Parents in New Bedford, Massachusetts, managed to stop an outrageous charter money-grab.
Here is a report from
Local activist Ricardo Rosa writes:
An unprecedented charter school model was introduced in the city of New Bedford, MA. Alma Del Mar charter school sought to expand by 1,188 seats, which would have meant the syphoning of $15 million dollars from the city’s public school system and likely a major hit to city’s budget more broadly. The school’s expansion was legal under the current charter cap. The school sought just about all of the seats undermining the very premise of the charter industry, namely, that competition is a positive value in educational reform.
The state’s commissioner of education, the charter operator, the Mayor and the superintendent crafted a deal behind closed doors and attempted to implement it very hurriedly to evade public scrutiny. The deal allowed the charter 450 seats, a closed public school and its land at no cost, and the crafting of a new public school zone allowing for a structure that bypasses the lottery system and where students in the zone would be automatically enrolled in the charter school instead of their local public schools as of fall 2019. Families could fill out a change of assignment form so as to stay in they public schools, but there was no guarantee that the superintendent (in consultation with the charter operator) would honor it.
Furthermore, the charter could, in three years time, seek additional seats if they so choose. Worse, the public school system had to agree to pay for a pre-determined enrollment figure regardless of how many of those seats are actually filled. Should the deal not work out, the commissioner structured a “Plan B” (an extortion plan really), which would allow the school to proceed with its lottery and expand to 594 seats.
The state’s Board of Education applauded the deal as a model that could be implemented in other working class and low income cities in Massachusetts. The model was dangerous in that it could have circumvented the charter cap through a complex “home rule petition” that had to be signed off on my the local school committee, the city council, and then move on to the state legislature for the introduction of a bill.
Massachusetts voters voted, overwhelmingly, in 2016 to not expand the charter cap despite large amounts of corporate money that poured in to support the initiative. This was clearly not a deal that would have affected just the city, but the state.
The New Bedford Coalition to Save Our Schools (NBCSOS), a grassroots organization of parents and grandparents of New Bedford Public School children, community activists, educators and youths, went to work at every stage of this proposal. The Coalition worked in solidarity with the local teachers union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and Citizens for Public Schools.
Members spoke to residents in a door to door campaign, hosted forums and film screenings to educate the public, spoke to parents at pick up and drop lines in local public schools, wrote Op-Eds, organized rallies, spoke to local and state officials, and wrote a policy analysis report they circulated with state legislators. The Commissioner of Education was forced to pull the deal. There is some indication that legislators are making an attempt to have a hearing of the full body of the legislature, despite the deal being pulled and multiple news reports citing that the deal is dead.
He explained there:
This is an effort to destabilize labor, capitalize on real estate wheeling and dealing in the city, and continue the pursuit of gentrification as an economic strategy. This property handover and automatic enrollment into the charter school is untested and unproven, contrary to the former state education secretary’s claim that it is “effective education policy and innovation.” This deal, however, really amounts to a form of corporate experimentation on New Bedford children that is immoral….
What is being introduced to families is a complex system and paperwork in the hope that parents and guardians will simply go with the flow. This approach is similar to filling out a mail-in rebate. Some will not fill it out due to various reasons. Others will fill it out incorrectly and will never receive the rebate. Even worse, the decision maker here can arbitrarily decide whether to honor the “rebate.”
This is a very dangerous proposal in the sense that it treats people as consumers rather than as citizens deserving all of the rights, information, and privileges of the common good. Automatically extracting a student from the public school that she or he is entitled to attend is antithetical to the values of the community.
These “third way” approaches are not unique if we look across the United States. It’s very naïve to think that this is a “better way to do charter schools.” The charter industry has come under fire across this country. In our own state we voted against expansion in 2016.
The Alma del Mar proposal is a politically devious and opportunistic way to skirt citizen resistance to charter expansion and to seek a new approach to doing business so as to survive. The mayor, the majority of the school committee and city council, and some of the state legislators who have stated that this proposal is the “lesser of two evils” need to be reminded that “the lesser of two evils” is still evil. This “pragmatic” lesser of two evils tactic may work for the short term, but it will just embolden establishment politics and undermine future chances for real progressive change.
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