Question 2 — the statewide initiative to expand public charter schools — has shaken many communities to the core, even though its passage will directly impact about nine urban centers where low-income and mostly minority students are forced to attend failing in-district schools.
A “yes” vote gives economically disadvantaged families a public option to send their children to a charter school.
There are 32,000 children across the state on charter waiting lists. Why should a disadvantaged urban child be forced to remain in a chronically underperforming school?
It makes no sense, especially when numerous national studies confirm that Massachusetts’ charter schools are the best in the nation at closing the achievement gap between richer and poorer communities.
Question 2 affects only the bottom 25 percentile of the state’s worst performing public schools.
But opponents have pushed the fear card, implying that an invasion of charter schools — and minority children — will descend on suburbia to steal precious financial resources from already top-notch schools. It’s a veiled racist campaign.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association and local teachers unions want only one thing: to defeat Question 2 and protect a state funding formula that rewards failing schools as much as it does successful ones. Keeping the status quo saves union jobs; it also plunges poorer kids deeper into academic despair. And they say they’re for the kids!
The MTA’s agenda is to pit suburban voters against urban counterparts desperately seeking change. Throwing more money at failing public schools — and the system as a whole — is its only solution. It defies logic. Since 1993, the state has spent $200 billion on public education and while most schools are doing well, there is a stubborn core resistant to change.
Is it the kid’s fault that the same urban schools fail year after year? Of course not. But that’s what the MTA wants you to believe.
Studies show that the presence of an innovative, competitive charter school helps lift academic performance throughout the entire district. Take Lowell, for example. Prior to the opening of the city’s first of two charter schools in 2000, more than half of Lowell’s 22 in-district schools were rated Level 3 or Level 4 (among the state’s lowest-performing 20 percent of schools). Today, the number has been reduced 50 percent and there are no Level 4 schools.
The “no” crowd won’t admit it, but 1,550 Lowellians enrolled in three public charters — Level 1 or 2 schools — are making a difference by exercising their right to school choice.
A “yes” vote on Question 2 strengthens public education by expanding the number of charters into districts where there is a dire need for improvement. It’s a kid’s civil right to have a choice. Don’t fear it, embrace it. And be proud you did.
