don’t let the Walton/Walmart family of Arkansas take over and privatize your schools. The schools were built and paid for with your tax dollars. They belong to the people of Massachusetts, not to Wall Street and Walmart.
Christopher Martell, a professor of social studies education at Boston University, wrote a thoughtful explanation of why he would note NO on Question 2 in November. Question 2 would allow the state to open 12 new charter schools every year forever.
Christopher Martell gives five reasons for his decision.
Here the first three reasons:
“This is not a post about the merits of charter schools. Just like their public school peers, some charter schools provide an excellent education, while others are failing their students. The reality is that charter school students perform equal or worse on standardized tests than their peers in the public schools. In Boston, while charter school students perform better on state standardized tests, their public school peers are more likely to graduate college. Overall, Massachusetts has the nation’s best public education system, which is something we should be very proud of, but also something we must carefully protect.
“Instead, this post is focused specifically on the upcoming Ballot Question 2 in Massachusetts. If this question passes, it would remove the current statewide cap on charter schools and allow up to 12 new Massachusetts charter schools every year. If it does not pass, the state legislature will continue to decide how many new charter schools can open in the future. Considering all of the negative consequences of the ballot question at hand, I am using this post to discuss the five reasons why I will be voting NO on Question 2 during this November’s election.
“1. This ballot question will decrease funding for traditional public schools. Despite the “Yes on 1” campaign’s claims in television commercials that voting yes will result in “more funding for public education,” there is no evidence that this is true, especially since communities continue to receive less state educational aid. Even the ballot question’s most vocal supporter, Governor Charlie Baker has stated that Questions 2 will not change the current school funding formula. Currently, more than $450 million is being drawn from public school districts and with an increase of 12 charter schools per year (which according to this ballot question can happen indefinitely), it could cost local school districts close to $1 billion by the end of the decade.
“While charter schools are approved by the state, their funding comes largely from charter school tuition reimbursements from public school districts (see here, for more on charter school funding). Boston had a $158 million charter school tuition assessment, which was 5% of the entire city budget. If this question passes, it could lead to almost all of Boston’s state education aid being diverted to charter schools. Moreover, there are other costs that local districts incur related to charter schools, including transportation. Last year, Boston spent $12 million on charter school busing, while the district has been dramatically cutting its own students’ transportation (middle school students now use public transportation instead of buses and the school assignment policy was changed so more students would attend schools closer to their homes. Boston charter schools also get first pick of school start times).
“2. This ballot question will contribute to growing educational inequity in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts (and nationwide), there is strong evidence that charter schools do not serve all students. They typically have higher student attrition rates (which some attribute to charter schools “pushing” or consulting out students) than public school districts. They serve smaller numbers of English language learners and special needs students. They are more likely to use “no excuses” discipline procedures that can be harmful to children (to understand what this looks like, consider this in-district charter school in Boston or these two charter schools in New York). They are also contributing to an alarming trend of racial resegregation in schools nationwide. It makes sense to correct these inequities before any major expansion of charter schools occurs in Massachusetts.
“3. This is about privatizing public education. This ballot question is being pushed by well-funded special interest groups (who do not have to reveal their donors and many are from outside Massachusetts with no previous advocacy work for public education), who would like to see more private entities running public schools. Many of these special interest groups are supported by wealthy families (who do not typically have children in the public schools) and investors (who profit from investments in charter school companies and other attempts to privatize public education). If you believe that public education is essential for democracy, then this should raise serious concerns.”
You may wonder why I am posting so often about the charter question in Massachusetts. Simple. If out-of-state billionaires can persuade the voters of the top-performing state in the nation to authorize a competing, privately managed system, they can do it anywhere. This issue–Question 2–is a line in the sand that will determine whether privatization of public education can be stopped.
We know that the billionaires and hedge fund managers are pouring an unprecedented $20 million or more into the campaign to lift the cap on charters in Boston. If Question 2 passes, Massachusetts could add 12 new charter schools forever. At some point, there would be no more public schools. Unaccountable corporate chains would take over local public schools. Massachusetts has the best public school system in the nation. It needs better public schools in every neighborhood, not disruption and turmoil.
Our reader and commentator Jack Covey has followed the debates about Question 2 and shares his observations here:
He writes:
I”m watching the latest Question 2 debate, and the pro-Charter guy Mark just made some hare-brained claim that the teachers union’s motives in opposing Question 2 are racist, or — at the very least — their motives are rooted in the fact that the union leadership is white, and their white-ness is driving them, subconsciously or whatever, to oppose Question 2 … again to the detriment to students and families of color.
Go here:
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MARK, THE PRO-CHARTER GUY: “We have our strongest opposition from the teachers unions across the state, whose leadership is primarily white… our goal, and whom we are trying to serve, are those black and brown parents and young parents who are trying desperately to get alternatives for their children.”
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Yeah, right, that’s your “goal” … unlike those crypto-racist teachers in teacher unions who only care about themselves, even if that screws the education of black kids. This is in spite of the fact that those unionized teachers are the ones teaching kids of all races and classes — including blacks —- for seven or more hours each day.
Naaah, only billionaire-backed charter folks care about black and brown kids.
So if Barbara Madeloni and other Massachusetts teachers union leaders were as black as Karen Lewis, Mark, the Pro-charter guy, wouldn’t attempting this line of argument? No, then he’d probably characterize those hypothetical black Massachusetts labor leaders as an Uncle Tom sell-outs, who value big union officer salaries more than she does helping out her fellow blacks.
What utter nonsense!
Thank God African-American anti-charter Tito Jackson was there to immediately counter this asinine attempt to frame this as a race issue, and inflame racial tensions.
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( 35:27 – )
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCsZZ-J7mcU
( 35:27 – )
TITO JACKSON: “Mark, the leadership of the teachers unions is primarily white, but SO IS the leadership of most charter school in the city of Boston, and so I think that THAT is a critical component.”
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Tito then changes topic, then proceeds to debunk the vaunted charter school wait list numbers.
DEBUNKING THE WAITLIST
Think about it. If here were 30,000 – 40,000 people furious at being wait-listed and denied entry to a charter school, because there wasn’t enough of such schools, wouldn’t that mean these parents would have formed an army of volunteer campaign workers swarming the state pushing for passage of Question 2— knocking on doors, phone-banking, marching down streets, etc.? They wouldn’t need $20 million of out-of-state billionaire money. The volunteer component would be enough to win the day.
No, there’s nothing of the kind going on in Massachusetts. The pro-Question-2 stuff is all big money commercials, mailers, and robo-calls, not live calls from live volunteer workers, or live canvassers knocking on doors.
Anyway, back to what Tito could have said to Mark regarding the overwhelming whiteness of Massachusetts charter leaders, as well as those leaders not living in the neighborhoods where their charter schools are located.
Here’s what Tito could have said, but was said by someone else at the other debate.
In the other debate, the FEMALE MODERATOR, in a question to Charter Lady Marty Walz, goes into detail about THE TOTAL ABSENCE OF ANY BLACKS, OR ANY LOCAL PARENTS OR CITIZENS IN ANY POSITION TO EXERCISE ANY DECISION-MAKING POWER OVER THESE CHARTER SCHOOLS.
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(34:30 – )
(34:30 – )
FEMALE MODERATOR: “Representative Walz, for some who oppose Question 2, one of the issues that it comes down to is this, and I’m going to paraphrase Carol Burris, she’s a former New York high school, and she says
” ‘The democratic governance of our public schools is a American tradition worth saving.’
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” … and then the Annenberg institute for school reform at Brown University earlier this year released a study, and they analyzed EVERY board for EVERY charter school in the state of Massachusetts. and they found that ..
“31% of trustees (school board members) statewide are affiliated with the financial services or corporate sector. Only 14% were parents.
“60% of the charter boards had NO parent representation on their boards WHATSOEVER.
“Those that DID were largely confined to charter schools that served MOSTLY WHITE students.
“Here’s an example: City on a Hill (Charter) Schools in Roxbury — again, this is according to the Annenberg Institute Report — has schools in Roxbury and New Bedford, (has a) 14-member board, trustees for all three of those schools.
“ONLY ONE member of the board lives in New Bedford. Three live in Boston, but NONE in Roxgury. The rest live in (upscale communities) Brookline, Cambridge, Cohasset, and Hingham.
“So they (at Annenberg) ask:
” ‘How can those charter schools be considered locally controlled and locally accountable?’ ”
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Charter Lady Walz responds by claiming — and winning applause from the charter folks stacked in the audience — that local control through school boards has “wholly failed’ to produce quality schools and educate children, and need to be wiped out.
Those in the audience are cheering the end of democracy? Really?
Wait. Isn’t Massachusetts the highest achieving state in the U.S.? Really? She says that democratically-governed schools with elected school boards in Massachusetts have “wholly failed” students? Really?
At another point in the debate, Charter Lady claims their group is about improving all types of schools, but here she is recommending replacing all of traditonal public schools with privately-managed charter schools. So which is it?
The Moderator interrupts by insisting that Charter Lady answer the question about accountability, and Charter Lady brings up the only method needed — the Death Penalty AND THAT’S IT…. but no accountability to parents and citizens, while those schools are actually open, and ZERO OPPORTUNITY OR MECHANISM for those parents and citizens to enjoy any kind of decision-making power over shose schools while they are in operation.
And we need to watch John Oliver again to find out how well that works out:
While more than 100 school district boards have voted against Question 2, while the teachers’ union opposes it, it has the passionate support of hedge fund managers in New York City.
Thus far, about $12 million has been allocated to fight for charters; most of that money comes from out of state.
About half that much has been spent to defeat Question 2, mostly from the teachers’ unions, which understand that the charters will kill the union and remove teachers’ rights.
Will Massachusetts allow millionaires and billionaires in New York to create a dual school system in their state and privatize public money meant for public schools?
Mitchell Chester, the state commissioner of education in Massachusetts, is a huge supporter of charter schools, Common Core, and PARCC testing (he was chair of the PARCC group). He approved a charter school for Brockton, despite loud community opposition. He recently met with parents at the Brockton High School, and when he mentioned the new charter for Brockton, he was met with boos and hissing. The Brockton charter was not ready on time, but received state permission to open in Norwood, 22 miles away. Chester defended the charter on grounds that it was able to recruit nearly 300 students from the Brockton public schools. Parents were unhappy because the Brockton public schools have seen budget cuts, which they attribute to the charter school.
Brockton High School, which has been repeatedly honored (including a front-page story in the NY Times) for excellence, enrolls more than 4,000 students. The charter school, New Heights, will enroll 315 (not there yet). The thousands of students at the public high school will lose programs so that the state can open a charter school to serve the same community.
If New Heights reaches an enrollment of 315 students by October, it will receive $3.96 million in state and local funds, based on early projections, Reis said.
Brockton parents like Dominique Cassamajor said that money would be better spent on Brockton Public Schools, including the elementary school attended by her 9-year-old daughter, especially when the district is already dealing with a difficult budget.
“I don’t like it at all,” Cassamajor said. “I know people who have kids in the new school, but it’s just taking away funds from Brockton Public Schools. Everybody has their choices. But to me, it’s taking away money from most of the kids. The classroom already has a deficit. That’s why we are doing the Brockton Kids Count campaign.”
So what is the logic in Brockton? Open a charter for 315 kids and take resources from the high school that serves 4,000+ kids?
Paul Sagan, the chair of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees and approves charter schools, gave $100,000 to the campaign to raise the cap on charters. This is a blatant conflict of interest. He is supposed to review and monitor, not cheerlead for them.
Please sign this petition to Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts calling to him to seek Paul Sagan’s resignation.
The petition says:
This year, 231 local school districts will lose more than $450 million to charter schools, even after state reimbursements. If Question 2 passes, it would more than triple the number of charter schools in just ten years, and take away more than $1 billion a year from our local public schools.
Jonathan Pelto reports on the big money that will flow into the Massachusetts referendum on expanding charters. Most of it will flow from the coffers of hedge fund managers, who never showed any prior interest in improving public schools but get excited by the opportunity to privatize them.
He writes:
A group of billionaires and corporate executives are using a front group called Great Schools Massachusetts and the New York based charter school advocacy group, Families for Excellent Schools, to pour an unprecedented amount of money into a campaign to expand the number of charter schools in Massachusetts.
According to published reports, the charter school industry is on track to dump up to $18 million into a record-breaking campaign in support of Massachusetts Question 2, a referendum question on this year’s ballot that would effectively lift the legislatively mandated cap on the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter school, pro-Governor Andrew Cuomo, anti-teacher group has led a series of expensive advocacy campaigns in New York State and Connecticut on behalf of the charter school industry.
Expanding first to Connecticut and then to Massachusetts, Families for Excellent Schools has become the preferred money pipeline of choice for a group of corporate elites who seek to anonymously fund the effort to privatize public education in the United States.
Thanks to the demise of campaign finance laws at the federal and state level, Families for Excellent Schools can accept unlimited donations from those who profit from or support the rise of charter school, the Common Core and the Common Core testing scheme.
While most of the money flowing into the Massachusetts Question 2 campaign can’t be traced, public documents reveal that a handful of hedge fund managers and corporate executives donated $40,000 each to kick start the campaign aimed at diverting even more scarce public funds from public schools to charter schools.
Most of the key players in the Question 2 operation are directly or indirectly associated with a handful of hedge fund companies including, Bain Capital, the Baupost Group and Highfields Capital Management.
Leading the effort from Bain Capital is Josh Bekenstein, the managing partner at the infamous company. Bekenstein is a long-time charter supporter having donated massive amounts of money to pro-voucher, anti-teacher, pro-charter school groups including Stand for Children, Teach for America, and the KIPP and Citizen charter school chains.
In addition, Bekenstein has played an instrumental role for both New Profit, Inc. and the NewSchools Venture Fund, two of the major funders behind the charter school movement in Massachusetts and across the nation.
New Profit, Inc.’s “investments” include major donations to underwrite the faux teacher advocacy group called Educators 4 Excellence, which is actually another New York based, anti-union front group. New Profit, Inc. also funds Achievement First, Inc., a charter school chain with schools in New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and the Achievement Network and Turnaround for Children, two more pro-charter school lobby and public relations organizations.
Through Bain Capital, and on his own, Bekenstein’s has also helped fund and lead Bright Horizons, yet another charter school chain with operations in multiple states.
There are many more financiers and bigwigs piling on to advance privatization. Read Jon’s post to see the cast of characters.
Jon’s post was written before we learned of the $1.8 million donated by two members of the Walton family of Arkansas. I wonder why they don’t fix the low-performing schools of Arkansas instead of telling the nation’s top state how to “reform” its successful public schools by opening up a dual school system.
We have had quite a lot of back and forth on this blog about Boston charter schools, in anticipation of the vote this November in Massachusetts about lifting the charter cap and adding another 12 charter schools every year forever. Pro-charter advocates argue that the Boston charters are not only outstanding in test scores but that their attrition rate is no different from that of the public schools, or possibly even less than the public schools.
Jersey Jazzman (aka Mark Weber) is a teacher and is studying for his doctorate at Rutgers, where he specializes in data analysis.
In this post, he demolishes the claim that Boston charters have a low attrition rate. As he shows, using state data,
In the last decade, Boston’s charter sector has had substantially greater cohort attrition than the Boston Public Schools. In fact, even though the data is noisy, you could make a pretty good case the difference in cohort attrition rates has grown over the last five years.
Is this proof that the independent charters are doing a bad job? I wouldn’t say so; I’m sure these schools are full of dedicated staff, working hard to serve their students. But there is little doubt that the public schools are doing a job that charters are not: they are educating the kids who don’t stay in the charters, or who arrive too late to feel like enrolling in them is a good choice.
This is a serious issue, and the voters of Massachusetts should be made aware of it before they cast their votes. We know that charter schools have had detrimental effects on the finances of their host school systems in other states. Massachusetts’ charter law has one of the more generous reimbursement policies for host schools, but these laws do little more than delay the inevitable: charter expansion, by definition, is inefficient because administrative functions are replicated. And that means less money in the classroom.
Is it really worth expanding charters and risking further injury to BPS when the charter sector appears, at least at the high school level, to rely so heavily on cohort attrition?
Charles Pierce blogs for Esquire, where he turns out spot-on posts about many issues. He lives in Boston, so he is well aware of the millions of dollars being spent to deceive the public into thinking that more charter schools means more money for public schools.
In this post, he explains that the issue is about siphoning money from public schools and sending it to privatized schools.
He writes:
The people seeking to blow up the cap on the number of charter schools here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) have turned on the afterburners in recent weeks, as we get closer to balloting in which a referendum on lifting the cap will be placed before the voters. The airwaves are thick with commercials about how lifting the cap on charter schools will provide more money to public schools, which is a dodge, because charter schools are not in any important sense public schools.
There is no public oversight. There is little public input. They are privately run and funded with public money. This is the same principle that has worked out so well with prison food.
In New York on Monday, Jonathan Chait jumps into the issue with both feet. (To his credit, Chait is quite clear that his wife works for a charter company.) He argues no less a case than that the referendum is “one of the most important tests of social justice and economic mobility of any election in America this fall.” Glorioski! And, of course, he characterizes the opposition to lifting the charter cap as wholly influenced by the all-powerful teachers union, which he casts as a thoroughgoing villain, and which he comes dangerously close to accusing of enabling racism—or, at the very least, as heedless to the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged.
This is noxious garbage; the great majority of the people represented by the teachers union work in classrooms that most of us wouldn’t walk into on a bet. And, anyway, as the very excellent Diane Ravitch points out, a huge number of local school boards have lined up against lifting the cap. These are not all puppets of the evil teachers union. Many of them are composed of people who have looked around the country and seen that an untrammeled charter system is an amazing entry vehicle for waste and fraud. Chait dismisses these people as the heirs to Louise Day Hicks or something.
Pierce reviews the millions pouring into the state from billionaires who live elsewhere, and he writes:
Call me crazy, but I don’t think Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family give a rat’s ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan. I think they are running for-profit businesses that want to increase their profits and, in Massachusetts, they see a chance to make themselves more money, the way they have in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, and all those other places where education is considered an industry and children, essentially products. (Especially Sacramento, where Michelle Rhee, Queen of the Grifters, is married to Kevin Johnson, a truly horrible person.)
They are not campaigning for freedom of choice for Massachusetts children. They are campaigning for their own freedom to gobble more and more from the public trough. See also: Privatization, all forms of.
In fairness, I don’t think Bloomberg or the Waltons expect to make a profit. They don’t need the money. I think they have a dedication to the free market (it works for them), and you can be sure that the opening of more charters will attract profiteers and entrepreneurs. It has happened everywhere else. Why would Massachusetts be immune? Deregulation and privatization will undermine Massachusetts’ excellent school system. School board members understand the threat, which is why more than 100 school boards have passed resolutions against Question 2, and not even one school board supports it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 