“Reward results, not compliance.” 1
- Pioneer Institute White Paper on ELLs
- Pioneer Institute White Paper on ELLs
“Criterion 3: Compliance: The school compiles a record of compliance with the terms of its charter and applicable state and federal laws and regulations.” 2
- Charter School Performance Criteria, MA DESE
“DESE’s data indicate notable demographic disparities between charter schools and their sending districts, both statewide and for the 21 Commonwealth charter schools in Boston.” 3
- Suzanne Bump, Auditor of the Commonwealth
- Where is the scrutiny towards the Boston charter sector, which continues to dramatically under-enroll English Language Learners despite legislative attempts that require them to recruit and retain a student demographic similar to the sending district?
- Who is in charge of enforcing the accountability measures of state laws related to charters and ELLs?
Lowering ELL Enrollment Standards for Charter Schools
DESE’s Feb. 2016 Charter School Enrollment Data Annual Report (which, by state law, the Commissioner must present to the Legislature every year) goes to great lengths to highlight the Board’s oversight of enrollment at MA Charter schools: “One of the Department’s key strategic priorities with respect to charter schools is to utilize enhanced tools and oversight processes to support and oversee compliance with these regulations (emphasis added).” In 2013-14 DESE showed its "resolve"on the issue of compliance with statutory enrollment requirements by adding a new set of expectations related to student access and equity, and developing CHART, the Charter Analysis and Review Tool to track MA Charter Schools’ progress related to these expectations.
All of this seems well and good until one actually looks closely at whose advice helped shape the “expectations” included in CHART. The advisees included “an Access and Equity Working Group of charter school leaders convened during the 2013 – 2014 school year, in conjunction with the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association (MCPSA).” 4 So, the State agency responsible for ensuring Charter School compliance with state law wrote their new regulations with Charter School leaders and the state's main Charter School advocacy organization. Let's take a look at how that worked out.
The first accountability measure included in CHART is called the Comparison Index. Here’s how it is described:
“The comparison index is a statistically calculated value designed to produce a fairer and more realistic comparison measure that takes into account the charter school’s size and the actual prevalence of student subgroups within only those grade levels in common with the charter school.” (emphasis added)5
In case you missed it, what DESE is saying is that in order to be “fair” and “realistic” in its oversight of Charters, it needs to lower the enrollment standards for ELLs established by the wording of the State statute.6 What does this lower standard look like in Boston Commonwealth Charters? According to DESE, it means that, Charter Schools in the community with the third largest percentage of ELLs in the state (30%) should receive special accommodations that only require them to enroll, on average, 19% ELLs in their schools. But the fairness doesn’t stop there!
As all good teachers know, when you make accommodations for a student in the classroom, you also need to adjust your assessments to meet those accommodations. So, CHART also includes a second accommodation called the Gap Narrowing Target (GNT). The GNT is DESE’s assessment tool for tracking Charter Schools’ progress toward the new reduced ELL enrollment standards. Here’s how the GNT is described:
The Gap Narrowing Target (GNT) refers to the halfway point between the school’s baseline rate (which is the rate in the 2010-11 school year, or the first year enrollment data is collected if after 2010-11), and the current Comparison Index (the “target”). The object is to meet this halfway point by the 2016-17 school year (or in a later year if baseline is after 2010-11), giving the school six years to do so. For a school to be on schedule to meet its GNT, an incremental increase must be met annually.7
DESE’s use of the the Gap Narrowing Target to assess Charter schools effectively reduces the already adjusted Charter School ELL enrollment requirements by 50%. What does that mean for Boston’s Commonwealth Charter Schools? According to DESE, it means that Boston’s Charter innovators have met or exceeded the standard if their schools have enrolled, on average, 8% ELL students. Thanks to this second accommodation, DESE’s evaluations of Charter School ELL enrollments are also no longer directly correlated to the student populations in the communities where they are located, as State statute dictates.
So how did Boston’s Commonwealth Charter Schools perform relative to these new lower standards? In the five-year period from 2012 - 2016, nine Boston Commonwealth Charter Schools failed to meet their Gap Narrowing Targets for ELLs at least three of the five years. Six of those schools failed to meet their GNTs for ALL FIVE YEARS.8 Only three schools met or exceeded their Comparison Index at least 3 of the five years.
Does that mean that even these new dramatically reduced enrollment standards for ELLs in Charter schools are “unrealistic?” Not if you ask KIPP Boston, MATCH, and Bridge Boston Charter Schools. As of 2016, all three have used their resource privilege as Charter schools to attain numbers of ELLs equal or exceeding BPS’ average of 30%. Perhaps it’s time for these three schools to share their “innovative approaches” to ELLs with their Boston Charter colleagues?
Using Demographics as an Excuse for Low Enrollment
As we noted in our first post on ELLs, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Jim Peyser is well aware that Charters under-enroll ELLs: “The biggest demographic difference between BPS and charter schools involves students whose first language is not English. About 45 percent of BPS students come from homes where a language other than English is spoken, compared to 21 percent in Boston charter schools.” 9
But instead of encouraging Charter Schools to rise up and meet the challenge of implementing new strategies for recruiting and retaining more ELL students, the Secretary has taken to offering demographic excuses meant to justify lower standards for the state’s "education innovators": “Part of this difference reflects the areas of the city in which charter schools are located and the racial and ethnic makeup of the surrounding neighborhoods, which supply most of the students.” 10
Is this statement true? Let’s take a look. We plotted the address of each Commonwealth Charter School in the DiscoverBPS tool to identify the closest BPS schools enrolling the same grade levels. We found that Peyser’s statement was largely not true (all of our data can be viewed here). For example, in 2016 Brooke East Boston has 12% ELLs, while the BPS schools Guild Elementary and Patrick Kennedy enroll 66% and 74.5% ELLs respectively. Brooke Mattapan has 3.7% ELLs, while BPS schools Sarah Greenwood has 46.4% and Lee K-8 has 16.2%. Academy of the Pacific Rim has 6.7% ELLs, while the Roosevelt K8 has 18.6% and the Channing has 19.5%.
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| Based on 2016 data from DESE. Each charter school paired with closest BPS schools using DiscoverBPS. |
Why would Jim Peyser, who obviously understands Charter Schools very well, make a statement like this? DESE’s adoption of the Comparison Index gives us a big clue, it’s called Unified Enrollment. BPS currently uses a home based lottery that gives preference to neighborhood families, while Boston Charters have a citywide lottery. However, the Mayor’s office and the Boston Compact (backed by The Boston Foundation) are hoping to unify the enrollment process in Boston and to change charter schools to a similar neighborhood lottery. Not surprisingly, unified enrollment systems like this one were championed by current Secretary Peyser when he was the Managing Director of the New Schools Venture Fund, an education venture fund for the Charter sector.
But are Boston’s charter schools prepared to absorb a dramatic increase in ELL students that certainly would come with Unified Enrollment? For an answer let’s take a closer look at Brooke Roslindale. For those of you not familiar with the Brooke system, it is one of the wealthiest (“financially healthy”) and fastest growing Charter school operators in Boston11, with schools in Roslindale, Mattapan and East Boston. In May 2015, Brooke Charter Schools were award the Pozen Prize for Charter Schools, "an $80,000 prize to recognize academic excellence and quality learning environments in Greater Boston charter schools." This Spring, DESE approved a Brooke proposal to build a new high school in Boston. Roslindale is Brooke’s flagship school, and is often held up by Charter School advocates and State Education Officials alike as a model for Charter school success.
As we mentioned earlier, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has a tool called CHART available on their website to evaluate the progress of Charter School Recruitment and Retention plans.
In 2016, Brooke Roslindale has 2.5% ELLs, while the statewide average is 9% and BPS average is 30.3%. In our research, we found the closest neighboring BPS schools enrolling the similar age groups were the Charles Sumner at 37.8% ELLs and the Philbrick with 17% ELLs. Clearly, DESE’s 2016 Gap Narrowing Target of 9.7% for Brooke Roslindale is a number that is only relative to Brooke Roslindale itself and not neighboring schools or the district. As you can see from the chart below, Brooke Roslindale has never met its Gap Narrowing Target or its Comparison Index in the past 5 years. Also, it has not made yearly incremental increases in its ELL populations as the GNT accountability measures dictate. For more info, click here for a simple comparison of all three Brooke schools using the CHART ELL enrollment performance criteria.
This Spring two Boston Charter school operators, the Brooke Network and Neighborhood House, received approval from the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to expand their operations in Boston next year. All three Brooke Schools and Neighborhood House failed to meet their Gap Narrowing Targets for ELL enrollment for the last 5 years.
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| Screenshot from DESE CHART tool |
Under a unified lottery, would Brooke Roslindale and all of the other Boston charter schools with a dramatically lower rate of ELLs suddenly be able to accommodate a more complex student demographic? Given a five-year track record in which 45% of Boston’s Commonwealth Charters were either unable or unwilling to consistently meet the dramatically lower enrollment criteria set out by the GNT, and only 15% of Boston’s Commonwealth Charters we able to meet or exceed their Comparison Index, you don’t need to be a Broad Foundation Fellow to answer that question.
We’ll close this third and final post with something for you to ponder as you consider the evidence in the Case of the Missing ELLs.
We’ll close this third and final post with something for you to ponder as you consider the evidence in the Case of the Missing ELLs.
This Spring two Boston Charter school operators, the Brooke Network and Neighborhood House, received approval from the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to expand their operations in Boston next year. All three Brooke Schools and Neighborhood House failed to meet their Gap Narrowing Targets for ELL enrollment for the last 5 years.
Now that Mitchell Chester has opened up another 225 Charter seats in Boston, perhaps it’s about time that No Excuses apply to DESE and to Charter School operators, not just to their students.
1 Charter Analysis and Review Tool - Demographics, http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/finance/chart/
2 MGL c. 71, § 89; 603 CMR 1.05. State law doesn’t identify a specific number, rather it states: “a student population that is demographically comparable to similar grades in schools from which the charter school enrolls students....”
3 Charter Analysis and Review Tool - Demographics, http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/finance/chart/
4 Charter School Enrollment Data Annual Report, MA DESE. Feb. 2016, p. 5.
5 Charter Analysis and Review Tool - Demographics, http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/finance/chart/
6 MGL c. 71, § 89; 603 CMR 1.05. State law doesn’t identify a specific number, rather it states: “a student population that is demographically comparable to similar grades in schools from which the charter school enrolls students....”
7 Charter Analysis and Review Tool - Demographics, http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/finance/chart/
8 The six schools are: Academy of the Pacific Rim, Boston Renaissance, Brooke East Boston, Brooke Mattapan, Brooke Roslindale, Codman Academy and Neighborhood House. All data is directly from CHART http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/finance/chart/
9 “Boston and the Charter School Cap” EducationNext, Winter 2014, Vol. 14, No. 1
http://educationnext.org/boston-and-the-charter-school-cap/.10 Ibid
11 For more information on Charter school finances, see our post on Charter School “Operational Gains".
