Gene V. Glass is one of the nation’s most eminent researchers and statisticians of education. He is a professor emeritus at Arizona State University.
He writes:
Education Policy Analysis Archives is an open access (free to read) peer-reviewed journal now in its 28th year of continuous publication.
EPAA just published an article by David S. Knight (Univ. Washington) and Laurence A. Toenjes (Univ Houston) entitled “Do Charter Schools Receive Their Fair Share of Funding? School Finance Equity for Charter and Traditional Public Schools.”
The charter school industry constantly complains that states underfund them. They lobby legislatures asking for funding equal to the per pupil expenditure of the traditional public schools. No matter that they offer fewer services than their public school counterparts, or that they rake off far higher funds for administration than public schools. (I make no apologies for ignoring the legality that charter schools are also public schools, because so many of them attempt to operate like private schools by discouraging applications for some types of student and by projecting the image that they are private schools.)
Knight and Toenjes’s conclusion will not be welcomed by the charter industry: “Using detailed school finance data from Texas as a case study, we find that after accounting for differences in accounting structures and cost factors, charter schools receive significantly more state and local funding compared to traditional public schools with similar structural characteristics and student demographics. … Policy simulations demonstrate that on average, each student who transfers to a charter school increases the cost to the state by $1,500.”
The complete article can be downloaded at https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/4438
Gene V Glass
http://gvglass.info
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Three sets of publicly-funded schools – public, charter and private- were always going to be more expensive than one set of publicly funded schools.
It isn’t free. They can’t cover the additional cost by just taking funding away from public school students.
The whole thing is magical thinking. “The funding follows the child” is purely ideological- it has no connection to the reality of budgeting and services. It’s a slogan.
Ed reformers are now demanding more funding for transportation in Ohio- they’ll need it, of course. They’re sending certain students to private schools. Why did they think that was free? If their past practice is any indication they’ll pull the private school transportation funding from students who remain in the unfashionable public schools.
Public school students are always the dead last priority. No one in ed reform advocates on their behalf or even considers them when putting these privatization schemes in.
The bigger story right now is that all school funding — public and charter — is going to be squashed by the economic catastrophe that is rapidly unfolding. There have been 10 million new unemployment claims in the last two weeks alone. That will probably accelerate as businesses run out of cash. Most workers have no real savings.
They will lose their homes. They will have no health insurance. Tax revenues will plummet while the public’s need for assistance soars. Again, this is absolutely catastrophic, and public funding across the board — including for schools, which are usually the biggest line item cost for states and localities — is going to get crushed in a way that make the budget cuts following the 2008 financial crisis look like nothing.
This is true that public funding is going to be decimated. People and schools will be in dire straits.
But the fact remains that if the charter industry keeps misleading the public and demanding disproportionately high resources to teach only the students that they find most profitable to teach, while demanding the the public system be their dumping ground for all of the more expensive struggling or disabled students they don’t want to teach, then that is going to hurt the most vulnerable kids even more.
The extraordinarily misleading boasts and claims of a charter industry that will only teach the students that give them bragging rights did serious harm to so many children even when the economy was booming. One can only imagine the harm those people without any moral or ethical compass will do when the resources are even more scarce.
Remember, the charter CEO with one of the highest profiles is the one who made it her personal mission to demand that Betsy DeVos be confirmed as Secretary of Education. Does anyone trust those people to put anyone first but themselves? Their lies need to be called out, whether in a time of scarcity or plenty.
Especially in a time of scarcity. Or else to the unethical and immoral charter CEOs will go the vast majority of the spoils.
Gene V. Glass quotes from the abstract “we find that after accounting for differences in accounting structures and cost factors, charter schools receive significantly more state and local funding compared to traditional public schools with similar structural characteristics and student demographics. … Policy simulations demonstrate that on average, each student who transfers to a charter school increases the cost to the state by $1,500.”
The dots in the middle of the quote is this sentence: ” However, many small charter schools are actually underfunded relative to their traditional public school counterparts.”
Leaving that sentence out of the middle of the quotation does not seem intellectually honest to me.
I can agree with your last statement, TE. Good catch! Certainly not an example of “fidelity to truth”.
Here’s one of the charter/voucher lobbying groups pretending transportation to schools is free:
“McShane and Shaw provide four recommendations for improvements at the state level. First, states should appropriate funding for charter schools to transport their students to their schools, bypassing districts. Second, private school choice programs should allow pupil transportation as an allowable use of education savings account, tax-credit scholarship, or voucher dollars. Third, states should not artificially restrict pupil transportation methods such as public transit. And fourth, state policymakers should look to improve the quality of the current pupil transportation system.”
Odd how none of them mentioned the additional costs during their 20 year effort to market privatization.
“Choice” isn’t free. It adds costs. It’s impossible to publicly fund three “sectors” of schools for the cost of one sector. They didn’t tell you that because they were hoping to codify their ideological objectives into law before the public could count the costs.
Every school kid in the country will take a funding hit to serve the ideological aims of ed reformers. That’s the part the cheerful slogan-reciting ignores.
Add in the lower cost of TFA staff and, the opportunity to make a killing in charter schools
becomes evident.
Bellwether advised ed reformers to reach out to churches to achieve their goals.
In certain sectors charter schools that serve affluent students are flush with cash. Some charter schools are highly selective. They not only serve elite students, they are also serving elite parents that can afford to donate and get tax breaks for their donations. They may also have the means to run expensive fundraisers for the school. At the same time, the public schools must cut much needed services to poor students in order to give private charter schools their piece of the pie. This is a reverse “Robin Hood” scheme in which the poor go without to give to the rich.
Professor Glass might be a hotshot statistician, but he clearly missed how expensive it is for the president of a charter management organization to maintain a stable of mistresses, a fleet of luxury cars, and a private plane, as well as keep all his golfing buddies and ne’er-do-well cousins employed at no-show jobs for seven-figure salaries. Of course charters need more funding that government schools get! This stuff isn’t cheap, folks! It sounds to me like Dr. Glass must be one of those Socialist academics who doesn’t understand these benefits of privatization. Next thing you know, he’ll be touting the virtues of democracy! He’ll be saying that charter schools should use state per-pupil funding to pay for school nurses and guidance counselors, art supplies, science labs, school supplies, textbooks, theaters and other frivolities! Crazy stuff!