Jan Resseger is one of our wisest commentators of issues of education, equity, and social justice. She devoted her professional life to these issues. In her latest blog post, she is critical of Eve Ewing for ignoring the “economic catastrophe” that charter schools impose on public schools. She has seen it up close and personal in Cleveland and other cities in Ohio, where public schools suffer as charter schools expand, and most of the state’s charter schools are rated as “low-performing” by the state.
She begins:
I am a great fan of Eve Ewing’s book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard. I have read the book twice, visited in Chicago some of the sites she describes, given the book to friends as a gift and blogged about it. In that book, Ewing documents the community grief across Chicago’s South Side, where the now three decades old Renaissance 2010 “portfolio school plan” pits neighborhood public schools and charter schools in competition and closes the so-called “failing” neighborhood public schools when too many families opt for a charter school.
In a column published in Monday’s NY Times, Eve Ewing wants to make peace with charter schools. She writes that we should allow families to choose and ensure that neighborhood schools and charter schools can all be well resourced and thriving. Ewing grasps for a third way—some sort of amicable compromise in a very polarized situation.
Ewing is a University of Chicago sociologist, and, in her column she examines many of the factors by which neighborhood public schools and charter schools have been compared and rated. She points out that academic quality is a mixed bag with neighborhood and charter schools sometimes besting each other in terms of student achievement. Then she wonders, “What would it look like if we built an education policy agenda dedicated to ensuring… resources for all students?
The problem in Ewing’s column this week is that she never identifies or addresses the matter of public funding for education. I assume she wants to equalize school funding across both sectors. But when charter schools compete for students with public schools, there are now two separate education sectors to split what has proven to be a fixed pot of money. In every single place I know about where charter schools have been allowed to open up, this is a zero sum game. A sufficient and growing body of research demonstrates that there is no way to split the funding both ways without cutting the funding that most states and local school districts have been budgeting for their public schools.
Bruce Baker, the school finance expert at Rutgers University, explains that one must consider more than the comparative test scores and students’ experiences in neighborhood schools and charters, and instead examine the impact of adding new charter schools into what he calls the entire educational ecosystem of the school district: “If we consider a specific geographic space, like a major urban center, operating under the reality of finite available resources (local, state, and federal revenues), the goal is to provide the best possible system for all children citywide…. Chartering, school choice, or market competition are not policy objectives in-and-of-themselves. They are merely policy alternatives—courses of policy action—toward achieving these broader goals and must be evaluated in this light. To the extent that charter expansion or any policy alternative increases inequity, introduces inefficiencies and redundancies, compromises financial stability, or introduces other objectionable distortions to the system, those costs must be weighed against expected benefits.” “In this report, the focus is on the host district, the loss of enrollments to charter schools, the loss of revenues to charter schools, and the response of districts as seen through patterns of overhead expenditures.” In his report, Baker calls charter schools “parasites.”
One issue is that charter schools tend to serve fewer English language learners and fewer students with extremely severe disabilities, leaving behind in the neighborhood public schools the children whose needs are most expensive to serve. Research by Mark Weber and Julia Sass Rubin at Rutgers University demonstrates, for example, that: “New Jersey charter schools continue to enroll proportionally fewer special education and Limited English Proficient students than their sending district public schools. The special education students enrolled in charter schools tend to have less costly disabilities compared to special education students in the district public schools… (D)ata… show that many charter schools continue to enroll fewer at-risk students than their sending district public schools.”
In Pennsylvania, the state funds special education in charter schools at a flat rate of $40,000 per student no matter whether the child is autistic, blind, a victim of severe multiple handicaps or impaired by a speech impediment. Peter Greene reports that in Chester Upland, where a charter school is sucking up a mass of special education funding, in a court decision, Judge Chad Kenney declared: “The Charter Schools serving Chester Upland special education students reported in 2013-14… that they did not have any special education students costing them anything outside the zero to twenty-five thousand dollar range, and yet, this is remarkable considering they receive forty thousand dollars for each one of these special education students under a legislatively mandated formula.”
The biggest financial loss caused by the introduction of a charter sector into a school district is that it is not possible for the school district to recover the stranded costs when children exit to charter schools. In a groundbreaking 2018 report, the Oregon political economist, Gordon Lafer demonstrates that California’s Oakland Unified School District loses $57.3 million every year to charter schools. Here’s how: “To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community. When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district… If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of heating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment. In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.”
Lafer concludes: “If a school district anywhere in the country—in the absence of charter schools—announced that it wanted to create a second system-within-a-system, with a new set of schools whose number, size, specialization, budget, and geographic locations would not be coordinated with the existing school system, we would regard this as the poster child of government inefficiency and a waste of tax dollars. But this is indeed how the charter school system functions.” In the same report, Lafer adds that in 2016-17, the San Diego Unified School District lost $65.9 million to charter schools.
In a subsequent report, Lafer explains: “Public school students in California’s West Contra Costa Unified School District are paying dearly for privately managed charter schools they don’t attend… Charter schools add $27.9 million a year to WCCUSD’s costs of running its own schools… That’s a net loss, after accounting for all savings realized by no longer educating the charter school students.”
Please continue reading her excellent post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The entire concept of charter schools is nuts, and if they hadn’t been propped up by so much polished billionaire-funded propaganda from operations like the Hoover Institution, everyone would say what a crazy idea. Turn over a public site to any rando who gets it together to fill out the form correctly, along with public money, to let them open a school, and drain the resources from public schools to do that. If that notion were applied to fire stations or parks or municipal bus systems, everyone would just laugh it off as crazy.
Exactly.
I think Ewing ignored that the ed reform “movement” doesn’t stop with charters.
Ed reformers now either endorse and promote ALL privatization of public education.
There are 21 public education privatization bills moving thru state legislatures right now- planned and promoted by ed reformers.
It’s just not true to say they stop at charters. They are moving really aggressively to privatize public education. The end goal of “the money follows the child” is to give each family a low value voucher and send them off to shop for educational services. Ed reformers openly promote these schemes.
We were misled by this “movement”. They do nothing to “improve” existing public schools and they are not stopping at charters. Hell, they haven’t even stopped at private school vouchers. They are now lobbying to push public education funding to any and all contractors.
They are WELL beyond charters. The big push right now is for universal vouchers- that’s what “the money follows the child” means.
It isn’t fair to the public to continue to characterize ed reform as anything other than a privatization movement. That’s what it is.
If these folks succeed “public education” will consist of a 7200 dollar voucher and a list of contractors.
Your observation is astute.
The Gatesway Drug.
The charter is a Gatesway drug
That leads you on to vouchers
There’s never really just one bug
When Gates infests in couches
I just don’t get why it is so hard to get the message across that we are not purchasing our own child’s education, we are providing a public good that educates all children. We are not buying the right to use roads or police and fire services, we are participating in the funding of those common goods for the entire community.
This situation points out the importance of avoiding public/private partnerships or at least structuring them much differently (to avoid huge tax write-offs). If everyone pays their taxes, the needs of the community will be met through that common collection. When private sources get to direct what happens, that means the common good has been sabotaged. No private entity should be dictating what the common good will be.
“Under the bill, two thirds of Arizona’s 1.1 million public-school students — 650,000 to 700,000 children — would become eligible for private-school vouchers, according to the Arizona Department of Education.
In 2018, Arizonans considered a ballot measure to block legislation that would have allowed all 1.1 million public school students to apply for ESAs. Voters rejected those universal vouchers by a 65% to 35% margin. ”
The work of ed reformers.
I don’t mind that they want to privatize public education. It’s an ideological approach and they’re certainly allowed to embrace and promote it. I mind that they continue to pretend that’s not what they’re doing.
The flip side of all this frantic work on privatization is they have not accomplished ONE thing that benefits any public school student, anywhere.
What do public school school students and families get out of ed reform? They get tests. That’s the sum total contribution to public schools of this “movement” over the last twenty years. They test our kids a lot.
Why should PUBLIC school families or advocates support them? They don’t serve public school students. They offer no benefit at all to students who attend public schools.
We have a benchmark for how ed reformers perform:
“The annual standardized tests will provide badly needed data to determine whether the level of learning is as grim as expected, who is faring worst and by how much. It will set a much-needed foundation for deciding who needs intensive summer educational programs and other interventions to ensure that this generation of students doesn’t become lost.”
The public were told they needed standardized tests to target assistance to public schools. The ed reform echo chamber got their testing demand met. Armed with “data” they would (supposedly) effectively advocate for students in public schools.
Let’s rank them on a 1 to 5 scale. They’re (supposedly) full time public education advocates and they have an absolute lock on education policy. Let’s see how they perform on the measure they sold to the public when this started, which was not “privatizing public education” but instead “improving public schools”.
Privatization is a zero sum game that public schools often lose when charter schools siphon off the cheapest and easiest to educate. Public schools must educate the neediest and most expensive to educate with far less money. The financial impact makes no sense for public schools that are treated like a host to parasitic charter schools. Another factor is that in several states many elected representatives are ideologically opposed to public education, and they give private charter schools preferential financial treatment causing further loss of funding to public schools. Public schools are on the losing side of the arrangement.
If both public and private charters are to coexist, we will need to figure out a new way to fund public education. If this becomes reality, tax payers must realize we will be paying more for public education as a result. We cannot pay for public and private schools for the same dollar. Public schools cannot continue to adequately serve the neediest students when they must bear the cost of the inefficiencies imposed by increasing privatization.
cx: public schools and private charters are to coexist
It’s a shame that Eve Ewing’s sociology coursework didn’t seem to include any learning about public goods.
Where Ewing’s reporting is the most seriously flawed is her blanket acceptance that charters are about parent choice. Ewing doesn’t even notice or consider that they are more importantly about the charter choice of which kids to teach or not. How did she leave that out? Because she didn’t care? Because mentioning that inconvenient fact would render the rest of her argument laughable?
Every time that ed reformers’ mention”choice”, the one thing that progressives do not like to mention is that the ultimate choice always belongs to the charter, not the parent.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would wonder why progressive politicians don’t make what is the strongest case against charters. “She who must not be named” is the only politician who clearly stated that in her comments in South Carolina, and the ed reformers went nuts and she couldn’t mention it again. But the fact that “she who must not be named” didn’t mention that again does not explain why progressive politicians who supposedly aren’t owned by corporate interests remain silent and complicit instead of publicizing the one argument that makes every other argument for private, voucher-like charter “choice” absurd.
Education is a public good that every child — every single one — has a right to have. Charters are a privately operated school that takes public money to teach ONLY the students they want to and if they don’t want to, they have no responsibility for them period.
Public good comes with OBLIGATION. The charters that Eve Ewing condones have no obligation to a student, period. They can teach the ones they find worth teaching and dump the ones who they don’t want to teach.
Public school systems are so obligated to their students that their obligation includes paying as much as $100,000 year for severely disabled students to attend private schools that can accommodate their disabilities. There is not a fallback “charter” school that has to accept every student whose education costs are higher than the per pupil allocation and can never end their financial obligation to that student, regardless of how high the cost is.
It is possible to have “choice” when all schools are part of the same system. But when Ewing endorses a system where some “choice” schools are privately operated and choose what students they will allow to remain in their school, and compete with the public system that has to accept all the students that charters don’t want, she is either being intentionally obtuse, or is shockingly ignorant of what a public good means.
I was sad to read Ewing’s editorial for the same reasons as Jan Resseger. I even worked in the very same neighborhood that she wrote about in Ghosts in the Schoolyard and personally witnessed the devastation that school deform brought to that area and the people who live there.
Ewing did not mention teachers unions. It seems to me that breaking unions is one of the primary motivations behind charter schools. Weakening unions means weaker job protections and also it leaves schools without strong advocates for what we are all talking about here – well funded, adequately staffed neighborhood schools that serve all children.
Of course, you are right. The Waltons are the main funders of charter schools, and they hate unions. Walmarts have no union. The Waltons invest in charters to kill off teachers’ unions.