The Boston Globe has reported that Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts state commissioner for elementary and secondary education, will lift the state’s cap on the number of charter schools that may operate in the state. Only 68 charters have been permitted to open so far in MA, and demand far outstrips the number of available seats. Waiting lists for the 20 charters in Boston, for example, range from 550 students to 2,647 students per school.
Traditional school districts in MA have long opposed charter schools, because of the way the state funds them, by diverting funding from the district the student leaves into the charter that s/he attends. To limit the financial impact of those moves, the state has said that no more than 9 percent of a district’s “net school spending’’ could go toward charter school funding. But a 2010 law has gradually lifted that limit, to 18 percent by fiscal 2017 in school systems with the lowest student achievement scores.
MA public schools have long ranked among the best performing in the U.S., so critics of charters in the state have long argued that more school choice is not necessary there. But the waiting lists and the gains shown by students, particularly in under-served communities, has made that argument less and less convincing.
The move to lift the limits on charter school seats may have been prompted not only by the rising popularity of charter schools in the state, but also by a recently released report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) on the performance of charter schools in Boston and elsewhere in the state. They found that charter students gain, on average, an extra 1.5 months of progress per year in reading, and an extra 2.5 months per year in math, compared with their counterparts in traditional public schools. The gains in Boston, in particular, were some of the largest ever recorded by CREDO.
