NEARLY A YEAR AGO, charter school proponents threatened to force a statewide debate on education issues by mounting a ballot campaign lift the cap on charters schools.
Be careful what you wish for.
It turned out teachers unions, school leaders, and municipal officials across the state were eager to have that conversation. When the contentious and costly ballot campaign was over last week, the charter proposal was steamrolled by a margin of nearly 2-to-1.
Charter advocates wanted to advance a social justice message by emphasizing the impressive results being achieved by the independently run, but publicly funded, schools, which they say are providing a lifeline for thousands of poor and minority students otherwise stuck in low-performing district schools. Their first television ad argued that charter expansion — the ballot question would have allowed up to 12 new charters each year beyond existing state caps — would mean a funding boost for all schools. It was an oblique reference to reimbursement payments to districts designed to ease the transition when students — and their tuition dollars — leave for charters.
It probably wasn’t the best opening move.
Instead of deflecting potential concerns, it aggravated them, opening a festering sore about funding for district schools, which local officials say are straining to make do under an outdated state financing formula that has not kept pace with spiraling costs.
“I think they miscalculated the support for charters and I also think they underestimated the concerns that many cities and towns have with the current system,” said Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz. “The proposal brought to the surface a lot of the concerns that many of us have been talking about for many years.”
It was only downhill from there for the Question 2 campaign.
Proponents’ early confidence was misguided, but somewhat understandable: Polls have long shown general support for charter schools in Massachusetts. But embrace of a broad idea is very different from approval of a specific proposal. That proved to be especially true for the charter question, which was complicated and hard to understand, yet touched on an issue that is a core concern in every community in the state.
“Ballot questions are not designed for complex, nuanced education policy,” said Linda Noonan, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, which spearheaded passage by the Legislature of the state’s landmark 1993 Education Reform Act. “They’re designed for yes or no. Do you want a five-cent bottle deposit or not?
Public dollars follow students to whatever school they attend, whether it’s a charter or a district school. Charter schools receive funding exactly in line with their share of the state’s public school population. What’s more, proponents maintained that the cap lift would only lead to charter growth in nine urban districts that were at or near the cap. But opponents said charters were already hurting districts, which have to adjust their budgets when students leave for charters, and argued that allowing annual charter growth indefinitely through the ballot question would only make that worse.
Barraged by millions of dollars in advertising from both sides, voters found the funding argument hard to sort out, making Question 2 exactly the sort of issue where holding pat seemed the safer course.
Great Schools Massachusetts, the pro-charter campaign, declined to discuss the election result. “We had a much tougher message task, and one that proved more difficult than expected,” Will Keyser, a strategist for the campaign, said in a statement. “We had to convince voters of the value of charter expansion while [the other side] simply needed to falsely position charters as the root cause of local school funding issues.”
Campaign spending shattered records for any previous ballot question in the state, with more than $40 million poured into ads, mailings, and staff. Proponents enjoyed a slight spending advantage, but that came nowhere close to making up for the ground game opponents assembled.
Teachers unions, led by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, funded most of the opposition, and the MTA’s 110,000 members were a ready-made statewide field organization ready for battle. But the “No on 2” campaign grew into a far broader coalition. More than 200 school committees voted to oppose the question, and municipal officials, parents, and students were drawn to the effort. In the end, the campaign says they spoke directly with more than 250,000 voters through either phone canvassing or door-knocking.
“We had no shortage of spokespeople,” said Lynda Tocci, the veteran Democratic strategist who directed the campaign. “Sometimes you have to create a narrative and juice up energy. We didn’t have to do that.”
Education reform issues have long defied easy political pigeonholing on the left-right spectrum, generating particularly passionate debate among Democrats.
National leaders, starting with President Obama and his education secretary, John King, who founded a Boston charter school, have embraced charters as part of the school reform solution for underserved populations. But other Democrats and teachers unions, a powerful constituency within the party, have railed against charters, which operate free of many district constraints and usually have non-unionized teachers.
In the Massachusetts debate, charter proponents were hamstrung by a lack of high-profile Democratic backers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has written passionately about the need to break the ironclad link between educational opportunity and zip code and advocated a voucher system that would allow open access to all public schools in a region, hemmed and hawed for weeks before issuing a statement against the ballot question. At one early rally on Boston Common featuring Question 2’s biggest booster, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, the only Democrat on the stage was state Sen. Michael Rodrigues.
Charter schools “had not been a partisan issue in the polls we had been doing for a period going back a number of years,” said Steve Koczela, president of MassINC Polling Group. By October, however, polling was showing a clear partisan divide, with Democrats opposing the measure 2-to-1. “Near the end, some of the partisan difference began to be erased because everyone was voting against it,” said Koczela.
Fewer than two dozen of the state’s 351 cities and towns supported the ballot measure, and it was defeated in every larger city, the places where charter attendance is greatest and where proponents expected support to be strongest.
The evidence is overwhelming that Boston charter students are significantly outperforming demographically identical counterparts in the city’s district schools. Rigorously-conducted research studies have shown that Boston is, in fact, home to the highest performing charter school sector in the country.
With some 30,000 students on charter school waiting lists statewide, 10,000 of them in Boston, Baker made one last pitch at a Roxbury rally the night before the election, framing the ballot question as a battle on behalf of low-income families’ “desire and desperation for something better.”
“If you’re thinking about the political calculus in this one, you’re not thinking the right way,” Baker said after addressing the rally. “This is about trying to give a whole bunch of parents just like me and just like many other parents in Massachusetts a chance to do the most important thing we care about as a parent, which is get your kids a great education.”
Of course, once Baker and charter school backers decided to take the question to the ballot, an effective political calculus was the only way to make good on that effort on behalf of parents.
Question 2 opponents insisted that the the focus should be on fixing what ails district schools rather than creating a parallel system that some students can escape to. But what would that fix entail?
With the charter-expansion question a settled issue, at least for now, leaders of the No on 2 campaign say they want the education debate to turn to funding of schools statewide.
It was a year ago this month that a state commission issued a report on the school finances. The Foundation Budget Review Commission said two decades of soaring costs for health care and special education services meant the state formula for aid to districts was underfunding schools by at least $1 billion a year.
“We’re going to work to fully fund the foundation budget – that’s our priority,” said Barbara Madeloni, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. “That’s what this is about now.”
But if the charter school fight proved to be too narrow a focus to win broad support, so too might an effort focused solely on more money for schools.
“If the solution that gets presented by the mainstream status quo system is to give us more money and we’ll be fine, I don’t think that’s going to be a winning argument,” said Paul Reville, the former state secretary of education.
He said we need to rethink everything about how schools operate, particularly those educating students that are lagging far behind their better-off peers — the same students charter proponents said were desperately in need of better schools. Reville said that means an emphasis on early childhood education and deeper connections between schools and careers.
But he said it also means looking within district systems to give leaders more flexibility over how the school day is structured and giving schools and teachers greater autonomy — as well as accountability for delivering results.
Innovation Schools, which were authorized by a 2010 education reform law, are a step in this direction, as is a special “empowerment zone” authorized recently to try to improve a set of long-struggling middle schools in Springfield.
One of the great myths of the anti-charter campaign has been that charters have failed to demonstrate innovation that can be replicated more broadly. The sorts of reforms Reville is talking about — school-based autonomy and accountability for delivering results when given that sort of freedom — are in many ways exactly the features of charter schools that researchers say are responsible for the success they have demonstrated in raising student achievement levels among low-income students.
“I would push that back on unions,” said Reville, now a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “You’ve been successful at defeating outside competition. What about deeper responsibility, more autonomy, and being responsible for results within district systems?”
Liam Kerr, head of the state chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, which strongly backed the ballot question, said Democrats have long advocated for both increased education funding and policy reforms. That started with the state’s landmark 1993 education reform law, coauthored by two Democratic legislators, which brought a huge infusion of new funding for poorer districts along with a host of reforms, including the introduction of charter schools.
“The history of Democratic-led education reform was, yes, we know we need to make changes, but we also know changes can cost money,” Kerr said. “I think we can all clearly agree the charter-only discussion took up too much oxygen in the last couple of years. We are excited to see the achievement-gap-closing ideas of the people who opposed the ballot question.”
“Fewer than two dozen of the state’s 351 cities and towns supported” Question 2? Wasn’t it more like just barely over one dozen towns voting for more charter schools?
Yes, “charters…operate free of many district constraints…” charters are free to not accept students! Specifically, charter schools K-8 are not required to accept students after 4th grade, charter schools K-12 are not required to accept students after 6th grade, charter schools Grades 9-12 are not required to accept students after 9th grade and all charter schools are not required to accept students after February 15th! When will CommonWealth come up with a more accurate description of charter schools?
Why is CommonWealth still peddling the charter schools waitlist false narrative? Seriously, why? The State Auditor released a report and a follow-up analysis confirming the charter schools waitlist is overstated. In addition, on October 31, 2016 WGBH ran an investigative piece, “Charter School Wait Lists May Not Be What They Seem” which clearly showed the number is still grossly overinflated. The charter school waitlist means absolutely nothing. Why isn’t CommonWealth talking about the waitlists for Boston Public Schools or the waitlists for Lowell Public Schools or the waitlist for state-subsidized pre-school? CommonWealth should be moving the conversation forward…not trying to put a spin on a resounding ballot defeat for more charter schools.
And what about “Rigorously-conducted research studies have shown that Boston is, in fact, home to the highest performing charter school sector in the country?” Let’s take a look at one of those studies. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) that used “a quasi-experimental study design” relying on comparing real charter school students to “virtual” or not real public school students. What did the study find? The real charter school students showed more learning gains than the pretend public school students. What does that prove? Nothing. Those “rigorously-conducted research studies” have narrow parameters or use old data or look at too few charter schools or exclude poorly performing charter schools or exclude charter schools that closed during the study period or exclude charters with poor recordkeeping or are financed by pro-charter school funding sources like The Boston Foundation or NewSchools Venture, etc. The “impressive results” aren’t so impressive.
It’s interesting the reporter didn’t mention In 2010 the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education released a report, “School Funding Reality: A Bargain Not Kept How is the Foundation Budget Working?” finding “Over the 17 years since the Education Reform Act passed, there has been virtually no equalization in spending or state aid between rich districts and poor.” What’s up with that?
What’s going on with Springfield’s special “empowerment zone?” It was set up for the 2015-2016 school year and according to a November 2, 2016 article in New England Public Radio, “As Charters Debated, ‘Empowerment Zone’ Promises Third Way in Education”, “The test results for the first full year of the Empowerment Zone came in last month. Duggan showed solid improvement. The other schools are more of a mixed bag, with some scores up and some down.” That’s not a success or even a step in this direction.
Come on, “One of the great myths of the anti-charter campaign has been that charters have failed to demonstrate innovation that can be replicated more broadly?” The State Auditor documented the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education failed to develop “an effective process to ensure the dissemination and replication of charter school best practices to other Massachusetts public schools.” When facts get in the way of the charter school narrative…ignore the facts?
Great Schools Massachusetts wasn’t just “the pro-charter campaign…” it was an out-of-state, dark money group that financed getting Question 2 on the ballot and airing commercials with outright lies.
If there’s any doubt public education is underfunded in this state then a history lesson is needed. In 1978 a court case was brought on behalf of students in certain property-poor communities who alleged that the school finance system violated the education clause of the Massachusetts Constitution. The case took FIFTEEN YEARS to work its way through the court system…with one entire generation of Massachusetts school children attending underfunded public schools…the court finally AGREED in 1993 and the state legislature finally acted…that’s how the 1993 Education Reform Act came about setting education standards, authorizing 25 charter schools and establishing the Foundation Budget…the state’s mechanism distributing aid to local public school districts. Then, according to Paul Reville, it took seven years for the state to double its financial commitment to local public school districts from 1993 to 2000. So TWENTY-TWO YEARS after the court case was first filed…Massachusetts met its financial obligation to public education first identified in a 1978 court case and addressed in law in 1993. In 2010 the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education released a report, “School Funding Reality: A Bargain Not Kept How is the Foundation Budget Working?” finding “Over the 17 years since the Education Reform Act passed, there has been virtually no equalization in spending or state aid between rich districts and poor.” Last year the “Foundation Budget Review Commission Final Report” was released finding a massive shortfall in state aid to public education in areas including English language learning, low income and special education. How is the conversation not about adequately funding public education now?
Question 2 “proponents enjoyed a slight spending advantage?” Slight? How about Question 2 proponents enjoyed a two to one spending advantage?
How come CommonWealth keeps promoting U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2003 book “The Two-Income Trap?” Is CommonWealth getting a commission on the book’s sales?
Question 2 was “steamrolled by a margin of nearly 2-to-1” but who’s extensively featured in this CommonWealth article? Mostly proponents of Question 2. Memo to CommonWealth: the proponents of Question 2 lost…THEY LOST…and when they lost the Question 2 vote they also lost their credibility. Stop quoting charter school proponents as though they’re saying something worth reading. They’re not.
The evidence is overwhelming that voters are tired of ‘the evidence is overwhelming’ statements that lack any credibility. Research by proclamation convinces no one.
Nope,
Just because your main goal was to defeat question 2 and won by a 2 to 1 margin doesn’t mean people lost credibility. Just another lie and scare tactic in your part. Now your credibility is at stake, if our don’t fix those failing schools your credibility can go down the drain. Public Charter schools are still operating providing a great education and they speak for themselves!!
Your fully funded statement is just a whole bunch of excuses for not doing your job well. Those kids you guys used as pawns deserve a better education and you will not deliver. It is your credibility is at test not ours!!!
The ads are true and the facts as well!! Failings schools in my district are not lies, they are facts so don’t twist it to your convenience!!! You are the liar using those kids in those failing schools as your pawns for your evil and dark interest. By the way I didn’t get paid and will continue to advocate for these kids at no cost. I am doing it from the bottom of my heart because is not right for people like you to keep on feeding fear to the families in my town.. I live in Boston and you probably not!!!
Lie after lie!!!
The results are better than your failing schools… leave out your rich towns and the data is different!!!
All thanks to the cap in place…. you are preventing those students to enter charter schools by keeping the cap!!
Yes the towns who desperately need better schools choices, the other towns voted it down thanks to your scare tactics ads!!!
The statewide vote against Question 2 was 62.1% and for Boston the vote against Question 2 was 61.6%. That means no more charter schools. That also means the state needs to fully fund the Foundation Budget.
Just so you know, the CREDO study focused on 41 urban regions across the country. If you took the time to read it then you’d know that fact.
There were 159,940 voters in Boston voting against more charter schools…voting against Question 2 while only 99,781 voted for Question 2. Your own City’s residents said no more charter schools.
All students should be entering fully-funded and fully resourced public schools.
Why don’t you do yourself a favor and read the State Auditor’s report?
The people of Massachusetts voted against more charter schools by a vote of 62.1% to 37.9%. Accept it. You lost. No more charter schools for Massachusetts. And be advised I am a grandmother who wants her grandchild to attend a fully-funded, fully-resourced public schools. That’s all I am. I am not a teacher or married to a teacher or related in any way to any teacher. I’ve stuck to the facts and don’t engage in name calling. That’s something you should try doing.
Fully funded schools in the suburbs that is grandma!!!
There is a big difference between public Urban and public suburban!!!
Please explain the difference between urban public schools and suburban public schools.
I’m a grandma who wants all public schools fully funded. And you? A dad who wants to fully drain urban and suburban public schools to benefit charter schools! Great…just great.
Grandma I find it hard to believe your only interest in fully fund your grandchildren’s schools. I also find it difficult to believe you have grandchildren in all 351 cities and towns!!! You are sticking your nose in towns you don’t have a saying. You are too opinionated.. I am looking at a liar!! Lying through your dentures!!!
333 of those 351 cities and towns voted against Question 2…against more charter schools. The voters in your own city rejected more charter schools. In other words, the vast majority of voters are on record opposing more charter schools. In crystal clear terms, more charter schools = dead issue. It will be impossible for the state to approve more charter schools under the existing cap BECAUSE 333 cities and towns rejected more charter schools. Find another issue to support. How about fully funding public education in Massachusetts?
So you won’t and now you can demand fully funded schools for your grandchildren’s schools and stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong and stop lying trough your dentures before they fall off !!! You are a winner of supporting failing schools in my district!!!
The Boston Globe reported Moody’s Investors Service said Massachusetts voters’ decision to reject Governor Charlie Baker’s charter school expansion plan is “credit positive” for the state’s urban governments, freeing them from potential financial pressures had the proposal been approved. The bond rating agency noted the history of charter schools “shows they drain money from city governments’ education budgets, citing Boston, Fall River, Lawrence, and Springfield in particular.” How the charter school drain works is: “A city that begins to lose students to a charter school can be forced to weaken educational programs because funding is tighter, which then begins to encourage more students to leave which then results in additional losses.” Moody’s went on to say charter schools “tend to proliferate in urban areas where school districts already reflect a degree of underlying economic and fiscal stress that can detract from a city’s ability to deliver competitive services and can prompt students to move to charter schools; this growing competition can sometimes create a ‘downward spiral.’” Why don’t you support properly funding public schools in this state?