>
>To: Marjorie Pritchard, Op Ed Page Editor
>From: Mary Ann Hardenbergh, Chair Citizens for Public Schools, former State
>Board of
>Education member
>Subject: Commonwealth Charter Schools
>Date: February 22, 2001
>
>A new budget buster is being nurtured in Massachusetts and nobody is paying
>attention. The advent of the charter school movement a short nine years ago
>was received with a great deal of enthusiasm in some quarters. Many thought
>that they had found a magic bullet so that miraculously inner city schools
>would be transformed into safe havens where, with the same or less dollars,
>students in all grades would be developed into intellectually curious,
>enthusiastic students, prepared to meet the complex needs of the workplace of
>the twenty-first century. The allure of the competition of the private
>sector that produces the best widgets in the world could be applied to
>educating children.
>We fast forward to the present in Massachusetts where we now have 39
>commonwealth charter schools with the anticipation of the start-up of at
>least seven per year until we meet the currently capped number of 72. In
>this fiscal year alone over $137 million will be spent by the state on
>commonwealth charter schools, money coming out of other public schools. The
>unheralded news story is that many charter schools did not do as well on the
>MCAS as their sending school district and many did considerably worse. Yet
>these dollars only serve about 12,500 students, amounting to almost $11,000
>per child, more than one and a half times the state's targeted or
>"foundation" level of spending for children in public schools.
>Even as the Massachusetts Board of Education prepares next week to approve
>more commonwealth charter schools, deep concerns about this educational
>initiative continue to grow. At every turn, it would seem - cost, academic
>achievement, accountability - charter schools have over-promised and
>under-delivered. It is time for the legislature to impose an immediate
>moratorium on granting new commonwealth charters, and begin the work of
>integrating these schools into the public system where they can be adequately
>overseen.
>Ironically, this enormously expensive initiative owes its existence to the
>ceaseless lobbying of the Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank that
>claims to favor government doing "less with less." Instead, many commonwealth
>charters are doing less with more. As one study after another has
>documented, compared with public schools, charter schools, in general, avoid
>the expensive to educate children (special education, bilingual and
>vocational ed students) and several schools have encountered fiscal problems
>and/ or irregularities cited by the State Auditor, Inspector General and
>Board of Education; conflict-of-interest issues abound.
>As talk of the state budget and a possible economic slow down dominates the
>news, alarm bells are ringing for the charter school movement. Now is the
>time to take a close look at commonwealth charter schools, the new budget
>buster in Massachusetts!
Anne Wheelock