The economic cost of charter schools

[Islam Imamate]

My wife is currently working at a middle school with very low income students (90% free or reduced lunch). Those problems you describe are all too common. I feel your pain. Seems to be pretty impossible to expel anyone from there. They just go to self contained ebd

In many cases the parents don't care or are too busy to be sufficiently involved.

I remember once in middle school this delinquent kid was called up by the teacher and told to call his parents since he was acting up like usual. He called a few numbers and no one answered. So the teacher tells him to call someone and the kid says he can call his uncle. The uncle picks up and the teacher starts telling him that so-and-so is acting up. After a few seconds he looks to the kid and tells him "He says he doesn't know who you are" and the kid takes the phone and tells him "I'm x's son" and then passes it back to the teacher.

The teacher had a word with the uncle but at that point we all knew it didn't matter, how much influence can you have over your nephew if you don't even know his name? He was a little POS and I laughed internally at first but then I did feel bad for him. None of my extended family live in the US and most aren't fluent in English but if you called any of my aunts or uncles I know at least they'd recognize my name.

 

[panamaican]

Pan, from a tl/dr perspective, are these studies saying that charter schools decrease the total amount of funding per kid, or are they just saying that the total amount of funding is decreased? If the latter, then the argument is meaningless, borderline fraudulent, since by definition a decreased enrollment means less kids, less funding, less costs. You don’t get to assume that in another world you’d have less students and yet retain the equal amount of funding.

The question is what the *marginal* impact per kid is. Not restating the axiomatic fact that less total kids in the system means less total money in the system.

They decrease the total funding per kid. But this is also a reminder of how "per student" numbers include things that go beyond direct instruction. I think "per student" is a misleading title since it makes people think that this is money spent on each kid.

I'm going to expand this a bit for others. A school district gets a certain amount of non-categorized money per student. This is what they use to cover their budget.

However, that pool of non-categorized money covers the "per student" spending stuff and the "general spending" stuff. When the total non-categorized money in the budget drops because of charter allocations, some of the money that used to be allocated to "per student" stuff ends up in the "general spending" pile because those costs have to get met no matter what. This leaves less overall money to spend on "per student" stuff and drops that figure.

 

[Zankou]

They decrease the total funding per kid. But this is also a reminder of how "per student" numbers include things that go beyond direct instruction. I think "per student" is a misleading title since it makes people think that this is money spent on each kid.

I'm going to expand this a bit for others. A school district gets a certain amount of non-categorized money per student. This is what they use to cover their budget.

However, that pool of non-categorized money covers the "per student" spending stuff and the "general spending" stuff. When the total non-categorized money in the budget drops because of charter allocations, some of the money that used to be allocated to "per student" stuff ends up in the "general spending" pile because those costs have to get met no matter what. This leaves less overall money to spend on "per student" stuff and drops that figure.

Unless I’m misunderstanding, that’s just a repetition of the ‘fixed costs’ argument, stated in terms of how it gets paid.

It’s true that total fixed costs don’t decline in lockstep when total student enrollment declines, but it’s also misleading to (a) take that to be an eternal principle, since fixed costs are always shifting year by year with new budget decisions; and (b) it doesn’t take into account changes in population over time, e.g. if the total students in a district is increasing but the non-charter population is static, the school district is actually getting *more* money per student by losing those students to charters because it doesn’t have to make expensive new expansions in facilities and administration.

So yeah, an enrollment decline relative to a maxed-out fixed cost structure means less discretionary resources to allocate to each student over the short term. Basically, you might have bought too big a factory, relative to demand. But as a general principle, it would not over time mean you get less money to teach a given quantity of students with. It essentially just means that your investment in fixed costs was based on an projection that was rendered inaccurate because of lower demand. If you knew ahead of time that the demand would be lower, it wouldn’t affect you.

 

[panamaican]

Unless I’m misunderstanding, that’s just a repetition of the ‘fixed costs’ argument, stated in terms of how it gets paid.

It’s true that total fixed costs don’t decline in lockstep when total student enrollment declines, but it’s also misleading to (a) take that to be an eternal principle, since fixed costs are always shifting year by year with new budget decisions; and (b) it doesn’t take into account changes in population over time, e.g. if the total students in a district is increasing but the non-charter population is static, the school district is actually getting *more* money per student by losing those students to charters because it doesn’t have to make expensive new expansions in facilities and administration.

So yeah, an enrollment decline relative to a maxed-out fixed cost structure means less discretionary resources to allocate to each student over the short term. Basically, you might have bought too big a factory, relative to demand. But as a general principle, it would not over time mean you get less money to teach a given quantity of students with. It essentially just means that your investment in fixed costs was based on an projection that was rendered inaccurate because of lower demand. If you knew ahead of time that the demand would be lower, it wouldn’t affect you.

Sure, as a general principle, you'd be right. But in the context of education, we're closer to the maxed out fixed cost structure. There's nothing misleading in discussing the effect as it applies to the current education model since there doesn't appear to be anything on the horizon that would change it.

Even if you knew ahead of time that demand would be lower, it would still affect the school district because they have to operate enough facilities to accommodate the entire student population, regardless of if the student population attends.

Which means that even if the total students in a district is increasing but the non-charter population is static, the school district couldn't avoid the responsibility of having to make facilities available for them.

 

[Zankou]

That point is interesting, but it also sounds like a mistaken policy. I assume school districts do not maintain facilities and resources to cover all private school students in their district, because that would be retarded. Charter schools, you might need more of a buffer because you are more likely to need to absorb kids from a failing charter school than from a failing private school. But the principle is the same ... you need to correctly estimate total enrollment to have max cost efficiency. If it is inaccurate either way, you might benefit or lose.

 

[panamaican]

That point is interesting, but it also sounds like a mistaken policy. I assume school districts do not maintain facilities and resources to cover all private school students in their district, because that would be retarded. Charter schools, you might need more of a buffer because you are more likely to need to absorb kids from a failing charter school than from a failing private school. But the principle is the same ... you need to correctly estimate total enrollment to have max cost efficiency. If it is inaccurate either way, you might benefit or lose.

But they do maintain facilities and resources for kids in private. For example, even though kids might go to private, the school district might still have to provide transportation to and from the private school for those kids which can mean less efficient mass transportation and the higher costs that go with that. Or when it comes to special needs, in many school districts they still have to cover the cost, even though the student is in a private school and even though the district has its own school psychologists on a salary that they use for public school students.

The difference between the charter and private school situation is that the school districts keep most of the money when the kids go to private schools and so they can pay those costs out of the retained money. In the end, it's closer to your model where the school gets *more" money from less attendance.

In the charter model, the district might still have to pay for those special needs for the charter student but they've already given up the entire funding for that kid. So if the charter allocates a smaller percentage of that money to special needs, the public school has to cover the spread out of the district's remaining funds while still funding fund their own version of the special need for the public school kids.

Of course, it's more complex than that and varies to some degree school district by district based on how state and local education mandates are set up.

Definitely a mistaken policy and it's not the charters fault or not wholly.

 

[VivaRevolution]