If you are a historian, you have to have a long memory or know where to find out what you need to know.
I remember when charters first started. One of the arguments that charter advocates made was that they would cost less; they would be more efficient and would save the taxpayers’ money. After all, they wouldn’t have all those administrators and overhead found in public schools.
But as time goes by, charters are forgetting the original promise (they never made them) and demanding parity with public schools.
That’s the purpose of the “Gates Compact,” where the Gates Foundation gives a district a big cash award if they agree to treat charters on equal footing with public schools.
And now we see charters in Pennsylvania making a plea to up their state reimbursement for tuition.
In a time of fiscal austerity, every dollar that goes to charters comes out of the budget for public education, meaning less money for public schools.
Charters are learning that the cost of education is what it is, unless you pay teachers less or make a point of having large numbers of young, inexperienced teachers who are at the bottom of the salary scale. Or, go online, in which case, students can be put in front of a computer and the virtual class size may be 50 or more, with none of those pesky brick-and-mortar expenses, like heating, cooling, custodians, a school nurse, a library, etc.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Your point about the claim that charters would have lower administrative costs reminded me of the recent report by researchers Gary Miron and Jessica Urschel. They found that both virual charters and brick and mortar charters spend significantly more on administration than public schools do. http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/nepcrbk12miron.pdf
The forces attacking public education in Pennsylvania have just been handed a gift from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Assuming that tests alone are a valid way to rate schools, the Sunday Inquirer reports on massive cheating on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment. Only late in the article do they state that the cheating has not happened in the majority of schools.
What this signifies is the tremendous pressures administrators and teachers have been under to improve test scores to the neglect of everything else. In Philadelphia in particular, under the administration of former School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman during the years this report covers (who was on the Board of the Broad Foundation while she was Superintendent of Philadelphia Schools), Administrators were pressured into supporting Ackerman’s PR campaign of self-promotion through propaganda about rising test scores.
Most of the cheating took place in schools with high poverty rates, both public and charter. The absurdity of blaming teachers for the conditions their students come from is so obvious in this article, but, as many of the letters accompanying this article show, this will be seized upon by right-wing forces to escalate the attack on public schools.
PSSA-cheating reforms yield lower scores across Pa.
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20120729_PSSA-cheating_reforms_yield_lower_scores_across_Pa_.html
I heard that every time a student leaves the public school system in NYC for a charter school, $12,000 goes with him/her. I assume that if one of those students goes back to the public school, which some surely do, that money is not returned but kept by charter school. Is this accurate?
I don’t know where else to post this but Duncan is using the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) to e-mail blast congress against sequestration. Why should special educators and parents of children with disabilities advance Duncan’s agenda? Race to the Top does not provide more money or equal opportunities for SPED students or teachers. It mandates more money for third parties (e.g. charter schools, testing companies, Michelle Rhee attacks, and high stakes testing.) His OSEP director Melodie Hargrove announced in April 2012 no more resources will be available for SPED so why would special educators and parents want to support an agenda that hurts kids and teachers in special education?
Here’s the link to the CEC policy insider. You can leave a comment there if you wish. I’m offended he’s using special education as a political tool .
http://www.policyinsider.org/2012/07/secretary-duncan-tells-congress-sequestration-is-bad-for-kids.html
Can you explain sequestration?
Will this help?
The failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit
Reduction to produce a bill identifying budgetary savings
of at least $1.2 trillion over ten years (2012-2021) has
triggered an automatic spending reduction process that
includes sequestration (the cancellation of budgetary
resources) to take effect on January 2, 2013, as stipulated
in the Budget Control Act of 2011. For fiscal year 2013,
automatic, across-the-board budget cuts will be applied to
almost all federal education programs.
Click to access Impact_of_Sequestration_on_Federal_Education_Programs_Reformatted_06-26-12.pdf
As a person who helped advocate for the charter public school idea from the beginning I disagree with this assertion, “I remember when charters first started. One of the arguments that charter advocates made was that they would cost less; they would be more efficient and would save the taxpayers’ money. ” As a person who has testified on this subject in a number of states, I’ve never made this assertion. Gary Clark, Democratic State Senator who was the chief author of the legislation there, never argued these schools would cost less.
Yeah. There is a push in Florida to give them equal facilities funding.
Charters lack the economy of scale provided by a public school system — particulary in the inner-cities (where virtually all charters are located) where the school system is relatively large. Therefore, assuming that charters served the same mix of students as the neighborhood public schools, charters must have higher per-pupil costs than the neighborhood public schools.
As you note, charters can only overcome this economy-of-scale disadvantage by spending less on individual expense items in the budget — i.e., teacher salaries, employee benefits, facility maintenance. In the long run, you get what you pay for, so the charters will ultimately have lower-quality teachers, employees, and facilities.
The only ways that charters can cost less than neighborhood public schools in the long run are to either 1) skim the cream in pupil enrollment (enrolling the inexpensive-to-educate students) or 2) provide lower quality services to the students.
I think they are doing an outstanding job of both #1 and #2. If those were the measurements for success, then they need to hang out a “mission accomplished” banner.