Boston public-school apartheid?
Think busing was a problem in this town?
By Chris Faraone
Originally published in the Boston Phoenix (October 2009)
At the Edward W. Brooke School in Roslindale — a kindergarten-to-eighth-grade public charter school — the push to advance graduates to elite secondary programs begins in fifth grade. That means students are routinely steered toward such private and parochial schools as Milton Academy and Catholic Memorial. How about your standard-issue Boston public district high schools, such as English (in Jamaica Plain) and Madison Park High (in Roxbury)? Almost never. In fact, quite the opposite: Brooke students are told explicitly by advisors and through literature that teenagers who attend Boston district high schools are “unmotivated,” “disorganized,” and uninterested in education.
The dismal reputation of Boston’s district system might be a sad reality of institutions filled with children from broken and low-income families. But according to teachers and administrators who work within the traditional order, charter schools are only exacerbating the problem by using tax revenue to help cycle promising city students out of the district system. In response, charter advocates are unflinching in their belief that the plight of the overall framework should not be a factor in considering the academic future of their select students.
Weighing both sides of the school-choice spat, two things seem certain with regard to Boston charters: 1) many are unfit to accommodate needy, foreign-language-speaking, or poorly behaved students, yet 2) they have proven capable of launching proficient learners onto extraordinary life trajectories. Indeed, the charter movement has by all measures replaced busing as the hot-button issue in a city that will always be the national poster child for operatic battles over public education.
Dropout factories
At Roxbury Prep, a charter serving grades six through eight, co-director Will Austin insists that placement counselors do not badmouth such destinations as Dorchester High or Madison Park; still, not a single one of the 54 2009 Prep grads matriculated to Boston public district schools. It’s a similar case at Excel Academy in East Boston, where more than two-thirds of students last year fled the district system for private and parochial pastures following commencement. The numbers are similar throughout the Boston public charter schools that terminate in eighth grade.
The charter-school conundrum is hardly isolated to the Boston area, where mayoral candidate Michael Flaherty is hell-bent on vast charter expansion, while incumbent Mayor Tom Menino is reticent to surrender municipal funds to programs that do not answer to his school committee. (In June, Menino did adjust his long-held anti-charter stance and vowed to turn low-performing district schools into alternative programs.)
At the federal level, President Barack Obama infuriated teacher unions (which oppose charter schools because, they claim, they divert funds away from the majority of students) by championing charter growth in his first education address this past March. Statewide, Governor Deval Patrick recently proposed legislation to double the number of charter seats across the Commonwealth to more than 50,000, inciting hundreds to rally at the State House, both in support of and opposition to his plan.
Back in Boston, a September 16 report by the adamantly anti-charter Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) fueled the crossfire, labeling all Boston public charter schools as “dropout factories” and accusing administrators of practicing “selective out-migration.”
“It’s this whole notion of pushing low achievers back into the public system, and guiding what they perceive to be high achievers into other types of schools,” says Kathy Skinner, policy and practice director for the Center for Education, who authored the controversial MTA report. “When thinking about this, people should ask themselves if charter schools should be able to create a discriminatory two-tier education system — and if public dollars should be used to support that.”
In other words: Hub charters have benefited many children, but possibly at the expense of the overall public-education infrastructure, not to mention the 50 percent of students who leave charter schools before graduating. Whether the net outcome is positive depends on who you ask.
Positive impact
Created through the Commonwealth’s 1993 Education Reform Act, a Massachusetts charter school is a public institution that is run by a board of trustees operating independently from local school committees. Theoretically, charters are intended to provide students with “greater options,” and “teachers with a vehicle for establishing schools with alternative, innovative methods of educational instruction and school structure and management.” Teachers, parents, nonprofits, and almost any well-intentioned secular, non-corporate entity can petition to open up a charter school.
By law, the 14 charter operations throughout Boston — as well as the other charters statewide — all select students through a random lottery (preferences are given only to brothers and sisters whose siblings attend a particular school). There are no entrance exams or interviews, and parents can apply to as many charters as they wish. Last year, nearly eight percent (or 4800) of Boston’s approximately 60,000 public-school students attended charters.
There is endless debate as to the effectiveness of charter schools, much of which stems from the uniform practice of exclusively enrolling students at certain grade levels (and not replenishing the student body). Boston charter high schools Codman Academy (in Dorchester) and City on a Hill (in Roxbury), for example, only accept students in the ninth-grade year. So, though both boast 100 percent college placement, many claim such figures are deceptive, and that charter schools manipulate data to solicit funding and admiration.
“Boston’s Commonwealth charter schools have significantly weak ‘promoting power,’ “ according to the MTA study on out-migration. It continues: “The number of seniors is routinely below 60 percent of the freshmen enrolled four years earlier. Looking at it another way, for every five freshmen enrolled in Boston’s charter high schools, there were only two seniors.”
That deliberation affects the comparison of traditional- and charter-school students on Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests and other academic measures. A January 2009 report by the Boston Foundation (which was commissioned by the pro-charter Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) was loudly touted by choice cheerleaders after finding that “charter schools — at both the middle and high school levels — have a very positive impact on student achievement.”
As far as those results are concerned, opponents charge that charters benefit from not having to account for students that they purge. District schools cannot legally enforce the same behavioral and academic sanctions as charters, which suspend students nearly five times more than district schools, and often expel underachievers and lose kids as a result of asking them to stay back. Furthermore, while charter admissions don’t discriminate, critics say they are ill-equipped to instruct learning-disabled and foreign-speaking students, who, as a default, mostly wind up at district schools, where they negatively affect test scores, producing low rankings and the sort of reputations that charter-school guidance counselors warn their students about.
The fight against charters will prove a tough one, as teachers and traditional-school representatives believe popular sentiment lies with administrators from the MATCH Public Charter School, which Flaherty cited as a model in his last debate against Menino. The MATCH Web site claims “from a kid’s perspective, we’re offering the educational equivalent of spinach and the other school is offering Twinkies.”
“We expose them to all the tools, and let them know that the ball is in their court,” says Joelle Gamere, the Brooke School’s director of high-school placement. “That’s our mission: take your knowledge straight to college.”
Still, Skinner and others opposed to out-migration believe that exclusionary attitudes are detrimental to the majority of children. “There have been success stories,” says Skinner, who says such practices are creating a “publicly funded private system.” “But they’ve all been at the expense of kids in district schools.”
Editor’s Note: In a previous version of this article on the charter-school controversy enveloping the city, a quote taken from the MATCH school’s Web site was misrepresented. That quote, in full, says: “So sure, from a kid’s perspective, we’re offering the educational equivalent of spinach and the other school [not schools, as we wrote] is offering Twinkies.” The MATCH School would like to point out that it believes a number of district schools provide an excellent education.
