There is good news and bad news on the education front in Massachusetts.

The good news is that the Patrick administration abandoned its dug-in resistance to more charter schools by proposing to raise the cap on charter schools in the state’s lowest performing districts. The bad news is that the proposed charter expansion appears to be the one card the administration can play right now in the effort to close the achievement gap.

To great fanfare, Gov. Patrick rolled out his 10-year vision for education last year, the culmination of a year of meetings among several hundred people on the various committees that made up the Readiness Project. At the center of the proposed initiatives for the K-12 system were “readiness schools,” which are to be run within regular districts but with the autonomy and freedom over staffing and budget decisions currently enjoyed by charter schools. The idea was to make good on the goal of taking to scale some of the best features of charter schools in order to reach a broad swath of students in underperforming districts.

But a big push for readiness schools, like many other elements of the Readiness Project, has fallen victim to the dire budget crunch and been put on the slow track. It was in the face of that grim reality that the charter school expansion was proposed. The policy turnabout from the administration also came on the heels of a recent Boston Foundation-sponsored study in which Boston charter schools outperformed the city’s regular district schools as well as its pilot schools, which are district-run schools that have more charter-like autonomy.

Currently, charter schools can draw no more than 9 percent of all school spending within a district. The Patrick administration proposal, submitted as part of its 2010 budget plan, would raise that spending cap to 12 percent, a move that would open the door to new charter schools in a dozen communities that were at or near the 9 percent limit, including Boston, Holyoke, Fall River, and other districts that have struggled with low-performing schools.

“I think it’s purely positive that the governor has put that on the table,” says Paul Sagan, president of Akamai Technologies and a member of the 18-person leadership council that oversaw the Readiness Project. But Sagan and other charter school boosters voice serious concerns about some of the details of the plan.

The proposal would raise the cap for charters in the state’s 50 lowest-performing districts and would mandate that 80 percent of the students at new charters be from low-income homes or have limited English proficiency or special needs. The plan further requires that the schools have 5 percent more English language learners and special needs students than the district system. How charter schools, which award seats based entirely on a random lottery drawing, could ensure such a population make-up is unclear.

But an even bigger stumbling block may be a change the proposal would make in the way charters are funded, taking 20 percent of the charter funding out of the state education aid formula and putting it in a separate line item in the annual state budget. Charter school leaders fear that this portion of their funding could be vulnerable to legislative cuts in tough times, since it would be untethered from the formula that sends money to district schools.

“Putting 20 percent of our funding in a line item would jeopardize the whole charter school movement,” says Marc Kenen, director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, who hopes the funding language can be changed.  He says no increase in the cap would be preferable to one that carries the funding risks of the proposal as currently drafted.

Even if the concerns of charter school leaders can be resolved – and if a Legislature that has been decidedly cool to charter schools can be won over – that would still leave the state a long way from the Readiness Project’s goal of a robust plan for dealing with the thousands of students stuck in chronically low-performing schools.

Willing spirits but a weak wallet might be the best way to describe the state of the Readiness Project.

“There’s no lack of urgency,” says Education Secretary Paul Reville about the huge achievement gap between poor and minority students and their higher-performing counterparts. As funding becomes available, he says the state will challenge districts to develop plans to convert low-performing schools into readiness schools.

Reville has also met recently with several college presidents who may be interested in taking over underperforming schools and operating them as readiness schools under terms that set strict performance measures by which they would be judged. 

No one knows whether the readiness model will deliver, as hoped. But with so many Bay State students falling through the achievement crack each year, the broader-scale effort to test it can’t happen soon enough.