Charter School Math

I haven't posted much about education in a long time. It gets mentioned occasionally in my monthly Twitter round-up, but that's about it.

Today I saw an excellent summary of how charter schools in general work to defund and undermine the public school system. It was written by Sarah Cole McIntosh, a school board member from Jefferson County, Kentucky:

Charters WILL strip resources and funding from public schools, harming students. Here’s how. Understand this is simplified to explain the concept and that the size of a district, local vs other funding source, and other variables can impact the rate of impact.

Let’s suppose there is a public elementary school with 3 classes of each grade, K-5. That is 18 homerooms. A charter opens in the area. 1 or 2 kids from each class leaves to go to the charter; a total of 30 kids from the whole school. From a funding perspective, that’s the cost of 1 teacher. BUT - the kids weren’t all from the same class or grade level so the school still needs the same number of teachers. Who or what should that school cut?

Let’s say in a large district, 1,000 kids attend charters in the first 5 years. Again, they’re not from the same school or class, so the staffing needs for those schools don’t change but that’s the cost of roughly 35 teachers. So, the district does what they have already done ALL ACROSS AMERICA - they cut out things that are not required; things like art and music are often the first teachers to go; building maintenance falters; there are fewer extracurriculars offered; class size increases; technology and other resources aren’t kept up to date… it gets bad. Fast.

Meanwhile, the charters have control over who they accept. You can search all you want. You won’t find many charters that take kids with significant medical or developmental needs; not the kids with profound behavior and mental health issues stemming from abuse or trauma; charters don’t take the kids that require a lot of additional help because they’re more “expensive” to educate. Sure, some kids may have IEPs but they’re statistically those whose accommodations can be met in a typical classroom and don’t require additional, specialized staff.

Academic research has shown charters don’t really perform any better than their public school peers. Increases in achievement are nearly always attributed to smaller class size (which public schools can’t offer because of $!) or the selective nature of charter enrollment. Studies that purport significant improvement were conducted by biased, pro-charter entities. They’re more propaganda than research.

Saint Paul and Minneapolis both face this chipping away at their bases of students. Minneapolis, despite being the largest city by far in the state, is now the third largest school system. (Admittedly, a significant amount of that is from open-enrollment across suburban boundaries as well.) Saint Paul may have a larger problem than Minneapolis with competition from charters, and the schools families choose turn out to be highly segregated.

Any single student doesn't make a difference, but the cumulative effect begins to add up, feeds on itself, and becomes a cascade.