Last year, In the Public Interest, a nonpartisan advocacy group in California published Professor Gordon Lafer’s seminal study of the fiscal impact of charters on three school districts in California. Oakland alone lost $67 million in “stranded costs” because of the flooding of the district with charter schools. Stranded costs are the costs beyond the per-pupil tuition that leaves the district, like heating, cooling, transportation, and other fixed costs.
ITPI has released a new report that demonstrates the fiscal impact of charters in one other district. The report is timely, since the Legislature is currently considering four bills to regulate charters so that they stop damaging the public schools that enroll the most students.
Jeremy Mohler of In the Public Interest writes:
Been wondering what’s causing all the hoopla about charter schools? You’re not alone — it’s a complicated issue.
I’m going to explain one aspect of the issue, in as simple terms as possible, to try to convince you that charter schools are worth paying attention to.
This morning, we released a new report on the cost that charter schools create for just one school district, West Contra Costa Unified (WCCUSD) in California’s Bay Area.
What do I mean by “cost?” I mean that, because some students that would’ve otherwise attended WCCUSD’s traditional public schools instead attend charter schools in the area, the district has $27.9 million less in funding to work with each year. That comes out to $978 less for each traditional public school student the district serves.
Here’s why. When a student transfers to a charter school, public funding for their education follows — but costs remain. Because charter schools pull students from multiple schools and grade levels, it’s rare that individual traditional public schools can reduce expenses enough to make up for the lost revenue.
Say a district loses 14 percent of its students to charter schools in the area. Its schools can‘t adjust expenses by, for example, cutting 14 percent of their principal, heating bill, parking lot paving, internet service, or building maintenance. The district also can’t proportionately cut administrative tasks such as bus route planning, teacher training, grant writing, and budget development.
This forces districts to cut services provided to traditional public school students.
WCCUSD recently did just that. Faced with a budget deficit, its board approved $12.5 million in budget cuts in December 2018 eliminating 82 positions, closing an academic tutoring program, and cutting services for English learners.
We found the same dynamic last year when we studied districts in Oakland, San Diego, and San Jose.
Keep in mind, we’re making conservative estimates here. Our totals don’t even include the often inequitable proportion of state funding districts receive for educating high-needs students.
Long story short: California’s traditional public school students are bearing the cost of the state allowing charter schools to grow in number at a rapid clip.
Of course, charter schools aren’t the only financial pressure that districts are facing. Regressive taxation, declining birth rates, and other forces are impacting districts from Los Angeles to Sacramento.
But, so far, the cost of charter schools has gone unmeasured and ignored in California educational planning. That can’t go on — students are paying the price.
Can anyone explain the rationale of public funding of two different school systems? Seventy years ago, we had public funding of two different systems in 17 states. That was called a dual school system, one for whites, one for blacks. What’s the rationale now for a dual system?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When many states passed their short-sighted charter rules, they gave no consideration to the impact they would have on local schools and communities. Choice was supposed to be a benign change. Over time we have seen charters expand, not to “save” poor children, but to make profit for politically connected actors. With laws that favor charter expansion, local communities have helplessly watched public schools suffer the loss and shoulder the burden of the most needy and expensive to educate. The result is many students continue to suffer from this imposed inefficiency. Public schools are left with stranded costs and reduced capacity to serve students. This is horrible public policy that lacks foresight and understanding the consequences of actions. California and other states need to examine what privatization has done to communities and students. Much needed policy changes are long overdue.
In other news, the Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics and Trumpeteering ran an opinion piece a couple days ago (on May 22, 2019) called “The Underpaid Teacher Myth,” vomited out by Jason Richwine and Andrew G. Biggs. In this screed, Richwine and Biggs attack the conclusion, in a report by the Economic Policy Institute, that in 2018, American K-12 teachers were underpaid by 21.4% vis-à-vis people with comparable levels of education in other fields. Mr. Biggs is a resident “scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute.
In most areas, the WSJCAT and the AEI can counted on to argue that everything good comes by way of the operation of the invisible hand of a supposedly “free market.” So, you would expect them, in accordance with their One True Faith, to say, “Well, there’s a lot of demand for increased teacher pay these days; that’s because there is a teacher shortage, and we’re seeing a market correction.” But no. Evidently, Libertarianism in practice is as flexible as is, say, Jabba the Part-time President’s application of the rules of golf.
What they argue, instead, in their piece, is that one can’t compare levels of education across fields. Nurses, they say, are paid more because they have REAL DEGREES, not ones from education schools. Evidently Richwine and Biggs don’t understand that most secondary school teachers have a major either in the subject area that they teach, with additional education courses, or a double major in their subject area and in education. But, as perusal of any report from an Ed Deform astroturf organization such as The Thomas B. Fordham Institute will demonstrate, actually knowing something about teachers and classrooms and students isn’t a prerequisite for the practice of EduPunditry. In the world of Ed Deform, you can become Secretary of Education based on, say, being the daughter-in-law of the founder of a pyramidal marketing scam. The less you know, the better.
One of the Ten Commandments of Education Reform is that you shouldn’t pay public-school teachers more for advanced degrees. Why? Well, Gates funded studies that showed no positive correlation between high-stakes test scores and level of teacher education. It never occurred to these NUMEROLOGISTS that level of teacher education might be a determinative factor IF YOU FIRST CONTROLLED FOR THE MAJOR DETERMINANT OF TEST SCORES, POVERTY. (Perhaps they’ve never heard of Pareto Effect.) And in never occurred to them that high-stakes test scores, especially in ELA, are not reliable or valid–that they might be looking at a case of garbage data in and bad inferences out.
Somehow, it makes perfect sense to the WSJCAT and the AEI that CEO pay affects quality but that teacher pay doesn’t.
[B]e these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense
Two thoughts on “Nurses, they say, are paid more because they have REAL DEGREES” — 1) I would bet that much publicity and reaction to TFA has been helping to convince many that modern-day teachers are not truly professional and 2) as a teacher I have been both envious and chagrined over the past decade when reading how nurses’ union leadership stepped up to adamantly protect the profession: so much of what the teachers’ unions have done has been shockingly big money complicit and thus long-term devastating to the teaching profession.
Of course, the WSJ piece gets in a dig at the teachers’ unions. This is obligatory in any piece funded by an organization run by the oligarchs because these are among the few remaining functioning unions in the US. And they do this despite the complicity of which you speak. I have a really hard time forgiving for taking Gates money and being complicit in the Coring of US curricula and pedagogy. Sickening.
cx: I have a really hard time forgiving the AFT for taking Gates money and being complicit in the Common [sic] Coring of US curricula and pedagogy. Sickening.
You gotta love it when the wankers at AEI (people who were too dumb to get a real job) lecture the rest of us about real jobs and real degrees.
I studied psychology for decades, as well as degrees in my content areas, and with 4 decades of practice enabling and facilitating the young human brain to acquire. SKILLS (not merely facts) but the ways to do WORK, I am a true professional. It breaks my heart to read the disrespect the corporate entities publish in the media they control.
They are stripping teachers of their First Amendment Rights and Meanwhile, as this feature in the New York Times shows, many teachers have to work extra jobs to meet their expenses: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/magazine/teachers-america-second-jobs.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
This is shameful!
Tim Slekar, dean of the college of education at Edgewood College in Wisconsin, writes here http://bustedpencils.com/2018/03/wisconsin-department-of-public-instruction-makes-teacher-licensing-process-more-understandable/. about the state’s determination to destroy the teaching profession by deregulating it. This is an ALEC goal
When they take over our schools, they can tell our people what and whom to believe!
We, at the bottom —with the kids— the parents and teachers (who know what learning looks like, must not let this PLOY to hand the schools over to state legislatures
The power elite, end out a steady stream of lies and noise —- so much static, so many talking heads, and pundits, the average ‘Joe’ is confounded as he goes to vote for bills with Orwellian names ‘to benefit the children.’
Bob. I posted your comment, too at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/In-the-Public-Interest-Th-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Education-Costs_Education-Funding-190614-86.html#comment736403
I saw a Columbus Ohio Dispatc article that was citing rates of absenteeism among teachers, with sourcing of data to the teacher-bashing National Center for Teaching Quality. The writer included summer days in the HOW AWFUL article and deleted another version that mentioned the fact that this profession is dominated by women whose health care is being undermined and so on.
Meanwhiole there is not much publicty to the facts of the matter on charter school exclusions, reported here for LA on May 22.
https://capitalandmain.com/charter-schools-remain-slow-to-reform-punishment-bias-0522
The issue of teacher absenteeism is a regular trope in the writing of the Fordham Institute for School Privatization and Teacher Bashing. And, indeed, absenteeism among teachers is higher than for workers generally.
Now, imagine that you are a generously paid pundit working for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Your JOB, ostensibly, is to keep abreast of what is happening in education and to write about this. And, in fact, it’s obligatory that when you write a report for the Institute (or a news article about a report), that you describe whatever the Institute has done as a “deep dive.”
On this issue, Fordham has a history of blaming teacher absenteeism on “the generous personal and sick leave policies” of state governments and the dastardly unions that negotiate these. But is that the real reason, and why would generous personal and sick leave policies be a priority among unions? An actual deep dive would consider these issues. Evidently, at Fordham, a deep dive consists of sticking a toe in the surf.
If they dove a little deeper, they might make some discoveries. Here are a couple:
K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, and this gender gap has been growing. In the 1980-81 school year, 67 percent of public school teachers were women; in the 2015-16 school year, 76 percent were. About a third of the nation’s children live with a single mother. So, we have a lot of teachers who are single mothers, and if something needs to be done for the child during the work day (a visit to a doctor, for example), this mother has to take personal time off work. Teaching and parenting are both demanding and stressful. Hats off to those who do both alone. How they do this I can’t imagine.
Teachers come into contact with a lot of sick kids. Most people have a couple colds a year, but people with kids and teachers of kids have much higher rates. The reason why there is no cure for the common cold is that there are a great many cold-causing retroviruses, and these vary in different parts of the country. Inevitably, following a school vacation, kids will have visited relatives elsewhere, brought back a new cold (or flu), and spread it throughout the school. Colds and flus, of course, vary a lot in intensity. Some are fairly mild. Some are quite severe. Some can actually kill you. One of the hazards of the job of teaching is that you are going to get sick a lot because you will be exposed to out-of-area colds and flus for which you haven’t developed an immunity. In years when I worked outside teaching, I would get one or two colds a year. In years when I was teaching, I would get three or four. And, in the era of Deform, teaching has become extremely stressful. There’s always some officious administrator in your room checking to see if your data wall has been updated. That’s one reason why people are leaving the profession in droves. Stressed-out people have weakened immune systems and get sick more easily.
But don’t expect the folks at Fordham to consider matters like this. They are paid by Gates, the Waltons, and others in the billionaire boys club to bash public schools and teachers and to promote depersonalized learning. So, ignoring facts like these is what they are paid to do.
cannot tell you what I really feel about a conversation about the war on teachers, which I experienced in. 1998 at the top of the profession. All these years later, and we are still watching the degradation of the schools by the removal of the AUTHENTIC PROFESSIONALS.
The power-elite is winning.
The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX has engineered the end of public education, which means the end of democracy and the end of income equality for the masses of the people.
I have posted for years about the destruction of our INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION while the national media is silent.
“Say a district loses 14 percent of its students to charter schools in the area. Its schools can‘t adjust expenses by, for example, cutting 14 percent of their principal…”
Why not? Can’t you just cut the principal off at the knees, for example? What would be lost? I can understand why you might (might) not want to cut him or her off at the neck, for example, but what could it hurt to chop a couple arms or legs off?
It’s. up at OPEd. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/In-the-Public-Interest-Th-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Education-Costs_Education-Funding-190614-86.html
with THIS commentary which has EMBEDDED links to Diane’s posts,. If you go to the address above. There is a second comment with more links to Diane’s blog posts on the charter debacle. It is too bad that the links do not appear when I copy paste. But if anyone puts CHARTER into the SEARCH ALL POSTS field at this blog, https://dianeravitch.net/?s=CHARTER — you will get all the info you need to see the war on public education and on teachers.
Jeff Bryant reports here on the waste of millions of federal dollars poured into charter schools in Louisiana.
National Education Policy Center Reviews Claims about Fiscal Impact of Charters and Finds Them Shallow and MisleadingBruce Baker of Rutgers University reviewed three policy briefs produced by the pro-charter, pro-choice Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and found them to be “generally superficial and misleading.” The apparent intent of these briefs was to influence the policy debate in California, in which Governor Newsom and the Legislature are considering whether to take into account the fiscal impact of charters on public schools. Baker’s review was sponsored by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.
Who Benefits from Unlimited Expansion of Charter Schools?
Rob Levine: How Charters Kill Public Schools, the Example of Minneapolis
Carol Burris: Florida Charters Are a Swamp of Waste, Fraud, and Profiteering
Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools on the State and City’s Floundering Charters
San Diego: Eleven People Indicted in Connection to Online Charter Fraud