The ballot battle over public-education funds this fall

The thing that I can't stand about this debate is how ideologically it is driven. This article contains all of the hallmarks of the anti-charter rhetoric that attempt to dehumanize charter proponents as ruthless capitalists who want to "privatize" public education, rather than as people who truly think that charters are the best hope for providing a quality public education for kids in the 21st century.

None of the charter schools in Massachusetts are for profit entities. And though this article warns that many pro-charter organizations are funded by corporations, it doesn't, and can't, make a claim that those corporations are seeking to promote charters for their own profit motives (as was the case in the Boston Olympics bid to which this article draws the false comparison). Rather, the article infers, as if it is axiomatic, that a corporation cannot have the best interest of children in mind, which is in turn based on the false inference that the decisions by these corporations to support charters are not made by people for altruistic reasons, but by some faceless beast.

The real issue that this "privatization" anti-corporate rhetoric seems to drive at is that charters are not union schools, and that charter schools are inherently tied up in the demise of organized labor, which though not the focus of the anti-charter movement, is tied up in it. Finally, the article plays the BPS parents concerned over school funding as pawns in the game by pitting this as a match of public school vs. private charter where funding is the prize. Charter proponents are cast as seeking to bleed traditional public schools to death so that charters can, somehow, profit. But there is no evidence that charter schools are seeking to bleed the public schools, and there is no motivation for them to do so beyond the belief that they can do a better job educating kids and deserve a crack at it.

The bottom line is that people who support charter schools are not doing it for self interested reasons. They support them because they think they will do a better job of educating kids. They believe the traditional model is broken and that it is saddled with so much red tape, politics, self interested administration, and history that change to public education can only be forced through entities that operate outside of the system. And if this is not true, why have so many parents chosen to send their kids to charter schools, and why has the traditional schools system not overhauled itself in all the years this has been going on?

I think there is a strong argument that the cap should be lifted again once the limit is reached (BTW they haven't reached the limit on the cap yet, more seats will be opening in Boston this year).

I don't know what the right cap number is, but the system as a whole could still work for most students if the cap was lifted. However, this question proposes lifting the cap by 12 schools a year until the end of time. That's careless and also leaves room for charter approvals to get sloppy. Not to mention it would drain hundreds of millions of dollars from traditional public schools. In Boston alone there are more than 30 level 1 and 2 (read high performing) traditional public schools that desperately need to keep the dollars in their already strapped budgets. Students aren't leaving these schools to go to charters, yet these schools will lose their funding anyway if 12 new schools open every year. It's crazy.

Sure raise the cap when the limit is reached, but do it in a responsible way. The current question on the ballot is extremely irresponsible.