BOSTON – A legislative plan to expand Massachusetts’s effective and in-demand charter school system is not pleasing charter school advocates.

The controversial new legislative proposal from state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz would link the creation of new charter schools to extra funding for traditional government-run public schools, the Boston Globe reports.

Government school apologists blame charters for the traditional schools’ financial woes, and want the state to “reimburse local (school) districts for some of the state aid they lose when students in their communities enroll in charter schools,” reports the Globe.

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Charter proponents say that arrangement would create so much instability and uncertainty that charter officials could not make responsible financial projections from year to year – and that could prevent existing charters from growing, and new ones from opening.

“What little we know of the current (proposal) would allow lawmakers to stop the expansion of charters … by simply voting to underfund the reimbursement (of traditional schools) by a single dollar,” said Paul Grogan, president of the pro-charter Boston Foundation.

There’s truth in Grogan’s concerns.

School districts are already entitled to reimbursement from the state for each student they lose to a charter school competitor. But the Legislature has not fully funded those reimbursements for the last two years, the Globe reports.

That’s fed into the perception that charter schools are the cause of public school districts’ current financial problems. But instead of focusing on how much money government schools are losing every year, lawmakers should look at the reasons why the districts are losing students – and the per-pupil funding attached to each.

Another problem is incentive for traditional schools to perform better. That incentive is intensified when the schools lose students and state aid to charter schools. There would be no such incentive if the schools receive the same funding, regardless of how many students they lose.

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Researchers at Stanford University have declared that Boston’s charter schools are the most effective in the nation. Boston charter students gain much more reading and math learning than their public school peers over the course of a year.

Charter schools throughout Massachusetts have followed that same pattern of success.

That’s why so many families are eager to leave their neighborhood public school for a charter.

Given that impressive track record, Massachusetts lawmakers should be doing everything possible to create more charter schools so more families can escape their failing neighborhood school.

But given the state’s pro-labor sentiment, it appears that legislators may be more concerned about protecting the jobs of union teachers in traditional schools than in doing what’s right for families.

The Joint Education Committee is expected to decide the fate of the expansion-for-reimbursement proposal on Tuesday, according to the Globe.