Keller @ Large: Look At Motives Of Both Sides In Charter School Fight

BOSTON (CBS) - If you don't really know much about charter schools in Massachusetts and are trying to make up your mind how to vote on Question Two, the ballot question that would allow more of them here, good luck wading through the avalanche of half-truths, spin and outright lies polluting the debate over the issue.

Related: Ballot Questions Coverage

I won't tell you how to vote on this one. But it might be informative to take a look at the two groups who are most passionately for and against a "yes" vote on Question Two.

The most ardent advocates for more charter school seats are the tens of thousands of families on the waiting list for the lotteries that select charter school students.

Despite statistics showing that "charter schools have more students in poverty, more black and Hispanic students and significantly fewer white students than the public school population of Massachusetts as a whole," propagandists for a "no" vote on Two continue to claim that charters somehow skim the cream for themselves, siphoning off resourceful, well-educated elites while leaving the faltering schools these students are escaping to deal with the leftovers.

No good deed goes unpunished around here if it even remotely threatens the power of the teacher unions, who are the most ardent opponents of Question Two.

Even as many rank-and-file teachers flock to charters for the freedom they offer from onerous union seniority and work rules, they somehow see an existential threat in the existence and growth of charters attended by less than five percent of the school-age population, and have been engaged in an all-out political effort to eradicate the charter choice for more than two decades.

There are your two sides.

Check them out, consider their motives, and don't forget to vote next Tuesday.

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