Chaos: Public School Funding is hurting as Charter Schools expand more and more

http://www.alternet.org/education/charter-school-expansion-having-devastating-impact-public-school-finances?akid=14445.294211.sxosdy&rd=1&src=newsletter1060314&t=18


A new study finds that charter school expansion in Michigan has meant financial chaos for a growing number of school districts.

We have districts getting into extreme fiscal distress because they’re losing revenue so fast. That table in our paper looked at the central cities statewide and their foundation revenue, which is both a function of per-pupil funding and enrollment. They had lost about 22% of their funding over a decade. If you put that in inflation adjusted terms, it means that they lost 46% of their revenue in a span ten years. With numbers like that, it doesn’t really matter if you can get the very best business managers—you can get a team of the very best business managers—and you’re going to have a hard time handling that kind of revenue loss. The emergency managers, incidentally, couldn’t do it. They had all the authority and they cut programs and salaries, but they couldn’t balance the budgets in Detroit and elsewhere, because it wasn’t about local decision making, it was about state policy. And when they made those cuts, more kids left and took their state funding with them.
We found that as the district’s share of special education students increases, it has quite a negative impact on district fund balance. We also found that as the share of students in the district that are going charters increases, there is a causal relationship of a larger share of the students who are left behind in the district who receive special education services. So there is a direct impact from charters on the loss of enrollment in the district, but there’s also an indirect impact on the changing composition of the children who remain in the district. There are federal laws that stipulate the educational services that are due to children with special needs, but the feds don’t fund it fully and leave it up to the state to come up with a funding arrangement. Michigan is kind of chintzy with this; for the state as a whole, they cover less than 30% of the required costs of special education. So if you get a high concentration of students who require special education services, these are costs that have to be absorbed by the school district’s general fund or through other local or county-level revenue sources.