Ok, here’s the first official blog post. It’s actually the first of several where I will focus on what I believe to be the most serious charge leveled against Massachusetts public charter schools. You cannot engage in a discussion on MA charters for long before someone asserts that charters manipulate their enrollment such that they are left with mostly “good” students, and we are told that is the reason for the superior results we see on standardized tests.
We hear this charge most often from traditional public school teachers and their unions, but it’s echoed by many who, for one reason or another, don’t like the idea of public charter schools. The accusation comes in many forms. We’re told charters “counsel out” students whom they do not like, or that they “push out low performers,” or that they “cherry-pick” their students by manipulating the admissions process.
So, let’s start the discussion with what Massachusetts law actually says about charter admissions:
(a) Enrollment Process. Charter schools may not administer tests to potential applicants or predicate enrollment on results from any test of ability or achievement. Charter schools may not use financial incentives to recruit students. Requirements for enrollment in a charter school, including but not limited to attendance at informational meetings and interviews, shall not be designed, intended, or used to discriminate. Charter schools may not require potential students and their families to attend interviews or informational meetings as a condition of enrollment.
The law as written makes it quite clear: any charter manipulating its enrollment for any reason, much less to puff up test scores, is breaking the law. I would add further any charter administrator or teacher participating in such a scheme is guilty of an incredibly serious breach of professional ethics, akin in its way to a nurse or doctor refusing to treat a very ill patient for fear of what it might mean to their care facility’s mortality statics. This is a serious charge, and it should not be made or taken lightly.
My experience as a charter parent, and as someone who’s done a bit of research on this topic, is that I see absolutely no conclusive evidence that charter public school professionals are doing this. The problem here is that the charge is easily made and difficult to counter as is always the case when one must prove a negative; i.e. prove that you have not done something. I could just as easily claim that you cheat on your taxes and beat your spouse, but were I do so you would be well within your right to say the charge is mine to prove; it is not incumbent upon you to prove your innocence. Yet proving innocence is exactly what the anti-charter lobby demands.
That said, I think we can demonstrate that charters are not engaging in these practices. In later blog entries I’ll bring more quantitative evidence to bear on this point, but for now I’d like to open with a mostly logical argument.
Let us for the sake of discussion say that the anti-charter folks are right: charters only achieve superior results because they break the law and manipulate their enrollment by various and nefarious means, and in the process achieve a Lake Wobegon like status of having all their children be “above average.” Since Massachusetts charters have, for the most part, been outperforming their traditional public school peers since inception, we must therefore conclude that charters have been at this game since the beginning, i.e. for the last twenty years. And here is where the claim begins to unravel. Some believe it was Abe Lincoln who said “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” yet fooling us all for the last two decades is what the anti-charter advocates require us believe.
The first question to ask is if charters have been wronging children for so long where are the legions of angry parents? Have they all been duped? Or are they sitting on their collective hands while their children has been forced from the schools of their choice? Where are their lawsuits? Are we to believe no lawyer would take up their case? Anyone familiar with the SPED classification process will know what it means to say a parent has “lawyered up;” it’s not uncommon at all. That thousands of parents would forgo legal action in the face of their child being treated in this way strains all belief.
Similarly, how is it possible that the regulator has been fooled all this time? Every charter in the state is inspected annually by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and each goes through a very rigorous process to renew its charter every five years. In the face of widespread “counseling out” none of these inspections produced evidence to that effect? We are required to believe the regulators have been asleep at the switch since the mid 90’s.
Where is the investigative journalism? Charters, by law, must adhere to the state’s open meeting laws. No reporter has caught wind of a cherry-picking story from complaints aired at a public meeting? Or perhaps they did yet did not find the story of a wronged family compelling enough to print?
And how about whistleblowers? There is no shortage of former charter school teachers now employed in traditional public school system owing to the better pay and benefits. These folks are safe the arms of the union and should have no qualms about speaking up. To the best of my knowledge no former charter insider has come forward.
Finally, let’s look at attrition data from the DESE. I’ll limit the analysis to Boston as it’s the best test case we have with many traditional public schools, the majority of the state’s charters, and a common enrollment pool. Boston’s traditional public schools have an annual attrition rate of 14% (source, page 12). For Boston’s charters it’s only 9%. Now, all schools have some attrition as students and families come and go for their own reasons; let’s call this “normal attrition.” In addition to that, charters have another kind of attrition that comes from simple choice; if a student wants to leave a charter, they may do so at any time. That choice does not exist for most traditional public school students so neither does that form of attrition in any meaningful quantity. So what the anti-charter crowd would have us believe is that charters, like all schools, have normal attrition and the added attrition that comes from voluntary choice and on top of those numbers a layer forced attrition and yet – somehow, someway – charters are able to maintain an overall attrition rate that is 35% lower than that of the traditional public schools serving the same communities.
As conspiracies go this one’s a beaut
Now, we get to thrust of this first, logical case against the forcing out charge. Which in your opinion is more likely:
- Widespread, illegal manipulation of charter enrollment that has gone on undetected, or at least unproven, by regulators, journalists, parents, whistleblowers, and attrition data for over two decades?
- The forcing out charge has been fabricated by supporters of single model public school system that is manifestly under threat by the existence of charters?
I think the answer is clear.
Bye for now.
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