I said I would not reproduce blogs, with rare exceptions. Jan Resseger is that one rare exception.
In this post, she explains how the costs of vouchers are destroying and defunding Ohio’s public schools.
Archives for category: Funding
Politico writes that Senator Bernie Sanders deserves credit for key features of the $1.9 trillion Biden plan and for encouraging Biden not to compromise with moderate Republicans who offered a $900 billion plan.
Politico said:
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) played the most dramatic role during the passage of the Covid relief bill into law. But the senator with the greatest imprint on the script itself was his colleague on the opposite end of the Democratic ideological spectrum: Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Sanders’ influence on the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation is evident in several places, particularly the guaranteed income program for children, the massive subsidies for people to buy health care, the sheer size of the $1.9 trillion measure and the centerpiece of it — direct checks to working Americans.
But the specifics of the law tell only part of the story. The calculus by which the legislation was crafted and passed — a belief that popular bills endure more than bipartisan ones — is quintessentially Sanders. And it raises a thought-provoking question: Has any elected official in American history had such a profound influence on a major political party without ever formally joining it?
Six years ago, Democrats were in a different place. Austerity politics were still gripping parts of the party. The ambitious agenda items were more social than economic: immigration reform, gun control, police reform after Ferguson. And in a few months time, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee would make serious inroads among the white working class voters who had served as the bedrock for Democrats for decades.
Within that landscape, Sanders was a throwback: a labor-oriented big-government liberal who seemed like more of a gadfly than a serious player. He was known for passing little-noticed amendments but also found a knack for making well-noticed public spectacles, often as acts of disagreement with the Obama White House on items like domestic surveillance laws and the extension of the Bush tax cuts. As his following picked up, a depiction of him emerged as an ideologue who valued ideological purity over progress and was content to undermine a historic president in the service of it.
That never jibed with reality. Though admittedly stubborn, Sanders voted often for major bills that fell short of his ambitions (Obamacare), cut deals that went against his ideology (VA reform), and made sure his public shows of opposition didn’t actually turn into catastrophes for the Democratic Party. When his legislative white whale (a $15-an-hour minimum wage hike) was nixed by the parliamentarian a few weeks back, he could have insisted that his fallback option be given a vote. He didn’t, calculating that it wasn’t worth jeopardizing or delaying the entire enterprise over the minimum wage. As one Sanders aide described it: “He knows when to throw down and when it’s time to get s— done…”
The Democratic Party today holds razor-thin majorities in both chambers and is helmed by a president who might have been the most moderate of the 20 or so candidates who ran in the primary. And yet every single member — save one in the House — voted for a nearly $2 trillion deficit-financed bill that sends money without strings attached to the poorest Americans, all while embracing a unionization effort targeting the biggest e-commerce giant in the world and entertaining a $4 trillion follow-up bill to revamp American infrastructure that will likely include tax hikes on the rich. If Sanders was just a touch more extroverted, we’d likely see signs of euphoria in Burlington.
Of course, credit (or, if you’re so inclined, blame) isn’t his alone. The enlarged child tax credit has been the project of countless Democrats, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). The bill’s $86 billion bailout for multi-employer pensions was spearheaded by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). And none of it would have been possible without twin Senate wins in Georgia or Biden’s insistence that he needed to go big out the gate.
But, it’s worth recalling, that Biden easily could have charted a bipartisan approach instead. In early December, Manchin and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) announced the outlines of a $900 billion relief bill of their own, with a splashy Washington Post op-ed framing it as the logical step toward ideological comity. Five other senators in the Democratic caucus were on board with the idea.
Sanders rejected the proposal out of hand. His move sent an early signal to the White House that it would have to scramble for votes even on a center-of-the-road approach. Weeks later, the Georgia election happened, Biden stuck to the script that bigger was better, and the pieces of a $1.9 trillion package — upon which the success of the Demcratic Party now hangs — fell into place.
From the earliest days of corporate reform, which is now generally recognized to have been a failed effort to “reform” schools by privatizing them and by making standardized testing the focal point of education, we heard again and again that a child’s zip code should not be his or her destiny. Sometimes, in the evolving debates, I got the sense that some people thought that zip codes themselves were a problem. If only we eliminated zip codes! But the reality is that zip codes are a synonym for poverty. So what the reformers meant was that poverty should not be destiny.
Would it were so! If only it were true that a child raised in an impoverished home had the same life chances as children brought up in affluent homes, where food, medical care, and personal security are never in doubt.
But “reformers” insisted that they could overcome poverty by putting Teach for America inexperienced teachers in classrooms, because they (unlike teachers who had been professionally prepared) “believed” in their students and by opening charter schools staffed by TFA teachers. Some went further and said that vouchers would solve the problem of poverty. All of this was nonsense, and thirty years later, poverty and inequality remain persistent, unaffected by thousands of charter schools and TFA.
In effect, the reformers held out the illusion that testing, competition, and choice would level the playing field and life chances of rich and poor kids. After 30 or more years of corporate reform, it is clear that the reform message diverted our attention from the wealth gap and the income gap, which define the significant differences among children who have everything and children who have very little.
Imagine the cost of assuring that every school in the nation were equitably and adequately funded. Imagine if all students had small classes in a school with beautiful facilities, healthy play spaces, the best technology, and well-paid teachers. That would go a long way towards eliminating the differences between rich schools and poor schools, but our society has not taxed itself to make sure that all kids have great schools.
None of the promises of “reform” have been fulfilled. The cynical among us think that the beneficiaries of reform have been the billionaires, who were never willing to pay the taxes necessary to narrow income and wealth inequality or to fund good schools in every neighborhood. They gladly fund “reforms” that require chicken feed, as compared to the taxes necessary to truly make zip codes irrelevant.
Our wonderful allies, Pastors for Texas Children, send us wonderful news: Friends of public education raised their voices, stood together, and stopped new voucher legislation!
| Vouchers Blocked Again! |
| Last week, we celebrated the victory of your tireless advocacy for public education funding for our children when we announced Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to extend “hold harmless.” Today, we have another piece of good news: The voucher proposal in this session’s House Bill 3 has been removed. In a meeting earlier today with Pastors for Texas Children and Raise Your Hand Texas, HB 3 author Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) indicated that all education issues, including vouchers, are being taken out of the bill. This change will be reflected in a committee substitute later this week. We thank Chairman Burrows and Gov. Abbott for their wisdom in removing the voucher from the bill. PTC Executive Director Rev. Charles Johnson gives “joyous testimony to the love and support Texans have for their neighborhood and community public schools – and firm opposition to the privatization of them through vouchers.” “That we have to keep delivering that memo to the Governor and a third of the Legislature is outrageous and unacceptable,” he says. Year after year, Pastors for Texas Children will continue to deliver that message, with your help. In case you missed it, HB3 is a pandemic response bill that deals with many issues, among them school vouchers. Here is the language of the voucher: If a district of residence fails to compensate the off-campus instructional program before the 46th day after the date of receiving a bill, the commissioner of education shall reimburse the off-campus instructional program from funding deducted from the district. According to this bill, the commissioner of education would get to decide which programs qualify for reimbursement from the state, which would be “deducted from the district” directly. A voucher bill has been filed in every Texas Legislature since 1995, so we were not surprised, nor were we unprepared. The people of Texas do not want vouchers taking money from their public schools. Furthermore, we will remain vigilant to block any future voucher proposals. We are thankful that this dangerous proposition was short-lived, and especially thankful for the public education advocacy community, which includes each of you, for making sure of that. Last week, we were honored to join dedicated public education advocates in a webinar with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. We love the different perspectives given by all the panelists, covering this issue thoroughly from all angles. The webinar is called “Fighting Voucher Legislation in 2021: An Update on State Voucher Bills and Tools to Oppose Them.” You can view it here to brush up on your talking points, as they will continue to be relevant. |
You may recall that sociologist and author Eve Ewing wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that said it was time to end the debate about charter schools and celebrate all good schools, whatever they are called. This is one of the talking points of the charter industry, which prefers the public not to notice how many charter schools close every year, how many are low-performing, and how many are run by non-educators who turn a handsome profit.
The New York Times published letters to the editor about the Ewing article. Only one was favorable, written by Jeanne Allen, who runs a charter advocacy organization called the “Center for Education Reform,” funded by rightwing billionaires and Wall Street financiers. CER promotes all kinds of school choice and is hostile to public schools.
The first letter was written by Denis Smith of Ohio, who has appeared on this blog:
To the Editor:
Re “End the Fight Over Charter Schools,” by Eve L. Ewing (Op-Ed, Feb. 23):
Why do we allow two separate but seemingly parallel systems of education, using scarce public funds that are taken from traditional public schools to fund charters, a seeming experiment gone awry? Why do we allow one entity that is accountable and has governance conveyed from the voters in each community and allow the other to avoid the same transparency and accountability?
Here in Ohio, charters are exempt from 150 sections of law that the public schools must be in compliance with to legally operate, yet the public schools are required to support charters with the school district’s transportation system and other services at no cost.
So no, we can’t stop fighting about the subject of charters until we have the same rules for both. If one is exempt from wholesale sections of the law, then by definition it is not a public school but something else, a school that acquires public funds to operate yet has its own rules and is free from much oversight.
Denis D. Smith
Westerville, Ohio
The writer, a charter school critic, is a former consultant in the Ohio Department of Education’s charter school office, responsible for assuring legal compliance in the operations of these schools.
The nation’s two teachers’ unions joined together to issue an unusual joint statement that advises federal, state, and local leaders what must be done not only to revive education after the pandemic but to restart it with a fresh vision that focuses on the needs of children, not assumptions about their “learning loss” or “COVID slide.”
They introduce the document and its visionary proposals with these words:
| Nation’s educators release shared agenda to ensure all students succeed Organizations offer proven ways to help students overcome Covid-19 opportunity gaps and meet students’ academic, social, and emotional needs |
| WASHINGTON, DC – Today the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s two largest educators’ unions, released a bold, shared agenda to ensure that all students receive the supports and resources they need to thrive now and in the future. Over the course of the last month, AFT and NEA have come together to define the essential elements needed to effectively understand and address the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted students’ academic, social, and developmental experiences. “We have an unprecedented opportunity to create the public schools all our students deserve,” said NEA President Becky Pringle. “It is our mission to demand stronger public schools and more opportunities for all students- Black and white, Native and newcomer, Hispanic and Asian alike. And we must support the whole learner through social, emotional and academic development. The ideas presented in this roadmap will lay the groundwork to build a better future for all of our students.” “COVID-19 has laid bare this country’s deep fissures and inequities and our children, our educators and our communities have endured an unprecedented year of frustration, pain and loss,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “As vaccine access and effectiveness suggest the end is in sight, it is incumbent on us to not only plan our recovery, but to reimagine public schooling so our children, families and educators can thrive. “The crises gripping our country are weighing heavily on young people, who are the future of our communities. That’s why our schools must, at a minimum, be supported and well-resourced to address our students their trauma, social-emotional, developmental and academic needs. This framework is an invaluable tool to help us get there,” Weingarten added. Shared with Sec. of Education Cardona last week, Learning Beyond Covid-19, A Vision for Thriving in Public Education offers the organizations’ ideas on ways our education systems can meet students where they are academically, socially, and emotionally. The framework outlines five priorities that can serve as a guide for nurturing students’ learning now and beyond COVID-19 including learning, enrichment and reconnection for this summer and beyond; diagnosing student well-being and academic success; meeting the needs of our most underserved students; professional excellence for learning and growth; and an education system that centers equity and excellence. The full document can be found here. |
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.
Parents and educators overwhelmingly oppose the New Hampshire voucher proposal, which would be the most expansive in the country. In terms of turnout, voucher opponents outnumber proponents by 6-1. Proponents claim that it is only educators who oppose vouchers, but many parents turned out to testify against the legislation.
Yet the Republican sponsors of the bill are forging ahead, claiming that so few children want a voucher that it would have no impact on the budget. In fact, the bill would have the state pick up the cost of tuition for children currently attending religious and private schools, and would fund homeschoolers as well. Critics estimate the cost at $100 million per year.
As background to the discussion, take a look at the research on vouchers. This report from the Center for American Progress finds that using a voucher is equivalent to missing about one-third of a year in school. Yet 23 states, including New Hampshire, are going full speed ahead to enact a harmful and demonstrably ineffective waste of public dollars.
The Senate’s school voucher bill drew a crowd debating the merits and liabilities of the program that would allow parents to receive state money to find the best educational fit for their child.
But opponents called Senate Bill 130 the latest attempt to privatize education and alleged it would set up a parallel education system with one tier for the well-to-do and the other for those who cannot afford an alternative for their children.
They said the proposal would be the most expansive educational choice program in the country and the most lax, with little accountability or transparency.
Supporters said the pandemic has heightened awareness that every child learns differently and needs options and choices to reach their full potential.They said the program would not only help students, it would save state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, although opponents claimed it would cost the state that much money.
The House had a nearly identical bill, but the House Education Committee decided to hold the bill for a year to try to improve some of the flaws.The ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. Mel Myler, D-Hopkinton, urged his Senate counterparts to either do that or recommend killing the bill...
One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Glenn Cordelli, R-Tuftonboro, said the House hearing on House Bill 20 drew 1,100 parents in support showing grassroots support. And he said a recent poll indicates 70 percent of New Hampshire adults approve of vouchers.
He did not say that nearly 7,000 people signed in opposition to the House bill.“On one side you have lobbyists and advocates and on the other side are parents,” Cordelli said. “It is the school units versus the kids.”
Carl Ladd, executive director of the NH School Administrators Association took issue with Cordelli’s statement.“This school system versus student argument implies that advocates for public education are anti-student, that is a real disservice to educators,” Ladd said. “I really take umbrage at that particular characterization…”
The student’s parents would receive the basic state adequacy grant of about $3,700 as well as additional money if the student qualified for free or reduced lunches, special education services, English as a Second Language instruction, or failed to reach English proficiency.
The average grant is estimated to be $4,600.
Will $4,600 be enough to gain admission to an elite private school? No. It will be enough to pay for a low-quality private or religious school that hires uncertified teachers and cannot match the offerings or facilities of the public schools. Or you might think of it as a transfer of public funds to students already in private/religious schools and home-schooled.
The Commissioner claimed that between 0.01 to 2.43 percent of eligible students would use the voucher. So, choose your rationale: either vouchers are wildly popular or hardly anyone will want one.
Commissioner Edelblut’s goal is to wipe out public schools. The people of New Hampshire will have to stop him. He is not a conservative. He is an anarchist.
In 2018, voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, were asked to decide on a referendum to raise property taxes for the “operational needs of district non-charter schools.” That is, for public schools, not charter schools. After the measure passed, two charter schools in the district sued for their “share” of the revenues. The case went to an appeals court which ruled 2-1 against the charters. Then it went to the full court of appeals, which ruled 7-4 that the charter schools were entitled to a share of the money.
The opinion also said that the wording in the ballot measure that prevented charter schools from receiving money was “severable” — essentially meaning that it can be disregarded — and that the rest of the referendum could remain in “full force and effect.”“Severing and striking the ‘non-charter’ limitation from the 2018 referendum still accomplishes the 2018 referendum’s intent to generate additional revenue ‘to fund school safety equipment, hire additional school police and mental health professionals, fund arts, music, physical education, career and choice program teachers, and improve teacher pay.’ The only difference is that a portion of those funds must be shared with charter schools,” said the 17-page majority opinion shared by Chief Judge Spencer Levine and Judges Dorian Damoorgian, Burton Conner, Alan Forst, Mark Klingensmith, Jeffrey Kuntz and Edward Artau.
But dissenting judges lambasted the majority for deciding that the referendum could remain in effect and for deciding to take up the case en banc.They argued, in part, that allowing the referendum to remain in effect violates the will of voters, who thought they were casting ballots on a measure that would exclude funding for charter schools. Judge Robert Gross described it as an act of “judicial hocus pocus.”
“Rather than taking that principled approach and acknowledging the only proper remedy is the referendum’s invalidation, the majority has instead rewritten the referendum and pulled a bait-and-switch upon the voters of Palm Beach County,” Gross wrote in a dissent joined by Judges Martha Warner and Melanie May. “By judicial fiat, the majority has imposed a levy for the benefit of charter schools that the voters never approved ‘by local referendum or in a general election’ as required (by a section of state law).”
In a separate dissent, Judge Cory Ciklin pointed to the majority “ignoring the will of 528,089 Palm Beach County voters who participated in a countywide election. Not this court nor the School Board nor the charter schools can legally agree to severing and striking the non-charter limitation from the 2018 referendum as if the sanctity of voter intent is of no concern and one that can be blithely cast aside as nothing more than an unimportant annoyance.”
The voters thought that the ballot explicitly excluded the charter schools from the taxes they were willing to increase. The court decided otherwise.
As Judge Gross said in his dissent, this is a classic case of “bait and switch.”
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 