CRA

I think it’s important to start off by saying that the first charter schools in Massachusetts arrived in 1993 as part of the education reform bill that we saw passed that same year. The original intent of charter schools was by and large good and driven by the right reasons — mainly to create hubs of experimentation, innovation, trying different educational models and then being able to bring them back to larger school districts that were struggling with improving student performance and outcomes.

As so many good things are, it was quickly hijacked by investors who saw charter schools as a lucrative business opportunity. And so began the co-optation of charter schools, to open more and more of them not as places of innovation but as replacements for public schools — replacements where generally speaking private boards were in control of school policies, parent and student representation was nonexistent and accountability to the public was nonexistent. They were supported by public funds but operated by private interests that were successfully lobbying for tax breaks and incentives that made returns on charter school investment even more lucrative.

So we’ve known this has been happening for a long time. One of the most successful strategies of the charter school movement has been exploiting people’s fears about their future and their children’s futures, particularly peoples’ anger at the failure of public schools to deliver the promises that we hold as a society.

Now of course many of us understood that the reason why some public schools aren’t as successful as others has everything to do with wealth inequality, poverty being probably the biggest factor in determining educational outcomes for students. This is compounded by the attacks on public education, and the defunding and budget cuts, that we’ve seen in the past two decades.

The charter school movement has been very good at exploiting that fear and using parents and students who have been frustrated with their public education system, who were left with no real analysis of why public schools aren’t doing the best they can. The movement harnessed their angst towards something that looks good but is actually a threat to the communities they purport to serve, and a threat to all students and all families.

In Massachusetts this has been no different.

Massachusetts had a cap that was put in place because lawmakers acknowledged that the expansion of charter schools would have a negative impact on the funding to public school districts, and acknowledged charters’ problems with accountability, transparency issues, hyper-discipline, counseling out based on test scores, selective enrollment practices, etc.

This year, the wealthy funders of the charter school movement saw an opportunity to move away from that legislative process, where a true grassroots coalition of students, parents, and teachers had roundly defeated them year after year. They decided to depart from that process and bring the decision as a referendum to the Massachusetts public.

I think they were overconfident in their ability to win, so they poured an unprecedented amount of money into this ballot question. But parents, students, and teachers came together and we quickly responded to that threat with our own campaign to defeat Question 2.