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When it was her turn to testify last month to the state board of education before it voted on a proposal from KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School to add 450 seats, the school’s executive director, Nikki Barnes, tried to send a message before she even began to speak.
“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,” Barnes sang as she approached the microphone, unspooling several lines of an old spiritual that became one of the anthems of the US civil rights movement.
With that, the veteran African American educator was tapping into the idea that schools like KIPP Lynn, part of a national network of charter schools focused on preparing students – almost all of them low-income Black and Hispanic pupils – for college, are a modern-day extension of the struggle for civil rights.
“I believe that now more than ever that our families must know that their voices matter, and that their desire to have access to a public school option that best supports their students, regardless of how uncertain the times may be, matters,” Barnes said to the board, pointing to the 1,700 students on a waiting list for a seat at KIPP’s K-12 school in Lynn, which enrolls 1,600 students.
The language of the civil rights movement once served as a powerful force animating bipartisan support for charters, which are publicly funded but operate independently of local school districts. Today, however, charter schools have become a lightning rod for partisan strife.
Charter schools still enjoy support from conservatives and some on the left. But they have increasingly become targets of attack from Democrats, their teachers union allies, and other liberal-leaning groups, who say charter schools undermine traditional school districts by diverting public funding from them.
That shift was cast in sharp relief at February’s state education board meeting, where Gov. Maura Healey’s education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler, voted against all five proposals for expansion of charter schools that the state’s acting education commissioner recommended for approval.
It was an extraordinary display of anti-charter sentiment, and it came with no explanation of the thinking behind the votes.
After the meeting, Tutwiler, who is one of 10 voting members of the board, issued a statement in response to a question to his office about the across-the-board vote against each charter proposal. |
