It is hard to understand why anyone thinks that charter schools have. O fiscal impact on public schools. There is only one pot of money for education, and not many (or any) states are expanding that pot. The Trump administration wants to cut the federal education budget and divert more money to charters and vouchers.
This is a post about a new study by Duke University economist Helen Ladd and John Singleton that nails down the fiscal Harm that charter schools do to public schools.
Here is the summary.
Here is the study.
Here is the abstract:
”A significant criticism of the charter school movement is that funding for charter schools diverts money away from traditional public schools. As shown in prior work by Bifulco and Reback (2014) for two urban districts in New York, the magnitude of such adverse fiscal externalities depends in part on the nature of state and local funding policies. In this paper, we build on their approach to examine the fiscal effects of charter schools on both urban and non-urban school districts in North Carolina. We base our analysis on detailed balance sheet information for a sample of school districts that experienced significant charter entry since the statewide cap on charters was raised in 2011. This detailed budgetary information permits us to estimate a range of fiscal impacts using a variety of different assumptions. We find a large and negative fiscal impact from $500-$700 per pupil in our one urban school district and somewhat smaller, but still significant, fiscal externalities on the non-urban districts in our sample.”
Public schools that are underfunded must cut their budgets so that a small minority of students can attend charter schools. It makes no sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s even worse in Ohio. In Ohio ed reformers promised that the charter system would be state funded. Then they took a cut of every public school student’s state funding and transferred it to charters. Presto! The shortfall disappeared. No one cared that every single public school student took a hit, because no one was advocating for them.
Ed reformers in the statehouse admit it- finally- but they do nothing about it, because if they DID adequately fund charters at the state level they would have to admit that two systems cost more than one system. And they can’t do that.
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It’s really difficult for ordinary people to find out what “choice” systems actually cost, because there’s a lot of cost-shifting.
Often transportation costs are put on the public system side of the ledger when that entire cost is for “choice” schools.
You’d have to look at what the district provides to the “choice” schools and designate that as a “choice” cost, but instead it’s often just added to the district expenses.
Ohio has been doing this for years with private schools. Public schools are required to provide certain services to private schools. That cost is put on the district. This makes “choice” look cheaper than it is, and inflates public school costs to include costs incurred by students who don’t attend public schools.
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such an obvious shell game
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The voucher “cost” is deceptive too. If they are giving a voucher for 5k and the private school costs 7k, then the cost is 7k. It doesn’t matter where the other 2k comes from, because it doesn’t disappear into thin air. Someone is paying 5k and someone else is paying 2k. Just because the state announces that the voucher subsidy is 5k doesn’t mean that’s the cost. What it costs is what it costs.
If a church (in the voucher example) is kicking in 2k and the state is kicking in 5k then public schools will always lose that “cost” comparison, because they don’t have a church to cover some portion of the cost.
Then ed reformers can (and do) come out and say “vouchers are cheaper!” Well of course they’re cheaper. Someone other than the state is paying the difference. That 2k didn’t disappear. They just shifted it to a private payor.
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I have argued the issue about the harm of charters on public school budgets for years with people that have supported charters on-line. I did it because it is important that the public understands that charters are not “free.” We cannot run parallel systems with separate operating costs for the same dollar. Charter drain will hurt smaller systems faster than larger ones, but the net results will be a loss to public education that will have to operate at diminished capacity. It will ultimately wind up with taxpayers paying more to underwrite increased inefficiency and potentially worse results for all.
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“It will ultimately wind up with taxpayers paying more to underwrite increased inefficiency and potentially worse results for all.”
We’ve been doing that in Ohio for quite some time.
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retired teacher: so much said in so few words.
For my part, I find it stunning almost beyond belief that the same crowd that touts its bidness acumen can, on the one hand, assert in so many ways that “money doesn’t grow on trees” and “there’s no free lunch”— which is another way of saying that there isn’t an infinite amount of financial resources available—
And then come up with a variety of schemes (e.g., busing charter students at public school expense) that literally drain pubic schools of essentials. All the while pretending that they aren’t propping up their patented failures up by subsidizing them with the lifeblood of their “competition.”
But then, this is the same group that has the fantastical notion that the “magic of competition” will “lift all boats.”
Link: https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-charter-schools-movement-needs-to-stop-alienating-republicans
Hint: when your rheephorm “boat” is full of water, and you start using your buckets of paid political intrigue & rigged rules & propaganda machine to ensure that you can dump copious amounts of water into the public school boats around you—
That’s not a fair competition. And one of the worst parts is that even under such adverse conditions, the Centres of Educational Excellence that the corporate education crowd puts forward are so very often the poster children for the “factories of failure” label that they try to pint on genuine public schools.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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This is called “ROBBING tax payers?” Isn’t ROBBERY a CRIME?
The yahoos use words like “CHOICE” when there really isn’t any.
Truth in advertising? NONE. And too many people “BITE.” Good grief.
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The science isn’t settled on this issue—a recent peer-reviewed study showed that New York City traditional public schools co-located with charters saw a 9% increase in per-pupil funding (http://educationnext.org/charters-and-common-good-spillover-effects-charter-schools-new-york-city/).
There is probably a great deal of variability depending on the conditions in the local district—is overall enrollment flat, increasing, or declining; how much per-pupil funding the charter receives (in NYC, it’s quite a bit less than a TPS student); the density of the district, etc.
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Tim,
Carol Burris debunked that study.
Helen Ladd is one of the most distinguished economists of education in the nation. Who is that assistant professor from Teachers College, I can’t recall her name?
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In her review of the Cordes study Burris actually accepted the study’s finding that TPS and specifically those co-located with charters “had an 8.9% increase in instructional expenditures and a 35.3% increase in spending on other staff.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/08/28/do-traditional-public-schools-benefit-from-charter-competition/?utm_term=.1fb7d76b6a0d
Your aside about the respective credentials of the studies’ authors is amusing as it appears that Cordes may have been taught by Ladd during the course of one of her graduate degrees. I think focusing on the studies themselves and whatever is uncovered in peer review is probably more helpful, though.
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Cordes, an assistant professor, apparently did not do her homework. Her mentor, Helen Ladd, does not agree.
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Can you point readers to where Ladd has commented on the Cordes study?
Carol Burris and the rigorous peer review process at MIT Press’s Education Finance and Policy journal agree with Cordes’s conclusions.
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ThE rigorous peer reviewed study by Duke University Economics Professor Helen Ladd—cited in this post—directly contradicts the study you cite.
Who is Helen Ladd?
Helen F. Ladd is the Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Her education research focuses on school finance and accountability, teacher labor markets, school choice, and early childhood programs. With colleagues at Duke University and UNC, she has used rich longitudinal administrative data from North Caroline to study school segregation, teacher labor markets, teacher quality, charter schools, and early childhood programs. With her husband, Edward Fiske, she has written books and articles on education reform efforts in New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and England.
She is the co-author or co-editor of 12 books. These include Holding Schools Accountable: Performance-Based Reform in Education (Brookings Institution, 1996); The Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy (2008 and second edition 2015), books on school reform in New Zealand and South Africa, and a forthcoming book entitled, Educational Goods, Values, Evidence and Decision Making. From 1996-99 she co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance. In that capacity she is the co-editor of two books: a set of background papers, Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance and the final report, Making Money Matter: Financing America’s Schools. She is currently a member of a National Academy study of financing early care and education with a highly qualified workforce.
Prior to 1986, she taught at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and at Harvard University, first in the City and Regional Planning Program and then in the Kennedy School of Government. She graduated with a B.A. degree from Wellesley College in 1967, received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 1968, and earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1974.
She was president of the Association for Public Policy and Management in 2011 and, from its founding in 2008 until 2017 was co-chair of the national campaign for a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.. Before she shifted to education policy, her research focused on state and local public finance, and she was active in the National Tax Association, which she served as president in 1993-94. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a senior research fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. With the support of two Fulbright grants, she spent the spring term of 1998 in New Zealand studying that country’s education system and the spring term of 2002 doing similar research in South Africa. More recently, she spent a tern as a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam examining the Netherlands’ long experience with parental choice and weighted student funding, and two months in London at the Institute for Fiscal Studies pursuing research on school improvement and English academies.
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Doesn’t the co-located school have a 35% increase in “other” staff because the public schools now has to hire “other” staff to cover for all the free riders at the charter school? Charter schools aren’t paying for the school security guards and I suspect not for the custodial staff either. You know, the ones who make sure the sidewalks are clear of snow when the charter school kids go in.
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Tim, Tim, Tim, haven’t you learned yet that you can’t bring a dull blade of baseless ideological sophistry to a knife fight of actual intellectual, empirical debate? The money bags you have behind you won’t hold up to an actual factual discussion. They do, however, prop you up and pay for the microphone much longer than would be fair if you actually had to work for an honest living like real teachers do. But I’m sure you must profit off the children you claim to care about quite well. Kudos to you for gaming the scam!
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Heh heh. I enjoy watching experts who support public education debunk the pseudoscientific studies sponsored by Destroyers of Public Education, DPE. I will add that the DPE CRPE, Center for Reinventing (the wheel) Public Education calls on its members to “Require that districts that fail to reduce costs [irresponsibly] leave the… business.” Got that from their website. Charters know they’re forcing public schools to shrink their budgets. They insist on it.
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