IN THE 41 days before the Legislature adjourns, Massachusetts has to answer a pivotal question. Will it remain a national leader in education reform or will the education establishment’s hostility to charter schools hold it back?
The stakes are high, and not just because of the impressive results many charter schools have delivered.
President Obama has now put a glittering pot of money - a pot that could hold $200 million to $300 million for the Commonwealth - on the table for states willing to press ahead boldly on reform. But the administration has also made it clear that those with charter caps will be at a disadvantage in applying for the “Race to the Top’’ dollars.
Governor Deval Patrick has taken a big step in the right direction by proposing to raise the charter cap in the state’s worst-performing districts. That’s more limited than what the Obama administration has sometimes called for, but the presence of US Education Secretary Arne Duncan at Patrick’s July charter-cap press conference was a clear signal that the governor’s plan would put us hard in the hunt for the national dollars.
Since then, however, little tangible progress has been made. Certainly neither House Speaker Robert DeLeo nor Senate President Therese Murray has issued a clarion call on lifting the cap. Although the Education Committee co-chairs say they are proceeding apace on a bill, others fear the governor’s plan could sink out of sight in a Legislature that has long proved a murky bog of anticharter sentiment. If so, the state won’t be strongly positioned for Race to the Top funding, applications for which will be due early next year.
Recognizing the dangers of inertia, a newly formed group of community, civic, and business leaders held a press conference this week to try to inject some urgency into the process.
The Race to the Top Coalition, midwifed by the Boston Foundation, counts progressives like Eduventures Inc. President Tom Dretler and Tom Birmingham, the former Senate president and coauthor of the state’s landmark education reform law; conservatives like Massachusetts High Technology Council President Chris Anderson and Analog Devices chairman Ray Stata; and minority and community leaders like Claudio Martinez, executive director of the Hyde Square Task Force, and Bennie Wiley and the Rev. Ray Hammond, co-chairs of Black Leaders for Excellence in Education. Others include University of Massachusetts President Jack Wilson and Leslie Nicholson, state director of Stand for Children.
Hammond told me that the African-American community has come to see lifting the charter cap as crucial to providing quality educational options to students of color.
“For many of us, we talk about it as in some sense the second phase of the civil rights movement,’’ he said. “Opportunity is great, but if there’s no equipping to seize the opportunity, it might as well not be there.’’
Birmingham, a former Ways and Means chairman, dismissed the argument that the state can’t lift the charter cap in a time of budgetary pressures, noting that the immediate cost, which he estimated as a few million dollars, is minor compared to the federal dollars that could be garnered.
Afterward, Birmingham said that with teachers unions, superintendents, and school committees all hostile to charters, raising the cap would be a tough vote for lawmakers.
“That makes for a formidable legislative foe,’’ he said of charter opponents. “On the other hand, charters are wildly popular, but with a more diffuse population.’’
The population that stands to benefit from the governor’s proposal is mostly urban, mostly poor, mostly minority. It would be shameful to leave them in the lurch - just as it would be a shame to leave hundreds of millions in federal money on the table.
In an interview, State Secretary of Education Paul Reville hailed the new coalition, saying he and the governor “welcome the sense of urgency’’ it brings to the issue.
Lawmakers aren’t likely to be as welcoming of the urgency accelerators. Some of them feel they have already taken too many tough votes this year, the poor dears, and don’t want to face another.
But if Massachusetts is going to join the race to the top, they need to rise to the occasion.
Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com. 
