The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently published a study claiming that charter schools do no fiscal harm to public schools, and may even lead to greater funding. Dr. Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Schools, has visited public school districts that are in a deep financial hole because of the financial drain caused by the proliferation of charter schools. She read the Fordham study with care and concluded that it was misleading and inaccurate.
Her article was published on Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet,” along with a response by the author of the study, Mark Weber. Weber agreed with her main point: – That said, I agree that my report does not provide evidence that charter school growth does not harm school district’s fiscal health. That fact is that this report can’t answer that question. My hope, however, is that it does provide a framework for having a more informed discussion about the costs of charter schools on the entire K-12 system.
It begins like this:
A recent study published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, entitled Robbers or Victims: Charter Schools and District Finances, was rolled out with fanfare and sent to policymakers across the country. When the Fordham Institute sent out its mass email, trumpeting its report, its subject line read: “New report finds charter schools pose no fiscal threat to local districts.” That subject line is a blatantly false and unsupported by their own deeply flawed study.
In the report and its public relations campaign, Fordham cynically attempts to razzle-dazzle the reader with misleading conclusions based on questionable data in hopes of convincing the public that charter schools do no financial harm to public schools. The Walton Foundation and The Fordham Foundation, the Fordham Institute’s related organization, funded the study. It is worth noting that The Fordham Foundation sponsors eleven charter schools in Ohio, for which it receives administrative fees.
The origins of the study, unacknowledged in the report, is author Mark Weber’s 2019 doctoral dissertation. Advocacy organizations are often accused of cherry-picking examples. With Robbers and Victims, Fordham cherry-picked a study on which to base its puffery. In a Fordham podcast and his blog, Weber, an elementary school music teacher who completed his doctoral studies at Rutgers University, reports that Fordham approached him to author their report after they read his dissertation, which is composed of three papers, the first of which is the basis of the Fordham report.
There are differences in substance between the dissertation and the report; however, these are not enough to substantively change results. Also, Robbers or Victims adds two more years of data (2016 and 2017). The research questions are re-phrased, some states were excluded, and several of Weber’s original cautions regarding the interpretation and limitations of his findings are either downplayed or dropped. Glossy bar graphs replace Weber’s tables.
In both the dissertation and the report, Weber attempts to show the association between charter growth and districts’ finances in revenue and spending—as charter schools expand. He found that in most cases in the states whose data he analyzed, revenue and expenditures either increased or stayed the same when the number of students attending charters located in the district went up. In all cases, there is no evidence of causation, just correlation.
For those not familiar with the distinction, a correlation occurs when two observations follow the same trend line. It does not present evidence that one causes the other. The classic example is the correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates—both are higher during summer months in big cities and then drop as the weather gets cooler. Then, there are hilarious examples of Spurious Correlations that show the associations between such oddities as the age of Miss America and murders by steam, hot vapors, and hot objects.
Fordham’s Petrilli latches onto the correlation and concludes that it appears charters do no financial harm to districts. In their news brief about the report, the National Alliance of Charter School Authorizers take Fordham’s deliberate attempt to deceive one step further saying, “Their findings show that if anything, increasing charter school enrollment has a positive fiscal impact on local districts.” That is blatantly false and deliberately misleading. “Impact” means that the study can support a causal inference. It clearly does not. But that is not the end of this study’s problems.
The Critical Question Not Posed
There is an obvious question that is neither posed nor answered. How do increases and decreases in district revenue and spending compare to districts without charters? Are the comparative rates higher, lower, or the same?
I read the Fordham report and Weber’s dissertation three times in search of that answer or at least a discussion of the limitation. The author never addresses it.
To ensure I was not misinterpreting the analysis, I emailed Professor Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, a national expert on school finance. He is familiar with Weber’s dissertation, having served as his advisor. I noted in my email that even if increases in revenue and spending are associated with charter growth, it is meaningless unless you can compare those increases to those of other districts with no charter schools.
Baker acknowledged the absence of comparative data and then went one step further (quoted with his permission).
“Comparing districts experiencing charter growth with otherwise similar districts (under the same state policy umbrella) not experiencing charter growth is the direction I’ve been trying to push this with a more complicated statistical technique (synthetic control method).
“But even with that, I’m not sure the narrow question applied to the available imprecise data is most important for informing policy. The point is that the entire endeavor of trying to use these types of data – on these narrowly framed questions – is simply a fraught endeavor and one that added complexity can’t really solve.”
Consider the following oversimplification of the problem. Between 2013 and 2018, national spending on K-12 education has increased 17.6% as states recovered from the Great Recession. That is the average. Spending increases in the states ranged from a 2% decrease in Alaska to a 35.5% increase in California. Both states have charter schools. Vermont, with no charter schools at all, had an 18% increase in spending. Florida, which has an ever-expanding charter school sector, increased spending by 11%. Only Alaska (which Weber does not include) did not see an increase. If we look at this from a national perspective, it is a safe guess to expect that revenue followed an upward slope similar to spending. So did the proliferation of charter schools. And so, frankly, did my age.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Misleading and inaccurate” are two terms to describe any so-called studies by the charter lobby. In this case Fordham has misused Mark Weber’s research. Reality paints a very different picture of disinvestment in public education in multiple states. Charter drain impacts programming in direct ways including larger classes, fewer supports and courses for students and facilities in need of repair. The Chester-Upland School District in Pennsylvania is teetering on the brink of extinction from charter drain and fiscal mismanagement. The Fordham paper is more charter lobby propaganda masquerading as research.
The report does not seem to address how districts compensate for the charter school drain on resources by cutting programs and personnel and increasing class sizes. There are types of “disinvestment” that are not quantified by dollar signs. Important point, retired teacher.
yes, as always with the reform reports — lauding this or that new concept but refusing to acknowledge the drain and frustration created on the other end of “innovation”
This from Mark Weber’s blog, Jersey Jazzman: Quote – As I’ve said on this blog and elsewhere many times: I am not for abolishing charter schools. I started my K-12 teaching career in a charter, run by good people who were committed to their students and their school. I have seen repeatedly in my teaching career that some students are not well suited to the “typical” public district school, and would benefit from an alternative that better suits their needs. I have no problem with charters being proud of their students and their schools, and I have never and would never criticize a parent for making the choice to enroll their child in a charter.
What I am against are the facile, often lazy, and sometimes outright mendacious arguments made in favor of charter schools by some — some — of their most ardent supporters.
There is no question that there are bad actors in the charter sector, and that they have caused unnecessary waste, fraud, and abuse against the taxpayers and families they are supposed to serve. There is no question that the current charter authorization and oversight system is completely inadequate to the task and needs to be reformed; consequently, many charters act in ways that are not in the best interest of citizens.
I am also deeply concerned that charters, particularly of the “no excuses” variety, are imposing a type of education on students of color that would never be tolerated by white parents in affluent school districts. The stories of students being denigrated and subject to carceral educational practices are well-known and far too common. end quote
All of which points to the need for charters to be under the umbrella of the districts that are impacted in some fashion. I don’t get to waltz into any other public institution and grab some of their resources to start my own more suited to my needs. Hey, I don’t like my police department, or my library, or public works department. Give me some of those tax dollars to start another one more in line with my needs. Ridiculous.
Well said!
Charter schools relationship with the school district depends heavily on individual state law. In several states it is only the local school board that can authorize a charter school.
Wisconsin is particularly interesting because of the large number of charter schools started by the local school boards. Granted there are 26 independent charter schools sponsored by institutions of higher learning including Akii-gikinoo’amaading high school authorized by the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College, but the overwhelming majority of the 240 charter schools in the state are authorized by the local school board.
That is meaningless when out of state charter billionaires buy local and state school boards, specifically to expand the charter sector and to frustrate democracy.
Did you listen to the interview with Charles Siler?
Weber’s rationale would work well if charter schools were established to work with public schools instead of in opposition to public schools. This thinking may have worked in the early days of so-called reform when people operated out concern for providing opportunities for students. Unfortunately, the mission today of so-called reform is rarely about more options for students. Now it is about the demise of public education by transferring public funds to private companies through any means necessary. It is about ending unions, collective bargaining, democratic input, accountability and a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the already wealthy. It is no accident that billionaires, corporations and religious zealots have lined up in support of privatization. It is no accident that dark money flows freely and lots of it goes to politicians that bog public schools down with testing, mandates and punishments. It is all part of the agenda to crush public education.
I am for abolishing charter schools as they are presently constituted. They drain funds and resources from the real public schools without the same accountability of the REAL public schools. Will charter schools ever be abolished? Not a chance in hell, they are supported by too many billionaires/libertarians, the GOP and corporate Democrats.
I am afraid you might be right.
“What I am against are the facile, often lazy, and sometimes outright mendacious arguments made in favor of charter schools by some — some — of their most ardent supporters.”
Unfortunately they have deep pockets to keep offending us with their nonsense. In NYC in particular they keep advocating for the removal of the charter cap, even though we don’t need more schools. NYC has had a declining birth rate since 2008, which was accelerating before COVID. The DOE has been forecasting declining enrollments for many years. We don’t need more schools really…but the charter industry does.
To correct myself, it’s “live births” and not “birth rates”.
2007 – 128,961 live births in NYC
2018 – 114,296 live births in NYC
The answer is “No, we don’t need new charter schools.” I’m sorry to perseverate on this issue, but I’m tired of their facile, lazy, and sometimes mendacious arguments, too.
Mark Weber’s blog says:
“I am not for abolishing charter schools. I started my K-12 teaching career in a charter, run by good people who were committed to their students and their school. I have seen repeatedly in my teaching career that some students are not well suited to the “typical” public district school, and would benefit from an alternative that better suits their needs.”
I challenge Mark Weber to explain why that “alternative” should be privately operated charters run under separate rules?
Many years ago, public school “alternatives” like Central Park East and Brooklyn New School were established but they were not “charters” run by private operators. They were REAL public schools. Their oversight was the public school system.
Mark Weber is guilty of promoting the same big lie here that has resulted in the increasing privatization of public education — the lie that these “alternatives” need to be privately-operated and it’s no big deal if they are because what is most important is that the parents whose kids are in them are happy about it.
That big lie is exactly the same lie that Mark Weber could use to push vouchers — after all, as Mark Weber points out — some kids benefit. Whether or not Weber supports vouchers is irrelevant since he supports promoting the underlying argument that “some kids benefit” that applies to vouchers.
I wish Mark Weber could explain why – if people like “alternative schools” – they haven’t been fighting to establish more alternative schools that are part of the public school system and not franchised out to private operators?
FYI — I can tell you why. Because deep down, Mark Weber and others whose research supposedly “unwittingly” justifies charters understand that simply having dumping ground public schools and “good” choice public schools that kick out all below average or problem kids doesn’t answer the question of how to teach the most at-risk kids who charters don’t want to teach. But instead of being honest and saying this, they go to great lengths to “prove” that charters that only teach the kids they want to teach are better than public schools who teach everyone and therefore they deserve disproportionate funding because of their “success”.
Until we have honesty, and researchers who don’t embrace the big lie that the ONLY ways that “some kids benefit” is to have privately operated charters get public money because all choice schools within the public school system have been such abject failures that we researchers will not even consider them when we do pro-charter funded research for fear that the public might rightly conclude that public schools could do this, too!
The goal of these researchers is to ignore what is right in front of them. Will Mark Weber ever explain why these “alternative schools” he promotes have to be privately operated charters and not choice public schools?
Because I would certainly like to hear his rationale for why he believes this has to be done privately, as every justification for charters he offers can be used to justify vouchers as well. Even if he claims it is “unintentional”.
We could establish choice public schools that teach only the students they want to teach in every school district and those alternative “choice” schools could teach half or 75% of the students, while dumping the rest into other public schools. There can be “alternative” PUBLIC schools that teach the kids that “do best” in them (i.e. the kids that don’t “do best” in them are mistreated and encouraged to leave).
Is that what Mark Weber wants? Or does he believe only privately operated charters should have that franchise?
In some states, like Nevada and Ohio, most charters are failing schools. In New Orleans, half the charters are failing.
While attending some Committee for Special Services meetings, I observed the specialists and committee members that decided to place an occasional student in a private school, but the school district was obligated to pay for the tuition, not the parent. An example would be sending blind child to a school for the blind. If the district does not offer the same level of service to the child, a few students were eligible to attend a private school paid for by public funds. Smaller districts may not have enough students of similar needs to form a class, and it was actually more cost effective for the district to send the students to a specialized school where there was a staff trained to serve these students better. This was an uncommon placement. More often districts in New York districts subcontract specialized services to BOCES, a shared service from New York State. This is very different from sending a student to a charter school where the school district has no say over the process and how much it will cost the taxpayers.
Diane,
It doesn’t matter if some or half or 3/4 of the charters are “failing” because that’s easy to dismiss if you are someone like Mark Weber or other supporters who claim they only support the “good” charters!
The problem is that those people are never challenged on what “good” actually means and why a “good” charter has to be run by privately operated entities and are not simply choice PUBLIC schools.
I always wondered what would have happened if NYC had called the bluff of the pro-charter crowd as soon as their billionaire funders got Cuomo and the Republican legislature and white lawyers and businessmen at the SUNY Charter Institute to force NYC public school students to subsidize “good” charters from their own per pupil allocations.
de Blasio could have established highly funded “choice” public schools that drew from the charter population in those neighborhoods because like charters they simply told students who weren’t easy to teach that they had to attend a different public school, but unlike charters the students that remained were treated the way affluent white students are treated and not like reform school inmates who needed constant humiliation and punishment to learn. I am pretty sure that a lot of the parents would have left the charters and chosen a public school that didn’t insist that African American children needed harsh discipline and humiliation to learn if that public school also limited itself only to the highest achieving and most motivated students in their community and lavished extras on them with the per pupil cost savings that accrue quickly when a school only teaches motivated students whose parents must also help them at home.
Does establishing those choice public schools do anything about the real problem in public education? Yes, it does everything — because it would stop the big lie that charters were a solution and the big lie that the “successful” and “good” charters were doing anything that public schools could not do if they were aggressively shedding students they didn’t want to teach to keep the families of students they did want to teach happy.
It is admirable that public schools didn’t do that, but it is also problematic because even though it seems like the most obvious thing, education reporters and even some scholars still believe with all of their heart that the “good” charters are good because they are offering something special.
The real problems with schools that teach the most disadvantaged at-risk students can’t be solved with “choice” public schools for the highest performing and motivated students, nor can they be solved with privately operated charters for the highest performing and motivated students.
But those problems are made worse because of the big lie that the privately operated “good” charters for the most motivated families is a solution. It is a solution in how to make people who don’t care about honesty rich. It is a solution for how to make people who care a lot more about promoting their careers than what happens to the students they wish would disappear happy.
That big lie needs to stop, but right now we are still at a point where scholars and education reporters embrace that big lie as the absolute truth that must be accepted without question.
Nycpsp: I’ve read a lot of posts at Mark Weber’s Jersey Jazzman blog, and he certainly never struck me as pro-charter. Many of his analyses would suggest he is anti-charter. I don’t think he is either. He is a researcher trying to get at the costs involved. He explains at the blog post linked to his Burris reply (at Strauss article) why he agreed to work with Fordham, how their intro/ summary misstates what his research shows, and gets into the weeds of what may explain results, how he is refining further research, etc. I think the work he and Bruce Baker (his supv at Rutgers) are doing is important: ultimately I expect it will show how much taxpayer $ is going down the drain and where it’s going.
NYC may possibly have more options for students than any other school district in the entire country. Such a vast system has so many varied schools to meet students’ needs and interests. Yet, we mostly hear about the under funded schools that are struggling.
“This from Mark Weber’s blog, Jersey Jazzman: Quote”
Who are you quoting, JJ or Weber?
Personal experiences with nice don’t matter. In order to support charter schools, money is taken from the children of the 95%. No dent is made on this statement if we add “but some charter schools do a good job”.
Mate,
Jersey Jazzman is the pseudonym of Mark Weber
Knowing that, I would have struck a different tone for the criticism; it would have sounded more constructive. But what I wrote is still valid: the per pupil growths stay way under the inflation rate, hence the most important observation is not growth but the slow growth.
I now read JJ’s explanation on his blog
https://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/
for what he thinks the growth of per pupil expenditures are due to. The argument for instructional expense growth is quite clearly incorrect, unless I am missing something. Namely. he writes
Next, a charter school comes to town and begins drawing students away from the district. Let’s say it takes away five percent of the enrollment, or one classroom’s worth of kids.
[…]
What happens across the district? Well, each school now has the equivalent of 19 classrooms, not 20. To maintain the same instructional cost per pupil, the district will have to let one teacher go at each school.
In a realistic scenario, this is not what happens when 5% of the students go to the charter school. This is because the 25 students who go to the charter school are not going from the same class but from each of the 20 classes evenly. Hence the number of students in each class will decrease by 1 or 2 at most. This means that the district still has to have the same number of teachers, hence the per pupil instructional expense would have to grow in the public school—even if the money spent on the public schools by the state wouldn’t increase a dime. If this per pupil instructional expense doesn’t increase as fast as the inflation rate, it means the teachers’ salaries do not keep up with the inflation, and if the per pupil instructional expense stays the same, then the teachers’ salaries decrease.
“That subject line is a blatantly false and unsupported by their own deeply flawed study.”
“Baker acknowledged the absence of comparative data…”
These guys are stupid but they’re not dumb. It’s in the playbook.
Rule #1: State a misleading generalization that makes the headline. The rest is details – or as they know full well, unread and ignored.
Rule #2: Ignore everyone else’s rules except these two.
GOP legislators do not recognize or care about evidence or research. If they can blow off over 60 state and federal court rulings denying election fraud charges and pretend that a half-million covid deaths is just “the new normal so get over it” – what’s the big deal over a few lies about charter schools?
Fraud? Death? Reverse Robin Hood state funding formulae? They don’t care – even when their racist and isolationist positions are exposed.
As for election winners and loser, the state legislators are still spewing all that they spew. A poisonous snake with its head cut off is still a snake.
“A poisonous snake with its head cut off is still a snake.”
I read a story, I think in Readers Digest, about a guy who nearly died from a rattlesnake bite delivered by its severed head.
I mentioned the story of the snake that bit a man even though its head was severed—in SLAYING GOLIATH. I used it as a Metaphor for the reform industry.it’s failed, it should be dead, but its bite is still venomous
I will have to loo and see where Readers Digest got it from.
cx; look
The Fordham Foundation receives administrative fees from charter schools! The Fordham Foundation receives administrative fees from charter schools!
As I recall, the administrative fee is 3% for each student. The more students, the more money.
That doesn’t surprise me. Recently, I read a Manhattan Institute article about charters that mentioned Success Academy. There are other charter networks besides SA. Leads me to believe that they are paying the Manhattan Institute as part of their public relations.
Success Academy doesn’t have to pay pro-charter organizations to promote them because the entire justification for charters depends on the existence of Success Academy and the false narrative of their results. Success Academy is to the entire charter movement (and I include the mom and pop charters) as Donald Trump is to the Republican Party.
At most, someone who is pro-charter but doesn’t want to seem like an Eva Moskowitz acolyte because of something reprehensible thing she says or does will pull a Susan Collins and “tut tut” while they make sure not to say or do anything that would interfere with enabling that charter network to do whatever it wants.
The charter movement desperately needs Success Academy (and to a much lesser extent the other no-excuses large charter networks ) because without them they are nothing. Just like Mitt Romney says he would support Trump if he was the nominee in 2024. When push comes to shove, what is most important to charter promoters is the same thing that is important to Republicans as demonstrated by the “good” Republicans like Collins and Romney.
Trump has helped the Republican party push their right wing agenda. Without Trump using hate and lies and more lies to get people to support Republicans, what would the Republicans be offering voters? Anti-abortion and forced prayer in school? Is there anything else?
Even the mom and pop charters need the false narratives of charters being “better” to justify why they are taking public money money and demanding that no one is allowed oversight except special rabidly pro-charter oversight agencies.
Without the outsize results of large no-excuses charter networks with huge attrition rates averaged in, the charter movement is no longer “successful”. It can no longer justify why it is getting so much public money. That is why the supposedly “good” charter operators’ criticism of Success Academy sounds like Susan Collins criticizing Trump.
The Manhattan Institute is like the rest of the charter movement and knows exactly where its bread is buttered, just like the Republican Party knows where its bread is buttered. Power is far more important than truth to them.
The Manhattan Institute gets Koch money (Sourcewatch).
Their efforts are anti-public pension, anti-public schools, faith-based initiatives, etc.
In other words, very similar to Bill Gates.
I am confused.
Is Weber the author of the Fordham report or not?
Go to the Jersey Jazzman blog and scroll down to the Tuesday, February 16, 2021 entry. It’s MASSIVE, very wonky, very technical and with even wonkier graphs and charts. It’s above my pay grade. I think Weber is the author of the report but Fordhasm (good typo) is drawing different conclusions? Maybe I’m wrong.
Fordhamonrye drew false conclusions from Weber’s report and put words in his mouth that he didn’t utter, so to speak.
This doesn’t appear to hold water, JJ. Weber is the author of the report, only the foreword was written by other people. For example, in the executive summary, written by Weber, we can read,
Finding 1. In most states, an increase in the percentage of students attending independent charter schools was associated with a significant increase in host districts’ total revenue and spending per pupil.
Finding 2. In most states, an increase in the percentage of students attending independent charter schools was associated with an increase in host districts’ local revenue per pupil, and in some states, it was also associated with an increase in state and/or federal revenue per pupil.
Finding 3. In most states, an increase in the percentage of students attending independent charter schools was associated with an increase in host districts’ support spending per pupil, and in some states, it was also associated with an increase in instructional spending per pupil.
The above statements are clear, since “association” implies causal relationship, and hence they claim a definite connection between charter school growth and funding growth of public schools and they are from the “mouth” of Weber.
See page 5-7 of the report by Weber/Fordham at
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/robbers-or-victims-charter-schools-and-district-finances
The claimed “Limitations” of the study, presented on page 20, mention nowhere the possibility that there could be NO causal relationship between the growth of charter school funding and public school funding. This belies either a high level of incompetence in handling statistical data or deliberate omission. Hard to decide which one is worse in a so called scientific research. Certainly embarrassing, to say the least.
In any case, the growth of per student funding appears to be way under the inflation rate, and my working theory would be that this lack of appropriate growth is caused by charter school funding and vouchers.
Joe Jersey,
You are right in a way, but when someone allows their research to be used to draw wrong conclusions, they should be shouting about it being wrong, not presenting it almost as a “both sides” narrative.
I know that if I had done that work and I saw an organization that DELIBERATELY misrepresented it without any context for ONE PURPOSE – which is to mislead the public – I would be pretty angry. Unless I really didn’t care that much about the impact of what the deliberately misleading misrepresentation of my work would cause.
A sign of how much Jersey Jazzman has (perhaps unwittingly) embraced a false narrative is this comment:
“I disagree with Fordham’s president, Michael Petrilli, about any numbers of questions around education policy. But I also acknowledge he’s been one of the few charter school supporters who’s willing to concede that “no excuses” charters do not enroll similar populations as public district schools (a point I find so obvious that I don’t believe I can have a good faith discussion with anyone who doesn’t agree).”
Hello? This is like saying “I disagree with Republican Senator Susan Collins about any numbers of questions about policy. But I also acknowledge she’d one of the few Republicans who’s willing to concede that Trump isn’t perfect.”
So what if Susan Collins will quietly “concede” this when “conceding” that fact quietly has no impact on anything? Does Susan Collins “concede” that when she is needed to push false narratives that empower Trump? Nope, she conveniently seems to “forget” that fact whenever it is important to the false narrative that fact be forgotten.
Petrilli “forgets” the fact that the highest performing charters most certainly do NOT enroll the same students and he certainly “forgets” that fact every single time the pro-charter folks are pushing the false narrative that the students at charters are just like those in public schools. And Petrilli often makes the outrageously misleading claim that the supporters of public schools are saying “no we insist those kids remain in the most failing and underfunded public schools and we want to do nothing for them” which is one of the ugliest and most hateful lies I have ever heard. I wonder why Mark Weber trusts a man who pushes that false narrative, unless Mark Weber himself agrees that public school supporters don’t want to do anything for the kids in poverty from the most motivated families except force them to remain in failing and underfunded public schools.
Why does he trust his research with those who are disingenuous and not interested in having an honest discussion about these issues?
I listened to a podcast with Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio discussing a book about an supposedly acclaimed charter network that — as they put it to minimize any negative impact — “enables some self-selection”.
And I wanted to ask them, as I want to ask Mark Weber, is it ignorance or their own self-interest that makes them believe that public schools could not offer the same “alternative education” as part of the system?
Which again brings us back to the question that Petrilli, like Mark Weber, is never asked, which is why anyone who is advocating for those kinds of schools wants to give the franchise for those schools to private operators and not simply have them established as part of the public school system.
Instead they all push the false narrative that only charters can do this.
Fordham’s questionable portrayal of research was also an issue in the work of Dr. Figlio who studied charter schools in Ohio. Figlio’s research finding contradicted the opinion of its funder, Fordham.
Unfortunately, media in Ohio enjoy quoting Fordham spokespersons so they chose to disseminate the Fordham add-on to the research which made claims about the benefit of free markets.
Weber wrote the report for Fordham and can be downloaded from
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/robbers-or-victims-charter-schools-and-district-finances
See the Download button on the right?
Here is Weber’s thesis at Rutgers
https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/60093/PDF/1/play/
I am confused. The Weber/Fordham report is analyzing data between 2000-2017. The growths in spending/revenue they exhibit on their graphs rarely reaches 20%. For example, here is the very first chart
All the growths are less than 15%. This is for an 18 year period, and the total inflation for that period is over 30%. So the growths in school revenue/spending should be interpreted as trying (but badly failing) to keep up with inflation. It has absolutely nothing to do with charter school growth. In fact, one can suspect that the reason spending doesn’t keep with inflation is because of charter schools and vouchers.
Of course, since both per student spending and inflation increase between 2000-2017, we can conclude that the inflation increase is beneficial to school funding.
If the report is based on Weber’s PhD thesis, Rutgers should be contacted and questioned about the unacceptable quality of the thesis. In which department was the thesis written?
It’s the Graduate School of Education, where I saw Race to the top and Common Core grants.
I am confused. The Weber/Fordham report is analyzing data between 2000-2017. The growths in spending/revenue they exhibit on their graphs rarely reaches 20%. For example, here is the very first chart
All the growths are less than 15%. This is for an 18 year period, and the total inflation for that period is over 30%. So the growths in school revenue/spending should be interpreted as trying (but badly failing) to keep up with inflation. It has absolutely nothing to do with charter school growth. In fact, one can suspect that the reason spending doesn’t keep up with inflation is because of charter schools and vouchers.
Interesting analysis
To understand Fordham, the reading of Richard Phelps chronology is important.