By Matthew Gardner Kelly, Assistant Professor of Education, Pennsylvania State University. Originally published at The Conversation
From California to Wisconsin, efforts to stop charter school growth are gaining momentum. In the April 2019 mayoral election in Chicago, both candidates say they want to halt charter school expansion.
Financial issues lie at the core of these efforts.
Schools were hit particularly hard by the 2008 recession. Many states cut education funding. As a scholar of school finance, I would argue that charter school expansion is making this bad situation worse.
Trends in School Finance
In my home state of Pennsylvania, schools watched US$1 billion disappear when former Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, both cut state funding and refused to replace federal stimulus funding.
A similar pattern unfolded across the country. In 2015, 29 states were still providing less money per pupil than before the recession began. In most states, state aid is designed to assist districts with high needs and low wealth. As a result, high-poverty districts were hurt the most by state cuts.
School finance scholars often consider school funding systems fair when they give additional funds to districts with the greatest needs. For instance, in conjunction with the Education Law Center of New Jersey, Bruce Baker, an education finance scholar at Rutgers University, has developed a measure of school funding fairness. In a majority of states, Baker found that funding fairness declined in the five years after the Great Recession.
Why Funding Disparities Matter
A number of politicians, such as Education Secretary Betsy Devos, reformers, and pundits claim that education spending does not impact student learning. They are wrong.
Over and over, rigorous research has shown that money matters and that increases in funding for low-income students have a positive impact on outcomes. No matter how we define those outcomes – from scores on standardized tests to the probability a student will experience poverty as an adult – the results are consistent. Anyone who says otherwise is misinformed.
The impact of charter expansion
The details of how charter school funding is structured differs by state, and even by districts within a given state. Despite this variation, a number of studies have shown that charter school growth hurts the finances of nearby public school districts. Recent studies from New Yorkand North Carolina have found that charter expansion negatively impacts local districts’ finances above and beyond simply losing per pupil revenue because of declining enrollments.
In Pennsylvania, the local district makes a tuition payment to the charter school enrolling each student from that district. The payment is based on per-pupil spending for similar students. For example, if a fourth grader leaves a public school in the Pittsburgh School District to attend a charter, the Pittsburgh School District is required to pay the charter school $16,805.99 – which is the average amount the district spends on a student in the district.
At first glance, it perhaps makes sense to have money follow the children. The problem is that increased charter enrollments rarely allow a district to save as much as they lose in charter tuition. As a result, without additional revenue from state governments or local taxes, districts are forced to make budget cuts and spend less on the students who remain in traditional public schools.
Consider an example. Bethlehem Area School District paid $25 million in charter school tuition payments in 2017. It was not possible to save $25 million with the students gone, however, because of the way the students were distributed across the district.
The students enrolled in charter schools came from 13 different grades in 22 different schools. Since students moving to a charter were rarely all of the students from a single school, grade or class, the district was not able to reduce staff or close classes to help cover the charter tuition payments. If next year’s third grade class goes from 28 students to 26 students in a school, district officials still need to keep that third grade class open. They cannot pay that teacher 2/28th less, heat 2/28th less of that classroom, or reduce the operation of electricity in that classroom by 2/28th.
Yet, if the class went from 28 to 26 students because two students enrolled in charters, the district needs to make tuition payments for the missing students. When those payments are repeated and distributed unevenly across schools and grades, it adds up to millions of dollars. Students move between districts all the time, but nowhere near the scale– nor with the fiscal impact – that takes place because of charter expansion. Bethlehem Area School District had 1,900 students, about 12 percent of the district’s population, enrolled in charter schools in 2017.
As Bethlehem Area School District’s business manager explained in a recent survey describing the challenges the district faces because of charter tuition payments, “there’s nothing left to cut.” Across the state, mandated costs are growing faster than the money many districts have coming in: costs for faculty and staff benefits like health insurance and pension payments, special education services and charter school tuition payments.
Charter school expansion drains dollars from local districts in other ways as well. For example, charters enroll far fewer students with characteristics that require additional financial resources, including students with disabilities and English language learners. These dynamics compound the financial difficulties for traditional public schools, which are required to educate all students.
The Appeal of Charter Schools
Research on the academic performance of charter schools is mixed, though some perform quite well. In New York City, students in a number of well-known charters often outperform similar students in traditional public schools. It makes sense – the highest-performing charters in New York often spend $2,000 to $4,300 more per pupil than traditional public schools, much of it coming through fund-raising and philanthropic efforts.
Some pundits and politicians like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz insist charter school expansion will force traditional public schools to improve through competition. I believe it’s dishonest to ask traditional public schools to improve through competition while at the same time creating fiscal difficulties that hamper their ability to compete.
Since the 19th century, American school reformers have focused on making schools and districts larger to lower costs and save money through economies of scale. But charter schools increase costs by removing these economies of scale and creating multiple school systems within the same district. Until policymakers provide additional funds to deal with the problems that arise from removing economies of scale, charter school moratoriums might provide some temporary relief. However, a moratorium on charter schools will not fix the issue by itself. Public schools need more revenue to deal with the problems created by the money they lose to charter schools.
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So far my town only has one of these things although they are threatening to open another one next year. Meanwhile the regular school system has been spending big taxpayer bucks on marginal items like sports fields and facilities. Is this in part due to the Charter challenge?
Clearly the mega rich do indeed favor competition if it means competition with existing government services. The state legislature tends to frown on governments competing in the other direction with businesses such as internet providers. It helps to have friends in high places.
Someone has to ask about parental attraction to charter schools and aspects of aversion to public schools. There is a demand side to the school equation as well as a supply side.
The attractions may fall into skill development and access to programs like science, performing arts or similar magnet schools. That may be supplemented by resource availability, both human and other like computers, labs, stages or whatever suits that magnet.
The aversions may include concerns about overt political correctness or indoctrination that parents might confess to admissions people or to friends or other parents. There are numerous other pluses and minuses to each approach so I picked some that don’t get as much play.
Disclaimer: public school kid, parent of public school kids. Mom was a teacher way, way back in the day when life was much simpler.
Please define what you mean by political correctness and indoctrination.
Here are some PC definitions, so I have used the term as a composite.
For indoctrination, I think of items outside a standard curriculum based on examples or anecdotes I’ve heard, of whatever stripe.
My dad was a teacher, among other things. However it’s not that the public school system doesn’t deserve criticism or in many ways simply acts as a socializer and baby sitter. Rather it’s that the charter school movement is clearly a scam fostered by the rich both to make them more money and to divert class conflict into education arguments rather than admitting that the meritocracy is in many ways bogus.
The other night I watched The Front Runner about the Gary Hart and Donna Rice scandal. The unspoken premise of the movie is that our world would be different if the press hadn’t been “hiding in the bushes” to catch Hart in adultery. And while our media world might very well be different, it’s not at all clear that “Atari Democrat” Hart, with his talk of education as a solution to de-industrialization, was much different from the sleazier Bill Clinton or not himself a symptom of what is wrong. We do need better presidents, but more than that better ideas…
One thing the Credo study does not appear to address is the make-up of the class the similar students are in. If you leave the disruptive kids behind in a regular public school, then even just one of them in a class can make a large difference in how that class is taught as the disruptive students significantly change the classroom dynamics and the focus the teacher can have.
My only surprise about charter schools is how poorly many have done considering they can be more selective about the students they let in. If you can cull the disruptive troublemakers from your classrooms, you should be able to do much better for education even if the same amount of money is spent.
But that might need teachers. One of the great scam points for many charters is that teachers are the problem and using bright do gooders is one of the solutions, hence teach for America.
Look all teachers start somewhere, but imagine being new and surrounded by people equally inexperienced or with just a year or so under their belt also with no mentors. It might keep.salaries low, but it is a blue print for having ineffective schools.
Obviously there can be other reasons, like the one where many charters are not intended to improve education or the ones where the whole point is doubling your investment in five years. But I cannot get past the point where in the most successful public education systems there is respect for teachers and teaching that is consistently missing in the charter school pitch.
Nations have mandatory public school attendance for a reason — it is astonishing to watch a nation allow its public education system to erode in so cavalier a fashion.
I’m encouraged to hear about alternatives to conformist SJW-dominated low-IQ Ed major-run standard public schools being outcompeted in the schooling marketplace. When they’re all replaced by superior alternatives, the kids will be better-educated, and that’s the important thing.
When this really happens let us know. What is mostly happening is that better performing students are leaving the public schools and going to the charters. So the charter school has better test scores but the scores at the school they left go down. The result being that the overall scores, or whatever metric you choose, are staying the same.
Steve
And this be law, that I’ll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.