Recently there was a back-and-forth among readers about whether charter schools or public schools pay more in administrative costs. One of our readers who supports charters insisted they were more efficient and spent less on administration.
I decided to ask one of the nation’s foremost scholars of charter school organization and finance, Gary Miron of Western Michigan University.
Here is his response:
Hi Diane,
** This has been a recurring finding in the 9 state evaluations commissioned by state ed agencies that we conducted between 1997- and 2007 as well as in a national study of charter school finance we conducted in 2010.
See cite below
Miron, G., & Urschel, J. L. (2010, June). Equal or Fair? A Study of Revenues and Expenditures in American Charter Schools. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved [date] at http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/EMO-RevExp.pdf
** We also write about this and document this in our 2002 book, Chapter 4, around page 58. Also, in chapter 4, we hypothesized that over time charters would increasingly be able to devote more to instructional costs but this did not happen.
Miron, G., & Nelson, C. (2002). What’s public about charter schools? Lessons learned about choice and accountability. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Hope this helps.
Gary
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, with Moskowitz getting about $500,000 p/year for 10,000 or so students that’s not surprising.
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Moskowitz gives new meaning to the word “overhead”
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Over whose head?
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Of course they do. Charters are PRIVATE schools. It’s SIC. Thanks for this, Diane.
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The authors note that private funds flowing to charters are not part of a national database that otherwise can be used to track administrative costs.
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And the answer is MORE administrative costs.
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Why does Miron never get interviewed? The newspapers in Ohio can’t quote the Fordham Institute enough, and all the while there’s an expert in Michigan they could be contacting.
It’s like he’s not at the Ed Reform popular kids lunch table or something 🙂
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Miron is a scholar.
Not sure how good he is with snappy sound bites.
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You expect Ohio to look to Michigan for advice/counseling/help???
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Public school advocates finally got someone in Columbus to listen to them about the charter funding issue. One would think it wouldn’t have been this hard to get the attention of the state leaders, given that 93% of Ohio students attend public schools:
“Lake Local passed a resolution in December noting that the Wood County district received $2,894 per student in state aid in 2015.
But the state took $7,398 for each of the district’s students who chose to instead attend a charter school. The Lake Township trustees followed up with their own supporting resolution.”
Public schools want the state to fund the charter schools the state promotes and runs, instead of dumping the charter funding problem on public schools.
If the state is allocating 2k per pupil to public school kids, then the state shouldn’t mandate public schools send 7k per student to charter operators.
The math doesn’t work for public schools. Obviously.
Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2016/01/20/Bill-changes-how-charters-are-funded.html#yIDHgXYzj4GLKhVk.99
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Charter chains are considered districts unto themselves, so it’s axiomatic that they will have higher administrative costs, since they cannot match the economies of scale of public school districts (which themselves often suffer from administrative bloat).
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It’s too bad I’m late to the party. Please see a study by Arsen and Ni (2012), “Is Administration Leaner in Charter Schools? Resource Allocation in Charter and Traditional Public Schools”with an in-depth review of various expenditures per-pupil included in the literature review. Here are some excerpts:
“Simple comparisons of per-pupil revenue, however, may not tell the full story. On the one
hand, some, but certainly not all, charter schools receive significant financial support from private sources (foundations, nonprofit charter management organizations, or parents) which is not fully reflected in state school finance data (Scott, 2009; Toch, 2010). Meanwhile, many charters do not provide the full range of services typically provided by TPSs, e.g., student transportation, special education, summer school, secondary as well as lower-cost elementary education (Arsen, Plank & Sykes, 1999; Miron & Urschel, 2010). So charter schools’ lower funding levels may correspond very roughly to a more modest set of services they provide. It remains an open question whether charter schools would provide more of these services, if their funding were to increase.”
“So how do charter schools compare to traditional public schools in their use of the
education dollar? Do charters represent an organizational model in which more spending is devoted to teaching and less to administration (and other non-instructional services) as early advocates (e.g., Finn et al., 2000) predicted? While some observers have argued that charters with their greater spending flexibility do indeed spend more on instruction than traditional U.S. public schools (e.g., Hill & Roza, 2008) most available empirical evidence indicates otherwise. Compared to TPSs, charter schools appear to devote a smaller share of their funds to instruction and a higher share to administration (Miron & Nelson, 2002; Miron & Urschel, 2010; Nelson et al, 2003; Prince, 1999).”
The actual study compared Michigan TPS and charter schools and found:
“The figures in Table 2 distinguish three types of administrative services: general
administration, business services, and school administration. General administration includes expenditures on a district or charter school’s board and executive administration (e.g., superintendent, assistant superintendents, legal fees, etc.). For charter schools managed by an EMO, the portion of the EMO’s service fees, which is devoted to executive administration falls under “general administration.” Business office services include purchasing, budgeting, accounting, payroll, duplicating, printing, mail services, and some short-term interest payments. School administration includes spending on principals, assistant principals and their clerical staff. Charter schools spend substantially less on instruction and instructional support than traditional public schools. On average, charters spend nearly $1,700 less per pupil on instruction and another $400 less on instructional support than districts. As a share of total expenditures, Michigan’s
districts devote 61 percent to instruction, while charters devote only 47 percent. Charter schools spend less on both basic instruction and added needs instruction (special, compensatory, career-tech and adult education). Seventy percent of charters’ lower total instructional spending is attributable to basic instruction ($1,128 less) and 30 percent to added needs instruction ($508 less). Under added needs instruction, the largest discrepancy between charters and TPSs occurs in special education, where districts spend over $500 more per pupil annually than charters. Nine percent of charter
schools have no special education expenditures.”
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1016
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Charters are inefficient by design. They duplicate fixed costs of public schools and often require taxpayers to underwrite all the costs of setting up a second site; all of these duplicate expenses could be rolled into existing costs in public schools. The also have a top heavy administration with exorbitant salaries. What they skimp on are the salaries of those that actually teach the students, often through canned, robotic programs. Taxpayers need to wake up to the fact they and their children are being used to underwrite someone’s profit while they are being sold on the wonders of “choice.”
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“This study is based on a cross-sectional design that looks at finance data from only 2006-2007 fiscal year.”
Right there that makes this worthless on top of the fact that no where in the study are schools of the same size and demographics compared.
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No, Cynthia, the study is not worthless. You don’t agree with its findings.
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Sorry Ms Ravitch, I should have been more precise.
The fact that the finance data is from 2006 make the study worthless today. The fact that the study failed to compare schools of the same size and demographics makes it worthless regardless of the age of the finance data.
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Weiss,
Direct the readers to the most current study.
Certainly, proponents of charter schools, who are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to management, Wall Street, as a return on charter school debt and, who are double-dealing on real estate and supplies, can be counted on to provide funds for the studies. They’re philanthro-capitalists!
Professors, at teacher’s colleges and in university education departments, have demonstrated an eagerness to lend the stature of their institutions to their pro-industry reports, as long as they’re funded by the richest 0.2%
So where are the studies?
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So they do spend less on admin but it doesn’t go into programs and instruction?
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