Expanding Charter Schools Is Not the Answer To Educational Injustice

Quentin Palfrey
2 min readMar 9, 2022

There is an urgent need to remedy the “savage inequalities” in our schools on the basis of race, wealth, and zip code. But the solution is to invest in our schools and our communities and to tackle structural obstacles head on — not to undermine collective bargaining and siphon off money to unaccountable charter schools

Sixty-eight years after Brown v. Board of Education, Massachusetts schools are still starkly segregated by race. Despite laudable reforms to education funding formulas in recent years, there remain significant gaps in the resources spent on Massachusetts schools.

In short, our education system fundamentally both separate and unequal. As the chief civil rights official in the Commonwealth, the Attorney General should make the intentional disruption of educational injustice a key priority. It is an affront to our democracy for the quality of a child’s education to be tied so directly to race and zip code.

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There is an urgent need to reform our education system to live up to the promise of Brown. And indeed there is an affirmative requirement in the Massachusetts constitution that every child receive — as of right — a free and appropriate public education.

But expanding charter schools is not the answer to this challenge. Rather, expanding charter schools points in the wrong direction by undermining teachers, picking winners and losers, and draining much needed resources for low-income communities.

Instead, we should do the hard work of investing in schools and communities and taking head-on the underlying challenges that perpetuate the “savage inequalities” in our school system.

In 2016, advocates of expanding charter schools such as the Walton family and Mike Bloomberg — supported by conservative think tanks and Republican Governor Charlie Baker — spent millions of dollars on a ballot initiative that aimed to raise the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. A coalition of progressive groups, labor organizations, teachers, and activists rallied against the measure and ultimately defeated the ill-advised ballot initiative.

Despite the defeat of question 2 in 2016, advocates for charter school expansion remain a potent force in Massachusetts politics — particularly in the financing of political campaigns and “independent expenditure” PACs.

As a proud progressive running for Attorney General, I will make disrupting the racial segregation of our schools — as well as the disparities in resources — a central priority. And I will vigorously oppose efforts to expand charter schools in the Commonwealth, which I believe will undermine the effort to bring true equity and justice to our educational system.

Quentin Palfrey is a former Assistant Attorney General and a Democratic candidate for Massachusetts Attorney General. He is the author of “The State Judiciary’s Role in Fulfilling Brown’s Promise,” which was published in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law in 2002.

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Quentin Palfrey

Former Sr Advisor Obama White House OSTP; @massago alum; 2018 Dem nominee for Lt. Gov in MA