The one thing we know for sure about the Walton Family Foundation is that it loves school privatization, I.e., charters and voucher. The other thing we know for sure is that WFF does not like public schools.
So, no surprise that the Walton Family Foundation funded a study claiming that charter schools are underfunded.
This is actually very funny, because when the idea of charters was first float in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we were assured that charters would save money because they would cost less. After all, they do not have bureaucracy, and they can buy their supplies at the lowest price, and they would be lean and efficient.
Except now they complain that they don’t get as much money as public schools!
Gee whiz, the friends of Eva Moskowitz held a dinner party a few days ago and raised over $7 million in one night for her charters.
It is hard to feel sorry for this island of privatization, to which Walton contributes about $160 million yearly, and which has the support of Arne Duncan, the NewSchools Venture Fund, the hedge fund managers, the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, the Dell Foundation, etc. as well as the legislatures of many states.
Cry me a river.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Per pupil expenditure has always been the WORST way to look at school funding….or to justify vouchers and other revenue transfer plans. A classroom of regular college prep students does not cost the same as a self contained classroom of moderately to severely disabled students. Nor does a school become magically one student less expensive to run when a kid takes voucher money off to another school.
Charters get to bypass rules and student populations district zoned schools cannot. Some charter chains have turned that into an art form. If legislatures are allocating them less money it is possibly a sign someone actually looked at REAL operating numbers.
The “charter schools are underfunded” war is just beginning in Michigan. The Detroit News (conservative) has had multiple editorials about equalizing funding. Today’s was by the head of the Michigan Association of Public Schools Academies. It was a flagrant advertisement filled with sentimentality and a call for more money. Then the usual claims of charter school closings due to poor performance (with the obvious dig of traditional schools never having closed for that reason).
It ignores that charter schools have far lower overheads. No teachers at the top of the pay scale. No legacy costs. No transportation costs. Shoestring models. The money would just line the pockets of the for-profit sector of which 80% of Michigan’s charters belong.
And the closing due to academic reasons is a myth. Exhibit A: A friend of mine teaches 4th grade at charter in Ecorse (near Metro Airport). His charter’s test scores were equal to that of the neighboring public school. They informed him that they’re closing. Clearly the reason isn’t academic. In fact, he told me two months ago that they were under-enrolled and that money issues were the talk of the staff. But they closed and claimed it was for academic reasons. It wasn’t but that’s what will be reported.
It’s all a game to see who gets the money.
I just don’t “GET” people being so money hungry when they already have so much more than they will need the rest of their lives.
They’re never going to save money if they have to replicate a parallel system. This happened in Ohio, when it came out that charter schools had higher administrative costs. Of course they do. They’re designated as “districts” and they each hire a full tier of managers and then pay outside contractors to do work they can’t replicate.
You know, I would be okay with 90% of the arguments for charter schools if they would admit that this parallel system they’re creating is dependent on a public school system. Because it is. We can’t have “specialty schools” without a public school system underneath it. They can’t afford to replicate the services they share with public schools.
Trashing public schools to promote charter schools isn’t just unfair, it’s dumb. It rests on this myth that we can have a “choice” system that will be all things to all people, and (magically!) cost the same or less. It’s just baloney, and they know it. It will never work. There are trade-offs in privatizing schools, and right now public schools are taking the entire downside. Before they celebrate that and exacerbate it, maybe they should consider what happens to charter schools when they’ve destroyed public schools and the “back up” system that makes charter schools possible is gone. That’s when reality hits.
If we think of charters as being like communes (which, philosophically, they kind of are) it outs a whole new light on it. Imagine a 1960s headline “Communes need more tax dollars.”
Joanna, this was addressed on a previous thread. Charters are absolutely nothing like communes. And I don’t believe communes sought tax dollars.
“Figures don’t lie but liars figure.”
Reminds me of the manufactured outrage over the salaries of Chicago teachers during and right after the 2012 strike. The defenders and enablers of the Chicago education establishment claimed that the “average” Chicago teacher was making approx. $77,000@year. As is usual in such situations, no mention of whether the figure was the mean, the median, or the mode.
Two online commenters posed a simple question which the edufrauds of CPS wouldn’t answer: how did they come up with the number? Best guess: taking the salaries of all employees [consultants too?] with [current? any even if expired?] teaching credentials, adding up those salaries, then dividing the resulting total by the number of people involved. Voilá—the mean! And in this case the mean IS mean, because when you include a whole bunch of highly paid educrats who haven’t worked in a classroom for ages and ages, you distort the average (mean) of actual living, breathing, hard working classroom educators. Kind of like putting Bill Gates in a bar with typical folks and then bragging how the “average” wealth of everyone there has now risen into the many many millions. Numbers/stats folks would call him an “outlier” that gravely distorts the arithmetic mean—but oh the propaganda advantage of such tactics for the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time”!
😡
Hence the furious pushback by the leading self-styled “education reformers” when it comes to transparency and audits. Propaganda doesn’t work well when all the facts are out in the open.
“This is actually very funny”—yeah, but not in a ha-ha kind of way. And it’s at our expense.
But when we don’t cooperate and we frustrate their “cage busting achievement gap crushing innovative 21st century plans”—their reactions, sometimes, now that’s funny!
😎
They did the same thing with parochial schools, for years. I heard it constantly. “How are they educating kids with less?”
It wasn’t and isn’t a mystery. In this state, they rely on state funding for certain costs, and they subsidize the schools thru the church, and pay teachers less.
Nothing magical at all. Just addition and subtraction. The compulsion to compare apples to pineapples is political. It serves political ends.
Hey, when is “public schools week”? Anyone know? For “agnostics” we sure do a lot of preferential treatment of this one sector of schools. When do we focus on successful public schools? Am I to believe such schools don’t exist? That hasn’t been my experience.
When’s the last time you heard a politician mention “public schools” without putting “failing” in front of it? I get that it’s politically expedient to find a punching bag for the ills of the entire country, but this is ridiculous. The schools that most children attend are either denigrated or ignored. How did that happen?
The fact that Walton funded the study shouldn’t be a surprise. If charters were spending more, the AFT would have funded the study.
Districts that say charters are costing them money on a per student basis are just lying. They have the data and could back that up with real numbers if it were true. They don’t because the math is not on their side.
The question of whether charters cost districts money overall is a bit more complicated. There are some legitimate issues, such as the district’s needing to take students back if a charter closes, and the places where charters have resulted in private/parochial students going to the public charter school instead. But, in many places, districts just have not adjusted their spending to reflect the many fewer students they have as a result of charters. I agree this isn’t easy to do quickly, but many districts aren’t doing it at all.
I thought the biggest argument for privatization was that the private sector can do everything more efficiently and less expensively. If that’s not true (and I have no doubt it’s not true, but now they seem to be admitting it), then why privatize?
profit.
Not surprised. I expected something like this to happen once the competition of the public schools was on its way out or gone—-that the private-sector for profit charters would claim they needed more money and that will, of course, lead to higher taxes to support them. After all, they own the majority of elected representatives too.
After all, the Walton family, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers and the Hedge Fund billionaires donated billions as an investment to get their people elected.
They could solve this by making them fully PRIVATE and privately funded. Get their rich friends to send their kids, give scholarships to some poor kids, and when they work the kinks out of their model THEN come back show public schools you can do it better.
Billionaires like WFF are well aware that charters are zombies that always need attention for life sustainability and reproduction(?) costing million dollars with little or no promise for educational improvement.