Testimony
Concerning Senate Bill S.326
A
Moratorium on Commonwealth Charter Schools.
I'm
here today in an effort to convince you to sign on as a sponsor of,
and to advance out of committee, bill S.326, calling for an
investigation of, and a moratorium on, Commonwealth Charter Schools
in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I'm constantly hearing the phrase, “Boston has the highest
performing charter school sector in the country”. If you only look at
test scores that appears to be true, but if you dig deeper and look
at how the test scores are obtained, you'll see something that's not very pleasant, something that is horribly wrong. The
charter high schools in Boston push out an average of 13.5% of a
cohort a year. That works out to 40.5% every three years, and guess what? As a
result - their test scores and grads to college stats soar.
A
really interesting thing is, if you look at the number of students
that entered high school as freshman in Boston Public Schools - that
end up actually graduating and going on to college, and compare that
to an aggregate of the six Commonwealth Charter high schools in
Boston, BPS
beats the charters, 51% to 46%.
In BPS, 51% percent make it through high school and go on to college
- 46% make it through the Boston charter high schools and go on to
college. Even if you take out the three BPS exam schools the
percentages are almost identical. BPS 44%, charter schools 46%.
I'd
like to remind you that Boston is performing in the bottom 10% of
school districts in Massachusetts. BPS also has a 24% higher ELL
population then the Boston charter schools, yet somehow BPS is
beating the “Highest Performing Charter School Sector in the Country” in
the percentage of students that make it through high school and go
on to college, and that's the goal, right, to become college and
career ready?
Something
is seriously wrong here.
The attrition rates I started out talking about - don't show up on the
DESE web site. That's because DESE only counts the children that
leave over the summer. The exact statement on their web site is:
“This
report provides the percentage of attrition by grade from the end of
one school year to the beginning of the next for students enrolled in
public schools, including charter schools, in the state.”
The
fact that there is a huge attrition discrepancy between tracking a cohort through
year to year - and what the DESE web site states, is a good indicator
that the students are not leaving over the summer to go off to an
exam school , but that students are leaving during the school year,
when their leaving is not being reported by DESE.
A
perfect example is Brooke Charter School in Mattapan, where Governor
Baker announced his “Lift the Cap” bill last week. A
Boston Globe editorial
that also came out last week, about Brooke, opened by saying
“One
of the best schools in this city - and perhaps the whole state - sits
on the edge of Mattapan”
and
then went in to say,
“Others
suggest that charter schools get good results because they kick out
the bad apples. But Brooke has one of the lowest attrition rates in
the city.”
After
reading this I took a look at the attrition at Brook. It turns out
that the class that graduated 8th
grade in 2015 started out in 5th
grade with 47 students, and ended up with only 24 students remaining
to enter 8th
grade. That's
an attrition rate of 49%.
One half of the class disappeared, and they did not go off to exam
school - because that attrition, students leaving over the summer,
would have shown up in the DESE attrition statistics.
One
way the charter schools get the students that they don't want to
keep, to leave, is by suspending them, over and over, until the
students and parents decide they simply can't go on like this. A good
example of this practice is Roxbury Preparatory charter school, a
school our new US Secretary of Education, John King, co-founded.
Roxbury Prep isn't the worst in suspending students in the Boston
charter sector - but John King is the one that set the standard on
how to achieve what, at first glance, appears to be a great school.
The
average suspension rate for students in the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts over the last twelve years is 5.9%. John King's Roxbury
Prep's suspension rate
average over the last twelve years is not twice that, it's not even
five times that, it's nearly ten times that, at 54.2%.
The
average attrition rate at Roxbury Prep,
for nine cohorts, starting with the cohort that graduated in 2006 and
ending with the cohort that graduated in 2014, is perfectly on track
with the Boston charter high school's yearly attrition average of
13.5% - and comes in at 13.3% - per year.
My
family made the choice to send my daughter to a BPS school. I'm not
sure any of what's going on with charter schools in Massachusetts
would have come onto my radar if it weren't directly effecting my
daughter and her schools funding.
Boston
Public Schools is now sending $122 million a year to charter schools.
That averages out to $953,000 for each and every one of the 128 BPS schools.
The loss of 6-12 children from my daughters small
school to charter schools each year results in a loss of
funding of around $132,000 for BPS. The students we never get, that
ones that went to charter schools in the first place, probably adds
up to about twice that. This impacts our school to the degree that,
in order to keep instructors in the classroom, all parts of our
schools budget that can be slashed, have been. It's to the point where our teachers have posted on Donors Choose - asking for pencils.
I'm
here today to ask you to stop what's happening here. I'm here today
to ask you to let any bill that proposes to lift the cap on the
number of charter schools in Massachusetts - die on the vine. I'm
asking you to sponsor and advance bill S.326, calling for an
investigation of, and a moratorium on, Commonwealth Charter Schools
in Massachusetts.
I'm
hoping that what's going on here can be exposed, and that the people
that are responsible for this fraud will be punished.
Thank
you for your service, and for allowing me to speak today.
