State Sen. Robert O’Leary, just four months into his new role as co-chairman of the Legislature’s education committee, says he has a lot of homework to get up to speed on the complexities of education policy. But the Cape Cod Democrat is a quick study when it comes to the essential truth behind the debate over charter schools. “This thing is basically at a kind of crossroads, but it’s also at a standstill,” he says.

The crossroads O’Leary refers to is the growing evidence that charter schools in Massachusetts are closing the achievement gap, producing impressive results among low-income students in communities where district schools lag far behind. These findings, including a rigorously-conducted study showing huge achievement gains among Boston charter school students, should be opening the door for more such schools that can deliver on the promise of high-quality education for all. The standstill preventing that is a cap on the number of charter schools in Massachusetts, a roadblock that legislative leaders, local school officials, and teachers’ unions have fiercely guarded, arguing that additional charter schools will drain badly needed funding from district school systems.

Under current law, spending on charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate independent of local districts, can account for no more than 9 percent of all public school spending in a district, a cap that dozens of communities are at or near, effectively preventing new charters in districts from Boston to Holyoke.

In February, the Patrick administration called for raising that figure to 12 percent in underperforming districts. But the plan, submitted as part of the governor’s budget proposal, was hardly the breakthrough it might have seemed, as charter school leaders said it would actually be a step backwards for their cause. 

The proposal would have required that at least 80 percent of students in new charter schools be from low-income families, special education students, English language learners, or those at high risk of dropping out. It further specified that new charters must have at least 5 percent more special needs and English language learners than the average in the local district. Charter school leaders say such a quota system would wreak havoc on the random-drawing lottery they use to select students. Even more troubling, they say, was a provision that would put about 20 percent of charter school funding in a separate state budget line item from school aid money that now supports all local districts and charters. Charter advocates call that a poison pill that would make their funding vulnerable to cuts that would not affect district schools.

The governor’s proposal is “a nonstarter,” says Kevin Andrews, president of the Massachusetts Charter School Association and headmaster at Neighborhood House Charter School in Dorchester. 

Neither the House nor the Senate budget included the governor’s plan. Instead, the Senate budget calls for formation of a 13-member working group to study charter school financing issues and the cap on charter growth. “It’s clear that we have to address the question of how charter schools are financed,” says Rep. Marty Walz, the House co-chair of the education committee. She calls that a “prerequisite” to breaking the stalemate over the charter cap.

But there is no clear funding fix on the horizon. Districts will no doubt call for even more money to make-up for what they lose when a student attends a charter school in their community. Yet charter advocates say local districts already enjoy one of the most generous reimbursement formulas in the country. The state currently sends charters the per pupil state aid allocation that would otherwise go to the district where each charter student lives. But to ease the reduction in local school aid, the state reimburses districts the full amount of the per pupil spending for the first year a student attends a charter — paying them for a student they don’t have — and provides districts 60 percent of that amount the second year and 40 percent the third year.

“I don’t see how you can rationalize a higher rate of district reimbursement,” says Paul Reville, the state secretary of education.

Reville says the administration will refile its proposal as a bill in the next month or two, with the main principles of the plan unchanged. But it’s not clear that it will be any more warmly embraced this time.

Meanwhile, charter advocates are backing a bill that would raise the cap to 20 percent of local spending in the state’s lowest performing districts, which is where most charters are located. There are 23,000 students on waiting lists for Massachusetts charter schools, many of them poor and minority children stuck in urban districts with low achievement and sky-high drop-out rates, enrolled at schools that families of greater means would never have their children attend.

Testifying on behalf of the bill earlier this month, Paul Grogan, president of The Boston Foundation, which sponsored the recent study of Boston charter schools, cast the debate in the starkly human terms that are often lost amidst talk of spending formulas and reimbursement rates. “If we know these schools work, it borders on criminal to withhold them from the black and brown children of our communities,” he said. 

Strong words, but nothing less may break a stalemate that is leaving thousands of poor kids behind.