Letter to the Editor: In response to Senator Jehlen's discussion on Question 2

To the editor:

Judging from your recent story, “State Senator Pat Jehlen discusses Question 2,” Senator Jehlen may have left Tufts students and your readers with some misconceptions about Question 2, the ballot question that would lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts.

First, there’s a real crisis in urban education in Massachusetts. In Boston, for example, 50 percent of the city's district schools are categorized as level three, four or five schools, meaning they are among the lowest performing 20 percent of schools in the same category statewide. Further, 30percent of kids don’t graduate from high school, and just 12 percent of black men and eight percent of Hispanic men earn college degrees within seven years of enrollment. Unfortunately, this dire situation is not from a lack of resources. Boston spends more per student than many wealthy Massachusetts suburbs and similar cities across the country.

Notwithstanding Senator Jehlen’s claims, charter schools currently account for just four percent of public school enrollment and spending in Massachusetts, and their growth has come mostly in cities with failing schools like Boston. Predominantly poor parents of color, not wealthy enough to send their children to private schools or move to suburbs with good schools, desperately want to send their children to high-performing schools. So much so, that more than 32,000 students are on waitlists for public charter schools in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, a cap currently constrains the growth of high-performing charter schools.

Second, public charter schools are publiclyfunded but operate independently of district schools. They are funded just like the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), the regional school choice program and vocational education programs around the state. As in these programs, the funding follows the student. Cities and towns have been paying for these programs, without protest, for decades. When a student leaves a district school, they take the funding with them.

And public charter schools do have to educate all students. They are required to admit every child who wants to attend – including English language learners and students with special needs. If they are oversubscribed, they hold lotteries and pick students at random.

Finally, researchers at Harvard, MIT and Stanford have all found that Massachusetts public charter schools are the best in the country. Boston charter schools are particularly effective at working to close the achievement gap between black and white students in both math and English, and Boston public charter school students learn almost twice as much in reading and math each year as their district school counterparts. In stark contrast to Boston Public Schools, 98 percent of Boston public charter school graduates were accepted to college last June.

Professor Thomas Kane at Harvard has said that it is extremely rare to find such a large-scale evidence-based social intervention that can have such dramatic impacts on life outcomes. The gains are particularly dramatic for students with special needs and English language learners, whom public charter schools enroll at similar rates to their sending districts.

Whether you think that we should expand charter schools because they are making such outsized educational gains or because you think every family, regardless of color or income or zip code, deserves to be able to choose to send their children to a high-performing school, expanding public charter schools makes sense. That’s why I’m voting yes on Question 2.

 

Scott Oran

Chair, Board of Trustees

Brooke Charter Schools

 

Scott Oran is the unpaid and volunteer chair of the Board of Trustees of Brooke Charter Schools. Brooke educates nearly 1,500 low-income Boston-area students in grades K-8. Brooke's academic performance makes it one of the highest performing school districts — charter or traditional — in Massachusetts.

 

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