Schools Open, Schools Close: Charter Schools and the Ties That Bind

Ask someone in education about charter schools – even casually – and you are liable to be overwhelmed by a torrent of either enthusiasm or disdain. In an election year rife with proclamations about how divided we are as a nation, debates about charter schools prove that the landscape of educational policy is no exception.

Amid all of the shouting in Massachusetts’ current charter school debate – the one about Question 2 on this November's ballot – I have finally found an argument I find compelling. Thus far, however, I have yet to hear it taken all that seriously. It is an argument about what it means to love a school and what happens when a school we love is taken away. Put another way, we keep opening new schools without thinking deliberately or compassionately about what it means to close the schools we have. And unless or until we figure out how to close schools with kindness, we should stop opening new ones.

School closures inflict real wounds on students, families, and communities, but these wounds are often unacknowledged, never mind treated. Sociologist Eve Ewing, formerly a teacher who experienced a school closing herself, wrote, “[T]he decision to shuffle students from one building to another in the name of numbers …is based on the premise that children, teachers, and schools are indistinguishable widgets, to be distributed as efficiently as possible across the landscape. But the fact is that schools are ecosystems, each with its own history, culture, and intricately woven set of social relationships. Schools are community anchors. They are not interchangeable, nor are they disposable.” Moreover, less poetically but just as importantly, school closures seem to have negative effects on students’ academic performance and their wellbeing. Ben Kirshner and his colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder documented numerous negative effects of school closure, including higher dropout rates, lower achievement, loss of friendships, and weaker emotional ties between students and teachers.

There is no comprehensive list of Boston Public Schools (BPS) that have been closed or merged in the charter school era – and in any event correlation still would not equal causation – but after a labored search of Boston Globe archives I counted at least 19 schools closed since 2003, and I suspect that I’m missing some. (I include my list at the bottom of this piece. I'd welcome corrections or amendments. There appeared to be no school closures between 1995, when the first charter school opened in Massachusetts, and 2003.) I realize this is a small number relative to other urban districts -- for example, the 49 schools in Chicago or the 23 schools in Philadelphia, all closed in a single year (2013) -- but as Ewing observes each school is an ecosystem sustained by a web of interdependent relationships. Severing those ties in any school can be deeply painful and destabilizing.

Indeed, accompanying nearly every school closing in Boston over the last decade, there were students or parents who expressed anguish, anger, and sadness, often in the kinds of raw emotional terms reserved for recalling or mourning lost loved ones. (In her doctoral thesis about the 2013 school closures in Chicago, Ewing theorized that these reactions were a form of "institutional mourning.") In 2008, after the announcement that two small academies at the former Dorchester High School would be closed, students from both programs gave public testimony. “My school is a second home,” said one from the Academy of Public Service. Students from the Noonan Business Academy cried openly during their statements, prompting one of them to observe, “We are a family that sticks together.” Two years later, facing a round of eight more school closures, a parent at the doomed Agassiz Elementary School said in an interview with the Globe, “I’m devastated right now… As a single mom, I have been struggling to find a good school for my daughter, and finally when I find a school with dedicated teachers, they decide to shut it down.” At the school committee meeting approving the closures later that year, a high school student rose from her seat and yelled, “You are robbing our future by closing our school.”

The voices of these students, families, and teachers – and the anguish they express – are notably absent from public deliberations about Question 2, but I think they are central to understanding what is at issue in a campaign increasingly being dominated by rhetorical bluster.

According to the official summary of the question, “This proposed law would allow the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to approve up to 12 new charter schools or enrollment expansions in existing charter schools each year.” A yes vote would permit the Board to approve more charter schools; a no vote would effectively limit the expansion of charter schools. To an outside observer, the question may seem benign enough, but it is arousing no shortage of passions and provoking many spirited debates, not all of them undertaken with goodwill. When all is said and done, the forces supporting and opposed to Question 2 expect to spend up to $30 million making their respective cases. So determined – some might say stubborn – are the advocates on either side of the issue that they each refused to support a legislative compromise bill earlier this year, preferring to settle the issue through the high-profile and high-cost but ultimately binding referendum now before voters.

At issue is the so-called “charter cap,” a statutory limit on the number of charter schools statewide. Current Massachusetts law states that no more than 120 charter schools may be authorized to operate. In 2015-2016, there were 81, but this numeric cap is superseded by a funding cap: municipalities cannot spend more than 9 percent of their budgets on charter school tuition payments (unless they are among the lowest-performing 10-percent of districts, in which case they can spend up to 18 percent of their budgets). There are other caveats, as well, but suffice it to say there is a cap and some people are bothered by it and others are desperate to keep it.

The problem is that the arguments taking up the most airtime seem not to be arguing about whether or not to open more charter schools but about the very existence of charter schools themselves. To be clear, these are related arguments. Supporters sing charter schools’ praises as evidence we should have more of them; opponents deride charter schools’ shortcomings as evidence we need to have fewer or none at all. But I think we need a more precise parsing of the issue.

Question 2 is fundamentally not about whether charter schools are good or bad. Rather, Question 2 is about what 12 new charter schools per year would do to the publicly accountable education sector and whether we think that’s a good idea. Two details in the proposed law are important to consider. Quoting from the proposed law is useful here, with my emphases in italics:

in the event that the number of qualified applicants in any year exceeds 12, the board shall give priority among such qualified applicants to those seeking to establish or expand enrollment in commonwealth charter schools in districts where overall student performance on the statewide assessment system approved by the board is in the bottom 25% of all districts in the two years preceding the charter application

First, by specifying Commonwealth charter schools, Question 2 is directing the Board to privilege charter schools that operate independently of school districts. In Massachusetts, there are two types of charter schools – Commonwealth and Horace Mann. The latter are subject to approval and oversight by local school committees and their teachers may be subject to collective bargaining. Currently, BPS has six of them. The former are accountable only to their Boards of Directors and state regulators. Second, Question 2 directs the Board to privilege charter schools serving the lowest-performing districts. Taken together, these two details mean that, over time (and Question 2 permits the opening or expanding of twelve schools per year without end), lower-performing districts like Boston can expect to hemorrhage students to an ever-growing charter sector over which they have no direct input or oversight. Families and teachers in districts like Boston, then, can also expect many, many more school closures.

School openings and closing are inextricably linked, and we ought to be thinking about what a future of endlessly opening schools means for us, for our children, for our communities, and for publicly accountable public education. When the #LiftTheCap campaign rhetoric is anchored in a narrative about children “trapped in failing schools,” we have a responsibility to interrogate this claim. Do the students, families, and teachers feel trapped? Or do they, like a majority of Americans, appreciate (and maybe even cherish) their school? What would it mean to them and their community if the school closed? In any case, what is worthy and good about these schools? These are questions to ask even if a school is ultimately closed, because they validate the lived experiences of the people who make up the community.

Make no mistake: I am not saying that schools should never be closed, but I am saying that closing a school demands care and communication and community input. Turning over decisions about the opening and closing of schools to an unelected board of state regulators (as a result of a campaign funded and directed largely by people who live hundreds of miles away and will never attend the schools in question) is anathema to this kind of a public and deliberative process. The charter school cap, then, is neither outdated nor arbitrary, as its detractors claim. It is preserving some semblance of essential public control and input over where our children go to school and who runs those schools.

In the debate about charter school growth, there is a lot of talk about justice – so much and in such self-righteous tones, by so many who disagree about so much, that it seems to demean the very idea that there is such a thing. And yet, in the blustering back-and-forth, there is almost no talk about community, specifically the deep ties that bind communities to their schools. If we lose the vote, we lose our voice.

 

Boston Public Schools Closed, Merged,
or Converted to Horace Mann (In-District) Charters (2003-2016)

School

Action Taken

Year

Baldwin

Closed

2003

Endicott

Closed

2003

Fuller

Closed

2003

Thompson

Closed

2003

Wheatley

Closed

2003

Cleveland MS

Closed

2008

Dickerman

Closed

2009

Lucy Stone

Closed

2009

Academy of Public Service

Closed

2009

Noonan Business Academy

Closed

2009

Lewenberg MS

Merged

2009

Agassiz

Closed

2011

East Zone ELC

Closed

2011

Emerson

Closed

2011

Fifield

Closed

2011

Engineering School

Closed

2011

Social Justice Academy

Closed

2011

Gavin

Converted

2011

Odyssey HS

Converted

2011

Alghieri

Merged

2011

Monument HS

Merged

2011

Parkway Academy

Merged

2011

Marshall

Converted

2013

Harbor Pilot

Merged

2013

E Greenwood

Closed

2015

Rogers MS

Closed

2015

Middle School Academy

Closed

2015