By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

BOSTON – Stanford University researchers who’ve studied charter schools in 29 states and numerous American cities say Boston’s charter schools are the most effective they’ve found.

According to Stanford researcher Edward Cremata, a student in one of Boston’s charter schools “gains an additional 12 months in reading every year compared to their traditional public school counterpart, and (an) additional 13 months in math.”

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Cremata explained those findings to lawmakers on Tuesday in an effort to convince them to abolish Massachusetts’ cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in the state, reports The Boston Globe.

Despite the obvious superiority of the alternative public schools (as charters are sometimes known), a number of lawmakers aren’t ready to allow more of them to open.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino “urged lawmakers to keep the current moratorium on charter schools and to allow more ‘in-district’ charter schools” – schools that are overseen by the school district and required to employ unionized teachers, The Boston Globe reports.

“Two key lawmakers said they are not sure if they will support the bill to do away with the cap in Boston and other low-performing school districts,” the paper reports.

Even Gov. Deval Patrick, who supported raising the charter cap back in 2010, has declined to take a position.

The reluctance of some lawmakers – and the outright opposition from others – to high-performing, life-transforming charter schools doesn’t make any sense to Boston Foundation President Paul Grogan.

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“It would be difficult to imagine in any other walk of life that we know, to have this kind of success and be expressing this kind of ambivalence or even opposition to extending that success,” Grogan told the Globe. “It’s frankly bewildering.”

We agree.

Lawmakers’ hesitancy to create more charters is a little like a university president telling researchers who’ve made a huge breakthrough in finding a cure for cancer that they can’t have a larger budget  to finish their work because it would unfair to the other university researchers.

The only conceivable reason Massachusetts’s legislators and political leaders are dragging their feet is because they know allowing more charters into the state will siphon students – and their per pupil state aid – away from government-run schools.

If that happens, it will decimate the ranks of unionized, dues-paying teachers – a financial disaster for the powerful and politically active Boston Teachers Association, the Massachusetts Association and the rest of the alphabet soup gang that’s been controlling public education for generations.