President, Massachusetts Association of School Committees
Charter School Hearings
Wednesday, January 14, 2004

My name is Paul Schlichtman. I am President of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, which represents the elected and appointed officials who serve on the school committees governing public education in the 351 cities and towns of the Commonwealth. I am also an elected member and vice-chair of the Arlington School Committee.

It is MASC's position that none of the Commonwealth Charter School applications should be approved. We believe there are substantial deficiencies pertaining to fiscal control and public accountability that are common to this group of Commonwealth Charter School applications.

We do not believe the Boards of Trustees adequately reflect the host communities, and lack mechanisms for engaging the community in the fiscal and programmatic oversight of the schools.

We also believe a successful applicant needs the endorsement of the local school committee to be viable part of the local educational network. Lowell presents an excellent example of the benefits we find with collaboration, and the problems we find when a charter school lacks community connections. The Lowell Middlesex Academy was launched with broad community support and involvement, and is a successful Commonwealth Charter School. The Lowell Community Charter School lacks a connection to other local schools, and the result is an expensive and unaccountable school with the lowest fourth grade MCAS scores in the state. The lack of local oversight, and the unwillingness of the Board of Education to halt the expansion of a failing school, is extremely troubling.

In the context of a charter school system that lacks proper oversight from the state, we believe individual applications must include substantially stronger measures of local accountability to prevent the creation and expansion of blatantly failing schools.

The characteristics that doomed Lowell Community to failure are reflected in this year's applications for Commonwealth Charter Schools.

The Cambridge proposal would garnish that city's Chapter 70 aid to buy its high school's failed former principal a school of her own, insulated from the community that did not support her prior efforts at running a school. While it isn't quite the egregious cash coup d'etat in Cambridge, the Marlborough program also imposes an outside group that is strongly opposed by the community and the local school committee.

I urge, on the merits, your approval of the Cotuit/Marstons Mills Charter School and the Marstons Mills East Charter School, as it meets reasonable standards for accountability. The remaining applications lack the programmatic and fiscal accountability essential to creating a good school, and I hope you ask the remaining applicants to gain even a modest level of support and involvement from the school committees and the community before allowing them to proceed.