by Dianna Vosburg
10/19/2016

The Charter School Debate: No on Question 2

Dianna Vosburg

Ballot Question 2: Authorizes the approval of up to 12 new charter schools or enrollment expansions in existing charter schools by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education per year.

Great Schools is flooding the state with ads to lift the cap. I see them on my Facebook feed, hear them on the radio…there’s no escaping. All of those ads cost money, and a lot of it. Who is actually funding this effort, and why?

It turns out that a majority of the dark money comes from out-of-state hedge fund managers, billionaires, and corporate interests, including Sam and Alice Walton (Walmart heirs) who together donated $1,800,000.00, Michael Bloomberg, the Koch Family Foundations, and the Broad Foundation, and so on. Paul Sagan, who is the chairman of the state education board that approves and oversees charter schools in Massachusetts, himself donated $100,000.00 to the pro-charter effort. Why would a state official in charge of regulating charter schools give such an enormous sum? This is an obvious conflict of interest. Appointed by Gov. Charlie Baker, Sagan was the CEO of Akamai Technologies and is now a venture capitalist, and is also a long-time supporter of charter schools.

Why would these hidden wealthy interests want to privatize education in Massachusetts and across the country? First, unions threaten them because organized labor acts as one of the few checks and balances on organized capital. The Waltons, for example, are vehemently anti-union. These wealthy interests in this country have spent a hundred years swaying public opinion against unions for a reason, and the demise of unions helped transfer great wealth from the bottom and middle to the very top. Second, public schooling represents a multi-billion-dollar business opportunity, and so corporate interests are salivating over the money at stake. This ballot initiative is another step forward in this project. It’s not about what’s best for students and communities, despite what you hear from Great Schools. According to the actual words of strategists who are grantees of the Walton Family Foundation to promote charter school expansion, the end game is clear. It’s not to improve education through competition. It’s to destroy public education entirely. Third, private interests could shift education inexorably toward mere job training and narrow ideological discourse, and away from the intellectual rigor, broad education in ethics and civics, and critical thinking that is absolutely fundamental in a well-functioning democratic society.

We need and deserve excellent education accessible to all, and that includes access to high-quality information, not just covert propaganda like these ads. I find this especially disturbing: rumor has it that Great Schools paid for “advertorials” to place pro-Question 2 fake editorials in local papers. They are trying to manufacture your opinion. Also, note that certain politicians and state officials who are pro-charter-school are--not coincidentally--making great use of lobbyist cash, ties to business associations, and the revolving door to benefit from their policy position.

The ads say “public charter schools,” but are they really public? They are publicly funded, but privately operated. Charter schools exist outside of the democratic process of local towns. Towns have no say in whether or not a charter school sets up down the street. Charter schools aren’t answerable to the public or democratically elected town officials. Charter schools are privatized schools, but we pay for them. That doesn’t make them public. Also, the dark money interests behind charter schools very actively push for deregulation and low oversight. The only public input they want is public money.

Charter schools drain significant money from public school that are already suffering through decades of underfunding. (A state commission found that we are underfunding schools by about a billion dollars a year. While Shane Dunn writes that charter schools receive exactly the same amount as what the sending town would spend to educate one child, resulting in a neutral effect on local schools, that’s not the whole accounting story. If one student leaves, the school still must pay for the classroom teacher, maintenance, and other overhead costs. Even including state reimbursements, which have been inadequate, to home sending districts, charter schools create a net drain from public school funding to over $400 million a year (state-wide).

If you feel that students in poorly performing schools should have a choice, that’s certainly understandable, but should that choice make the public schools even worse off, causing a downward spiral? Isn’t that actually anti-reform? What about the students left behind or pushed out? Charters create a two-tiered system of separate, and unequal, education. Besides, are charter schools really such “great schools”? Even in Massachusetts, which is commendable for its good oversight of charter schools, financial mismanagement and poor outcomes have led to charter school closures. Charter schools have not been the amazing hubs of innovation we hoped for, and the Brookings study referenced by Shane Dunn showed that students in suburban and rural charter schools do the same or worse than in public schools. Draconian suspension policies and high attrition rates mean that in Boston, some charter schools graduate only 40% of the students who entered as freshmen. Charter schools enroll fewer special needs students and ESL learners, burdening the public schools further with a higher population percentage of children who need and of course deserve extra help, but require extra expenditures to serve. These factors skew the data in the Brookings study. The Brookings Institute, by the way, is increasingly funded by corporate and wealthy interests, including the Walton Family Foundation.

In Finland, which famously operates the best overall educational systems in the world, all the public schools are funded equally and are of the same good quality wherever they are located in the country. Also, there is far less wealth disparity among the students. Poverty is experienced by the developing brain as trauma, and hurts a child’s ability to learn. Finland also has sensible parental leave policies, excellent subsidized daycare and preschool, and an educational philosophy the differs markedly from ours. They don’t continually test and stress students with standardized high-stakes tests. Students play outside for long periods of time, and Finland pays their teachers and respects them like the critically important professionals that they are. We could make schools a lot better here in America without privatizing them. Shouldn’t America have the best public schools in the world? We need to fund schools well through fair, progressive taxation, and fund them more equally as an investment in our communities, our nation, and our democracy, and we should work for economic justice to reduce poverty.

Whether Holliston will be immediately affected by lifting the cap or not, we have a responsibility to vote with all the students of Massachusetts in mind in all schools across the Commonwealth. Looking at the big picture, I recommend No on Question 2.