Mass. education secretary’s votes reflect growing Democratic hostility toward charter schools
Gov. Maura Healey’s top education aide, Patrick Tutwiler, opposed every charter expansion proposal brought to state board
by Michael Jonas
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.
Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler brings his 6-5 frame down to 4-year-old Alisha’s level as he plays with her at Horizons for Homeless Children in Roxbury. (Photo by Michael Jonas)
“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.
“I voted no today as I believe this is not the right moment for charter school expansion, as schools and students are still recovering from the pandemic, and we are all navigating a changing federal landscape,” Tutwiler said.
Three of the proposals were nonetheless approved by the board, but two – including the KIPP plan – were rejected in close votes. The KIPP proposal was voted down 6-4, while a plan to add just 34 seats to the Advanced Science and Math Academy Charter School in Marlborough was rejected in a 5-5 tie vote.
While Tutwiler opposed all the charter proposals, only the KIPP expansion plan had generated strong public opposition in the runup to the board vote.
Lynn officials, led by the mayor, school superintendent, and the local teachers union president, lobbied strongly against the proposal, arguing that adding the new seats would strip the Lynn school district of $8 million per year. Under the state school funding formula, public dollars flow with each student to the school system they attend.
“An $8 million budget cut would devastate our efforts to turn the district around,” Lynn’s mayor, Jared Nicholson, told the board prior to the vote.
Under the state’s charter school reimbursement law, meant to cushion the financial impact of students exiting local districts for charters, districts continue to receive payments for three years for each new charter student, starting with 100 percent of the per pupil funding the first year, 60 percent the second year, and 40 percent in the third year.
The KIPP proposal presented a challenging decision for Tutwiler, who previously served for four years as the school superintendent in Lynn. What’s more, he and Barnes, the KIPP school leader, worked to bridge the divide that often exists between district public schools and charter schools. They forged a strong relationship and developed an initiative that jointly counseled groups of district and KIPP students on college and career readiness planning.
“We partnered around the idea that we can get more done collaborating than we can by fighting with one another,” Tutwiler said in a 2023 interview with CommonWealth Beacon, shortly after taking the reins as education secretary.
“We hit it off early,” Barnes said in an interview at the same time. “We cared about kids and determined that we were going to work together.” Barnes said she and Tutwiler, as fellow Black educators, were fond of referencing a James Baldwin quote, whose message is, “all of the children are all of ours.”
That relationship hit a big snag with last month’s vote. Exactly what transpired in the days and weeks leading up to it is unclear.
Tutwiler’s office did not respond to multiple requests to speak with him over the weeks since the February 25 board meeting. Barnes also did not respond to messages seeking to speak with her.
KIPP originally sought to add 1,388 new seats but, in consultation with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, agreed to ratchet back the proposal to 450 seats.
In education circles, there has been talk that Tutwiler’s decision to vote against the KIPP plan came at the direction of the governor’s office, which was responding to the strong opposition from municipal leaders and teachers unions. Several education observers also suggested that Tutwiler’s votes against all the other proposed charter expansions – and the declaration that it’s “not the right moment” for charter expansions – may have been part of an effort to avoid singling out the KIPP proposal.
Gov. Healey’s office declined to comment on whether Tutwiler was directed to oppose the KIPP plan. The office also would not comment when asked whether Healey or Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll lobbied other education board members to vote against the KIPP proposal.
Katherine Craven, the education board chair, a position appointed by the governor, joined Tutwiler in the 6-4 vote against the KIPP plan. Craven also did not respond to a request for comment on her vote.
Tutwiler’s explanation that it isn’t the right time for any charter expansion seemed strained in the case of the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers in Boston, which sought to add 352 seats.
Unlike most charter schools, which operate apart from districts, often with non-unionized teachers, the Kennedy Academy is among a smaller group of in-district charter schools. It’s part of the Boston Public Schools, so its expansion does not involve any money being shifted out of the district.
The plan had the support of the Boston School Committee and the Boston Teachers Union. It passed 9-1, with Tutler casting the lone dissenting vote.
Mayor Michelle Wu trumpeted the expansion earlier this month in her State of the City speech.
With a $38 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the largest gift in Boston Public Schools history, the Kennedy Academy is growing its partnership with Mass General Brigham to develop a robust school-to-career pipeline for Boston students.
Tim Nicolette, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, called Tutwiler’s votes – and the rejection of two proposals that had passed muster with officials in the state education department – “appalling” and “deeply troubling.”
After hearing from opponents to the KIPP plan about the financial impact it would have on the Lynn Public Schools, the state’s acting education commissioner, Russell Johnston, who recommended that the board approve the expansion, emphasized that weighing the impact of charters on local districts “is not a consideration in law or regulations.”
Several board members nonetheless voiced exactly those concerns, including Tutwiler, who said, “I can’t ignore the context in which we are making this decision, and it is a pandemic recovery context.”
That put Tutwiler in sync with teachers’ unions and district leaders in the state.
Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers – Massachusetts, testified at the meeting that the charter proposals were coming at a time of growing budget concerns and the uncertainty of threats from Washington. “To ignore the realities of this context would be gravely irresponsible,” she said.
Mary Bourque, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, authored a Boston Globe op-ed the day before the board meeting urging its members not to approve any of the charter proposals.
“Policy makers are striving to ensure that the state makes the investments needed to maintain its standing as a leader in public education,” she wrote. “While that important work is ongoing, now is not the time to approve the expansion of any charter school.”
Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the free-market-oriented Pioneer Institute, which has been a strong supporter of charter schools, said despite the law not including the impact on local districts as a factor in weighing charter school proposals, it has increasingly seemed to figure in decisions. “It’s been de facto added as a criterion,” he said.
“The charter school law was created specifically to insulate authorizing decisions from politics,” said Nicolette, of the charter school association. “If politics and district financial situations are going to determine the outcome of charter school authorizing decisions, that has the potential to undermine the entire charter school authorizing process.”
At last month’s board meeting, Tutwiler said he’s not focused on the governance structure of schools and supports quality education, whether it’s in the district public school sector or charter school sector. He offered the same view two years ago when, in the only other charter school votes since he became education secretary, Tutwiler opposed a new Worcester charter school. “I’m sector agnostic,” he said at last month’s board meeting. “I like good schools.”
But his party-line vote against all five charter expansion proposals seemed to undercut that claim.
He also voted against a proposal by a sixth charter school, the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in South Hadley, to reduce the number of communities it serves from 34 to 18 so that it could afford to fund transportation for all students. It passed 8-2.
The board’s vote against two of the charter proposals “shows a change not in how charters are being regulated, but more so in how they’re being politically perceived,” said Will Austin, a former public school teacher, principal, and nonprofit leader, who now works as an education consultant. “What once was a very bipartisan issue became a very partisan one. There is this perception that if you’re a progressive, you have to be against charters.”
The growing partisan divide on charters emerged in full force a decade ago, said Margaret Raymond, executive director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.
“In the early days, it was about innovation and equity, and both parties could get behind that,” she said of the view that charter schools brought another option for lower-income families who could not afford to leave troubled urban districts for suburban schools. But that changed as teachers’ unions, an important part of the Democratic Party base, escalated opposition to the school model.
“Hillary threw support for charter schools under the bus,” Raymond said of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, in which she leveled criticism at charter schools, a sharp break from the pro-charter views of her husband, Bill Clinton, during his two terms in the White House.
In Massachusetts, the same strong turn by Democrats away from charter schools was seen in the resounding defeat of a statewide ballot question the same year that sought to increase the state cap on charter schools. Healey, then serving as attorney general, opposed the ballot question.
The 2016 ballot question drubbing, said Gass, of the Pioneer Institute, has left “charter politics in a really precarious state.”
Bourque, the head of the state superintendent’s association, said she hopes Tutwiler’s stance signals a turn away from charters. “There should be a freeze on all expansion of charters until we can really settle and calm down the financial challenges facing our districts,” she said.
Nicolette, the charter school association director, challenged the idea that it’s not the right time for any charter expansions, pointing to the hundreds of families hoping for seats at KIPP Academy in Lynn and the Advanced Science and Math Academy, or AMSA, in Marlborough, the two proposals that were turned down.
“If you were to talk to the students and families in Lynn or Marlborough that were trying to access KIPP or AMSA, I think they would say, why isn’t it the right time for our kids to be able to access the rigorous academic programming and strong family supports of this school?” said Nicolette. “And it begs the question: What needs to be in place for it to be the right time?”
Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former state education secretary, said the showdown over charters at last month’s education board meeting was an unfortunate sign of the times.
“It’s a missed opportunity to find some middle ground on a divisive issue at a time we desperately need parents and students to be motivated about their choices in education,” he said. “There ought to be a recognition that there are legitimate claims on both sides. It will hurt districts,” Reville said of charter growth. “At the same time, it will benefit parents and students.” There ought to be “some more nuanced middle ground instead of taking an across-the-board position about charters in this moment.”