Reporting mid-day on the progress of the bill, the sense is that this amendment would have too broad an effect and it is a non-starter which I am not going to press. My sense that any inclusion of additional narrowing factors will meet strong resistance, in part, because their effects may be less predictable than the basic score ranking. But I will continue to listen to other amendments on the floor that may make sense and pertain to this issue.

/w.

I will be filing this language (which I know that Rep Garballey also supports).

by adding at line 573 after the phrase ’18 per cent’ the following sentence “Provided however that if a school district’s Student Growth Percentile (or other similar measure of improvement adopted by the Board) places the district in the upper half of districts based on improvement in the most recently computed school year, then said district’s total charter school tuition payment to commonwealth charter schools may exceed 9 percent of said district’s net school spending only with the approval of the district School Committee.”

This language should suffice to preserve local control in districts that are performing well. It will not increase the number of districts potentially subject to an increase in the cap (only those with test scores in the lowest 10 percent will be affected), but will exempt those that have good SGP performance.

/w.

The theory of the reform is that charters might help even more and should be targeted to places with low scores, because they most urgently need to improve. I agree with your point that this might mean taking funds from a system that was doing a great job. I am prepared to support this bill because I hear the affected districts asking for it. If they wish to have a different formula that targets schools that are both low-scoring and low-improvement, that would be something I might be able to support if I were satisfied it would not make my communities more likely to be eligible — there is little demand for charters among parents in my district.

But I would not support switching the computation from a score-concept to an improvement-concept. That would mean wasting state attention on districts that (perhaps entirely due to high SES and despite a weak school system) are producing good outcomes.