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A ballot question favored by progressives this fall is about restricting choice and opportunity.
Question 2 would raise the cap on the number of charter schools permitted in the state, allowing 12 additional schools. Priority would be given to charters opening in areas where the existing schools are in the bottom 25 percent in the state in terms of performance. According to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, there are 78 operating charter schools in Massachusetts, and two being planned. Nine are Horace Mann charter schools, which operate inside the traditional public school. Locally, we have Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in East Harwich which is one of only 20 charter schools in the state still operating since the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1993. To date, the board has revoked or nonrenewed seven charter schools in Massachusetts, while another dozen surrendered their charters voluntarily. Unlike public schools, which can fail for decades, charters have to renew their licenses every five years. About 40,000 students attend the existing charter schools. But more than 35,000 are on waiting lists for enrollment. They are among the 900,000-plus students who currently attend one of the 1,800 schools in 404 school districts.
The main criticisms leveled against charters are that they discriminate — “cherry-pick” — the better students away from public schools, causing them to continue to fail, and so on. The mythology of charters is that they are elite publicly funded schools, pirating resources from the local schools without having to follow union guidelines. In a way, the criticism mirrors the conflict between the top-heavy taxi medallion service and the more nimble Uber service.
One local article criticized Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School for being 98 percent white; when I wrote to the author and pointed out that Nauset Regional, the main sending district, was 98 percent white, he replied that was not the point. But in many ways, it is the point. The statistics on the state Department of Education website don’t back up that criticism. English as a Second Language students comprise 25 percent of charter schools’ population, while the state percentage is 19. Special education students in charters comprise 14 percent of the population, while the state percentage is 17. Black students make up 29 percent of charters’ population, while the state percentage is 9. But the most telling statistic is that 35 percent of students in charters are economically disadvantaged, while the percentage of underprivileged children overall is 27.
If charter schools currently comprise only 4 percent of the state’s public schools, why is there such a concerted effort to prevent any more from being opened, as if traditional public schools are in danger of being overwhelmed?
As with many things, it may be about the money. According to the charter law, the state Board of Education may not approve a commonwealth charter school in any community with a population of less than 30,000, unless it is set up as a regional charter school. With a variety of sending communities, often in regions themselves, a regional charter does not have as much financial impact as a new school within a municipality, directly threatening the single school department. For each child enrolled, a charter school receives a tuition amount from the state equal to the per-pupil cost in the sending school. That same amount is deducted from the sending district’s Chapter 70 school finance money. The money follows the child, but the administration’s costs and infrastructure don’t. I’ve never understood why the same argument isn’t made against school choice, which uses the same funding mechanism, but at least there the money is going to a different set of public school administrators.
I cannot pretend to be unbiased about this. I sent my child to Lighthouse in its very first class, after talking with his teacher, and its influence rescued him from potential failure in the regular school system. It is wrong to deny the potentially transformative effects to children trapped in the worst schools in the state. They have only one chance to learn as children, and they deserve to try in one of 12 new schools.
