Vote NO on Ballot Question Number 2

Public school parents know the Back to School drill: In the piles of paperwork that tumble from our children’s backpacks during the first weeks of school, we’ll find a list of all the basic classroom supplies that our teachers need to do their job. Families with enough extra money will buy paper, markers, soap, hand sanitizer, tissues, and deliver them along with our kids in the first weeks of school. Many of us will be asked to do this again and again throughout the school year.

There’s a question on the November ballot this year that could make public school funding shortfalls even worse. Ballot question number 2, if approved by voters, would allow up to 12 new charter schools every year without any additional funding attached to them. Just as the world has been blind-sided with the far reaching implications in the wake of the Brexit vote, the passage of the charter school ballot question will have a far-reaching financial impact on all K-12 education sectors and municipal budgets alike.

There are a number of reasons why a NO vote on Question 2 is the right choice, even if you are in favor of charter schools. We’ll explain briefly first for those short on time:

• Ballot Question Number 2 would bring more charter schools to Massachusetts, but NOT more students and NOT more funding.
• The Commonwealth’s funding structure for charter schools is broken; the expansion of charter schools defunds traditional public schools of critically needed state education aid.
• Over 200 Massachusetts School Committees, Mayor Walsh, the Massachusetts Democratic Party, The Massachusetts Municipal Association, 8 City Councils and the NAACP oppose Question 2 due to problems with funding and the negative impact the additional charter schools would have on existing public schools and municipal budgets.
• Charter schools open (and close) without the approval of the local government or the local school committee.
• Charter schools use public money, but are privately operated.

Sold on voting NO on Question 2? Stop reading here and thank you so much for voting NO (and asking your friends to do the same). Skeptical? We love geeking out about public school funding and we’ll happily explain.

Ballot Question Number 2 would bring more charter schools to Massachusetts, but NOT more students and NOT more money

When a new charter school opens, students from nearby traditional public schools (and parochial schools, or even other charter schools) may leave to attend the new school. Despite a decrease in enrollment, the cost of running a school does not go down. In some cases the district’s cost may go up, because according to State Law, the sending public school district must pay for the charter school’s transportation. Traditional public school districts are structured to educate students; they are not designed to constantly contract and expand to accommodate the flow of students to charter schools (and sometimes back again).

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Ballot Question Number 2 will add 12 more charter schools per year in Massachusetts with no endpoint in sight and no funding source. This unchecked proliferation will no doubt lead to public school closures and threatens to end public education as we know it in Massachusetts, even though we already have the best public schools in the country. If charter schools are able to expand at this accelerated rate, our existing under-resourced (and sometimes under-performing) public schools will get worse, not better. 

The Commonwealth’s funding structure for charter schools is broken

Under the current funding structure, the sending district pays the tuition cost for the charter school using the state education aid earmarked for the entire district. When charter school proponents say the money follows the student, it doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. Because charter school tuition assessments are paid FIRST, a relatively small number of students receive the bulk of the state aid allocated to the whole district. There’s a reimbursement formula to help off-set the financial impact of a student leaving for a charter school, but it’s never fully funded by the state legislature. Here's how that scenario played out in Boston last year:

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It’s in part due to this imbalanced funding structure that a bill to raise the charter school cap failed in the Massachusetts State Senate in 2014. In 2016, an education bill passed in the Senate that would have tied a cap increase to an additional ~$1 billion in education spending, but the House failed to take up the bill before the legislative session ended in July.

Citing issues with the funding mechanism, Boston's Mayor Marty Walsh reiterated his opposition to the ballot question (31 minute mark) on Boston Public Radio in July. It’s worth noting that Mayor Walsh was a co-founder of the Neighborhood House Charter School and is a fervent charter school supporter. 

Over 200* Massachusetts School Committees, many elected officials, and the NAACP are opposed to Ballot Question 2

No school committee in Massachusetts has come out in support of question 2. In fact, over 200 school committees, 8 city councils, the Massachusetts Municipal Association, the Massachusetts Democratic Party, and the NAACP have passed resolutions denouncing the ballot question because of the issues discussed above. On the national level, Black Lives Matter has joined the NAACP in asking for a moratorium on charter school expansion. 
*EDIT: As of October 27th, 202 school committees have passed No On 2 resolutions.

Charter schools open (and close) without the approval of the local government or the local school committee
Prospective charter schools submit applications to open a new school to the Massachusetts State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). Approval is given by BESE without the consent of the local government or school committee.

In February 2016, the state approved a new charter school in Brockton, despite opposition from the Brockton Public School Superintendent, the Brockton School Committee, the Brockton City Council and Mayor. After the construction of the New Heights Charter School of Brockton stalled, the school was forced to relocate 22 miles from their intended location just days before the school year started, forcing families to scramble and some to withdraw.

In January 2013, the state abruptly closed the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School and 110 students were forced to find new placements in the middle of the school year. In a post-mortem audit of the Gloucester Community Arts Academy, Auditor Bump wrote:

“The ripple effects of this school’s closing were widely felt by its students, their families, their teachers, and administrators, as well as the students, teachers, and administrators of the schools that had to absorb the displaced students mid-year. What makes this especially troubling is that it was preventable. I hope the lessons learned here will be appropriately incorporated into management and oversight practices to ensure a solid foundation for learning and to make this the last mid-year closing of a charter school.”

Better results, or apples to oranges?
Charter school proponents boast that their students are performing better on standardized tests, but they are often enrolling and/or retaining students with less complex academic challenges. In Boston, the student population of the Boston Public Schools district is composed of 30% English Language Learners and 20% Students with Disabilities, while the charter schools in Boston are composed of 13% English Language Learners and 17% Students with Disabilities. As the number of charter schools expands and the number of district schools decreases, are charters prepared to educate children with more complex needs?

A recent study of Texas charter schools by Harvard and Princeton researchers yielded a surprising result. Though charter school students may perform better on standardized tests while in school, that did not result in increased income or better jobs for the graduates. It begs the question: Are charter schools simply teaching to a test?

Public money, private governance

Charter school advocates have long argued that charter schools are public schools. They are correct in that they operate with public money, but their governing boards (and their profits) are largely in the realm of the private sector. A 2016 report on Massachusetts charter schools by the Annenberg Institute of School Reform found that approximately a third of the seats on charter schools’ boards of trustees are held by members of the financial sector. Parents of charter school students make up only 14% of charter school trustees statewide, and 60% of the Massachusetts charter schools have NO parent representatives on their boards, even though state law mandates that 50% of the board should be parents.

In August, the National Labor Relations Board decided in two cases related to unionization that charter schools are private corporations and not public schools. The decisions were specific to New York and Pennsylvania, but it will be interesting to see if related cases arise as more charter school teachers attempt to unionize.

In 2015, the Washington State Supreme Court overturned a voter approved charter school referendum that passed in 2004 on the grounds that “money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools.” Massachusetts has a similar clause related to funding in our state constitution, but a lawsuit has never been filed on this specific issue. 

Please:

Join us in opposing Ballot Question Number 2
Ask your friends, family and neighbors to vote NO on question 2
Share this widely with your networks until the election on November, 8th 2016

Too serious for you? We’ll leave you with this!

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UPDATE: Over the past week, we've received some great follow-up questions about state education aid in the context of the BPS budget. We include 2 new supplemental figures below to help answer these questions. Both include information on the source data for the figures. Thank you to everyone for sharing and asking great follow-up questions. It's also worth mentioning that in addition to losing $120 million in state aid to charters this year, BPS also spent $15 million in charter school transportation.

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How to Tell if Your Life Matters

Photograph by Kristin Johnson

Over the past 6 months, I've had the pleasure of getting to know Sunny Pai, Director of Charlestown High's highly regarded Diploma Plus Program, while we were both fighting for increased funding for Boston Public Schools. His compassion and tireless advocacy on behalf of his students inspired me to keep going, even on the days I just wanted to give up.

After the recent fatal shootings of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile, Sunny Pai wrote this incredible piece about why the #BlackLivesMatter movement is so essential. We are grateful to Sunny for all of his work, his friendship, and for letting us share his thoughts below.

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How to Tell if Your Life Matters

• Schools that serve primarily those of your race are clean, well-resourced, and well-supported. Students in those schools generally understand they will go to college unless they choose not to and it will probably be a bit embarrassing if they don't. Your history is taught in these schools to everyone... and not just the parts of history where your people were on the losing side.

• In the very unlikely event that you are mistakenly shot by police, medical aid will be rendered immediately to try and save your life.

• If you are accused of committing a crime, the photo of you in the media will be a flattering one. Unless you are a teacher who slept with a student – that situation seems to universally warrant an ugly mug shot.

• You are not regularly detained by police because you "fit a description," cause after all, you have places to get to and things to do, and that, along with your life, is respected.

• People (outsiders) do not blatantly profit off your culture by appropriating it. Your most successful musicians are not controlled by bosses of a different culture that encourage you to make music that glorifies violence towards and objectification of your own people.

• College students and kids in gap years don't volunteer to "help you out," even though they are barely in a position to help themselves.

• Has a city ever been entirely shut down to hunt down the killers of your people? Your life matters. Same for a regional manhunt (see Christopher Dorner and Eric Frein).

• Was someone who looked like you murdered? If their killer was found, were they successfully prosecuted to the full extent of the law? Your life matters.

• Have you committed an awful crime and been let off with a lenient sentence? Or a minor crime and been let off with a slap on the wrist? So you could live your life? Your life matters. On the flip side, did you commit the same crime but were imprisoned for quite a while? Your life doesn't matter.

• If health statistics were disaggregated by your demographic, are your numbers lower consistently? Life expectancy? Blood pressure? If so, your life may not matter.

• Have an unexpected number of your people been dying? Did Facebook offer to change people's profile pic? Hey, your life matters.

• Did your founding fathers once value you at 60% of other people? Was this historical event studied in school primarily as a brilliant piece of legislation that broke a deadlock and celebrated Roger Sherman from Connecticut who was a co-author for his brilliance in breaking that deadlock? Instead of teaching generations of kids that somehow valuing humans at 3/5 their worth is a scourge on our country that we need to understand how it has ramifications today?

• Were your people not only killed, but at one time, almost 4,000 lynched in a 75 year period? And not just hung but mutilated? And is this history sort of erased? Do we have a national museum on this? Is it part of our national history curriculum? Does this "mob mentality" no longer exist? Or are people possibly still scared for their lives in normal situations as a vestige of this history? Maybe?

I am so tired of people not understanding why there is a hashtag. And why it is so absurd and heartbreaking why one is needed. And then it doubles the insult when that necessity is questioned.

The Balance of Power is Broken

Our nation’s founding fathers recognized that a balance of power can only be achieved by establishing distinct partitions to limit any one branch of government from overriding the core functions of another. The Boston City Charter establishes a local three pronged model of leadership as well, splitting power among the Mayor’s Office, the City Council and the Boston School Committee, a body that in recent years has been appointed by the Mayor’s Office.

Today as the flimsy House of Cards that constructs our Mayor’s Office continues to fold before our eyes, nine City Councilors chose to jump onto Mayor Walsh’s sinking ship rather than stake a claim to the great powers given to them by our City’s Charter and by the constituents across this city who elected them.

A second high ranking member of Marty Walsh’s administration was arrested this morning after he was indicted for extortion and conspiracy. Political extortion boils down to this: Someone in power says, “If you do X for me, I will do Y for you.”

As in, if you vote YES on my Budget, you will get Y for your district.

Today I watched as members of the Boston City Council were similarly manipulated into making concessions on the BPS budget, despite the fact that Boston is prospering during unprecedented levels of development and growth. Today I watched as deals made for the few led to drastic classroom level cuts for the many that will have a detrimental impact to the entire district.

This is my third year of advocating for the BPS budget and I can tell you this with 100% certainty: These budget cuts to our children’s schools will never be restored, at least not under this current mayoral administration.

Boston City Councilors, I ask you this: What does Marty Walsh hold over you that makes you willing to vote to pass budget cuts, year after year, that will hurt children in your district and in your city?

But what is worse than the opaque manipulations of political horse-trading? Ignorance. I watched as some City Councilors unabashedly displayed their complete ignorance of the BPS budgeting process by citing fictitious per pupil numbers based on over-simplified 4th grade level long division:

“And the school department! They have $1.15 billion dollars1 to educate less than 57,0002 students, which comes out to a calculation that we verified in the hearing on Monday of $20,000 per student! This is not grandstanding, this is money – financial money.”

Bill Linehan, Councilor for District 2.

Actually, it’s $18,217 if you use Councilor Linehan’s broken rationale, but if you insist on dramatically over-simplifying the equation, please don’t round UP as well. Applying simple math to complex systems indicates to me that you don’t understand the long-standing financial implications of mandated busing or the financial responsibilities of educating a district with a high concentration of English Language Learners, Special Needs students, or children living in poverty.

We can do better for our children and we can do better with our votes.

1 Total BPS budget appropriation is for FY17 $1.032B.

2 56,650 students in school year 2015-2016.

The City of Boston Budget: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

“It is an unpardonable sin to misuse numbers for propaganda purposes. The deliberate misuse of statistics to ‘prove’ a point for political advantage often leads to policies which cause serious harm to peoples, organizations, and countries.” 1

“David Sweeney, Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s top numbers-cruncher, told Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” that even though the school budget is rising at a rate three times greater than any other city service, “we have no plans to close schools at this time.” 2

Data from the City of Boston

We received an email last week from a friend of our blog with an excellent analysis of the recent Medium piece published by Boston’s Chief Financial Officer David Sweeney. We have an interest in the ethical implications of selecting and comparing data sets, so as the Boston City Council is poised to vote on the revised budget, we thought it was important to share this rebuttal of Chief Sweeney’s analysis of the BPS budget in the context of city spending.

1 Spirer, Herbert F., Louise Spirer, A.J. Jaffe.. Misused Statistics. 2nd Ed. Marcel Decker, Inc, NY, NY. 1998. P. 4. 

2 Sweet, Laurel J.  “Boston Budget Chief: ‘We have no plans to close schools’.” Boston Herald. Thursday July, 16, 2016.  

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David Sweeney’s recent article, Boston Proudly Invests in its Schools, contains many interesting facts and figures about the Boston Public Schools budget. However, a few of the data visualizations make convenient use of three specific mechanisms to exaggerate the growth of the BPS budget in comparison to other city department budgets:

• Using absolute budget growth rather than percentage growth
  Many budget increases - in particular salary increases - can reasonably be expected to grow in proportion to the size of the budget. Using absolute dollar increases only serves to make larger departments’ budget increases look bigger.
  
• Selectively using FY16 appropriations vs. FY16 estimated expenditures
  When calculating budget growth between FY11 and FY16, Mr. Sweeney uses the Public Safety Cabinet’s FY16 appropriation rather than its FY16 estimated expenditures. However, when comparing FY16 and FY17, Mr. Sweeney does use the FY16 estimated expenditures. The result is that neither chart truly accounts for an increase of more than $20 million in the Public Safety Cabinet’s spending that occurred during FY16.
  
• Selectively including health insurance costs in the BPS budget
  When comparing total budget increases from FY11-FY16, Mr. Sweeney uses figures that do not include health insurance costs. When looking at the change in expenditures between FY16 and FY17, however, he includes health insurance costs in the BPS budget but not the other three departments in his chart.
  

Mr. Sweeney’s article includes the following paragraph and chart:

Looking back over the past five years, investment in BPS has increased much faster than other City departments, growing by 25%, while public safety departments grew by 20%, and all other departments grew by less than 13%. Because Boston has been committed to investing in BPS even as the City’s Charter School costs have climbed sharply, Boston’s total education budget grew by almost 33% over that same time. Maintaining this level of commitment to BPS, with fixed costs rising as well, has not been easy. The City has had to reduce positions in other departments.

Source: Dave Sweeney, Boston Proudly Invest in its Schools

First, it is somewhat misleading to follow a paragraph that describes the percentage growth of these departments with a chart that uses absolute growth. Because the school department’s budget is the largest in the city, factors like a modest salary increase negotiated years ago are exaggerated by using absolute dollar figures rather than percentages.

Second, the chart shows that Public Safety spending is staying roughly level from FY15 to FY16, and in fact the Public Safety Cabinet’s original FY16 appropriation of $546,973,900 was a slight decrease from the department’s FY15 expenditures. However, the FY17 budget shows that the estimated Public Safety expenditures in FY16 are actually $567,576,563. It is simply inexcusable for Mr. Sweeney to ignore this increased expenditure of more than $20 million. To put it another way, the Public Safety Cabinet, a department that is significantly smaller than the school department, received a spending increase over the course of FY16 that is larger than the supposedly generous $18.2 million increase proposed for BPS in FY17, and yet this article completely glosses over it.

If we change the chart to use percentage growth since FY11 instead of absolute growth, and add in FY16 estimated expenditures along with the original FY16 appropriation, we see a different story: growth in the BPS budget mirrors growth in public safety spending almost exactly. In fact, with this new spending level, investments in Public Safety spending have actually grown just over 25% since FY11, very slightly faster than investments in BPS have grown.

I’ve included the original FY16 appropriation with a fainter line just to show how dramatic a difference the revised spending estimates make in the budget.

Data from the City of Boston: https://www.cityofboston.gov/budget/

Now, let’s add in the FY17 appropriations, too, including the $4.7M that was just added to the BPS budget.

Data from the City of Boston: https://www.cityofboston.gov/budget/

As you can see, in FY17 growth in Public Safety expenditures since FY11 will slightly, but clearly, surpass the growth of the BPS budget, even when including the recently announced $4.7M increase to the BPS budget.

Now let’s look at another chart that Mr. Sweeney includes in his article:

Source: Dave Sweeney, Boston Proudly Invest in its Schools

You might think that the city’s Chief Financial Officer would be careful to make consistent use of data in his visualizations, but if so, you would be wrong. First, the starting point for this chart is not the same as the ending point for the previous chart; here Mr. Sweeney has conveniently chosen to compare FY17 appropriations to FY16 estimated expenditures. In other words, after looking at the budget up through FY16 in his first chart, he has added more than $20 million to the Police and Fire department FY16 budgets before comparing those budgets to the FY17 appropriations. Since we have already corrected for this “oversight” in the earlier charts, there is no further correction necessary in our charts, but the manipulation of the data is so egregiously deceptive that it is worth reiterating. Second, in the previous chart he used figures that were “net of health insurance.” Not so here - these are the total budget increases, and of the four departments listed only BPS pays health insurance costs out of its own budget. However, Mr. Sweeney is consistent in one important way: he continues to use absolute growth rather than percentage growth as a way of making the BPS spending increases look as large as possible in comparison to the other departments’

Let’s go ahead and correct this chart, too, first by removing health insurance costs from the BPS budget increase:

Data from the City of Boston: https://www.cityofboston.gov/budget/

Already the growth in the BPS budget in FY17 looks more modest compared with these other, smaller departments. Now let’s convert to percentage growth:

Data from the City of Boston: https://www.cityofboston.gov/budget/

Perhaps the city would do well to cast the same critical eye on every department that it has reserved for the schools.