This Election Day, Massachusetts voters will be voting on whether to lift the state’s cap on the number of charter schools allowed to open. A recent poll showed 48 percent of voters opposed to lifting the cap and planning to vote no on question two, while 41 percent were in favor. Dozens of local school committees, along with the state Democratic party, have already voted to oppose the measure.
But despite this widespread opposition, there’s a very real chance the measure will pass, for one simple reason: money. Wealthy opponents of public education are pouring money into the state. Walmart heirs Jim and Alice Walton have given a combined $1.8 million. Hedge funders and bankers have given hundreds of thousands of dollars more. In fact, the pro-charter camp has put $11 million into this fight, much of it from out of state. By contrast, the major committee opposing the measure, Save Our Public Schools, has raised $6.8 million, most of it from unions representing Massachusetts teachers. As if to drive the point home what kind of a fight this is, the charter backers have hired the ad firm that did the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads.
One notable Massachusetts donation supporting charter schools over public schools came from Paul Sagan, the Republican-appointed chair of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, who gave $100,000. But he wants us to believe him when he says his thumb isn’t on the scale.
All of this in a state with some of the best public schools in the country—schools that are increasingly struggling to handle the funding drain charters create. In one “historically well-funded” local school system:
With almost $1.1 million last year following 90 secondary students – an average of 15 students per upper grade – to nearby charter schools, 37 staff positions were cut over the last three years to balance the budget. That's teachers, paraeducators, administrators, custodians. In recent years, computer instruction and physical education were cut from the middle school. High-school class sizes, historically in the low twenties, are now up to thirty students. Delayed building-maintenance runs into the hundreds of thousands. Several world languages have been eliminated, while, in the next town over, an immersion-language charter school is expanding.
That means all the students in the public schools are losing out because a relatively few students left. And that’s in a school district that wasn’t already struggling, as poorer districts are. Last spring, Boston students walked out of classes to protest the funding cuts their schools already face in large part due to the charter drain.
The big-money backers of Question 2 want to see that effect doubled or tripled in every town in the state. No wonder all those local school committees are opposed to this attack on their schools.