The economic cost of charter schools

[gatchaman]

First, I was talking public vs. private, not charter specific.

I'll try to explain but I don't necessarily want to write tons of paragraphs either. When measuring the difference between public and private schools most of the measurements boil to down to performance on standardized tests, acceptance into college and earnings some period of time after the fact.

When they compare the students, they compare like to like. So, white kid with 2 college educated parents with a household income of $100k only compares to similarly situated kids. White kid with a single mom with a high school education and a household income of $18k only compares to similarly situated kids. In your generic private vs. public conversation, those kids will perform the same on standardized tests, quality of college and earnings, regardless of whether they went to their local public school or a private school.

But that's because of a host of factors, the single parent white kid has the same external pressures on his academic progress whether he's in private or public school. He has the same economic limitations from his single parent household whether he's in private or public. He also has the same intelligence and the same drive. So his standardized test scores will reflect his ability to learn the material plus his restrictions from maybe not getting tutoring or not eating as often or needing to get a 2nd job to help out. Most private schools don't offset those circumstances (again there are 2 exceptions) and so the students outcomes remain unchanged.

Now, that's different from the charter vs. public school situation and left behind students. Left-behind students are harmed economically by the existence of charters because the charters take money out of the public school and reallocate it to the charter. This makes it harder for the public school to meet it's baseline criteria for providing a basic education to its charges. If the money from the public schools to the charters gets too large, the public school would be unable to financially meet its purpose while the charters can. This would mean that the kids who don't get picked for charters via lottery lose education opportunities so that the kids are charters can receive them.

They're 2 different issues. Public vs. private in terms of educational outcomes. Public vs. charter in terms of student financing for education. Private schools don't impact public school education opportunities, charters do.

Thanks for the long response, but it does not look as if you are measuring outcomes for public school students that do not lose on funding versus left-behind public school students as compared to public school students and private school students matched for family income.

Also if left-behind students really are disadvantaged then doesn't this become an advantage to those not left behind? For example, the family income matched student will make $100,000 whether he attends public school or private school. However, the left behind student will make only $20,000, while he would have made $40,000 if not left behind. Isn't that still an advantage in the sense that $100G is even more than $20G than it is more than $40G.

 

[panamaican]

I'm just wondering if there is some intangible that makes a teacher willing to accept lower pay to get it that also makes a student's parent willing to pay more to get it. What is that intangible?

2 different sets of incentives. Parents happen to be uninformed consumers. They look at individual school data and then assume that data reflects something that the school will impart onto their child. When school data simply reflects the composition of the previous attendees, not what the school can/can't do for their child.

So, it's like buying a pair of shoes based on how they fit someone else. I guess the intangible for the parents is misinformation.

But it's not the intangible for the teachers. The teachers just want the best job environment and that can take many different forms. For example, it requires more licensing to work for public schools so some teachers might prefer to avoid that stricture. They tend to have smaller class sizes. Which is great for teachers but doesn't really make a difference for most students. There's less bureaucracy around decisions and less oversight.

The point is that the best working environment is what attracts teachers, it's not what attracts parents.

 

[TeTe]

I’m more okay with magnet (aka selective enrollment) public schools because it limits the number of students allowed to attend and keeps down the flight from in district school with zero roadblock.

They serve more of a niche purpose anyway and seem to be more justifiable.

 

[panamaican]

Thanks for the long response, but it does not look as if you are measuring outcomes for public school students that do not lose on funding versus left-behind public school students as compared to public school students and private school students matched for family income.

Also if left-behind students really are disadvantaged then doesn't this become an advantage to those not left behind? For example, the family income matched student will make $100,000 whether he attends public school or private school. However, the left behind student will make only $20,000, while he would have made $40,000 if not left behind. Isn't that still an advantage in the sense that $100G is even more than $20G than it is more than $40G.

It looks like you didn't read what I wrote. I didn't discuss long term education/earning outcomes between publics and charters. I discussed financing for the education environment itself.

So your entire 2nd paragraph isn't based on anything that I actually wrote and doesn't logically arise from it either.

I realize it was a long post but you should re-read it since it appears that you missed some of the differentiating points.

 

[Jkillah]

this system will create a lot of haves vs have nots...some cultures are more education oriented than other cultures so your just giving the have kids more of an advantage than they already have. I think there should be a balance when a lot of cultures are living together, cream normally rises to the top anyways but society should give kids that come from unfortunate backgrounds at least a chance.

I think it will create more haves, but the same number of have nots. The ones from less education orientated cultures will statistically not be big winners regardless, and pouring money into them is an expensive exercise in futility. I would much rather more resources be put into magnet schools than chronically under performing public schools.

 

[luckyshot]

Yes and no. This is why I mentioned the 2 exceptions of elite college prep schools and Jesuit schools. Those schools actually do provide a measurable benefit to their students, although the reason why is unclear.

For your average public school vs. your average private school, the school doesn't matter to long term outcomes. This is because the average public school is providing the same quality of education as the average private school. The average school quality is the same. Teacher quality matters but private school teachers aren't a better quality than public school ones. Administrator skill matters but private school administrators aren't more skilled than public school ones.

The generic private school vs. public school debate is basically comparing 2 versions of the exact same thing but pretending they're different because you paid more for one version.

Another way to think about it is this. Since public schools are funded by property taxes and those taxes are usually reflective of an economic barrier to the neighborhood, when people pay for a private school they are often paying to duplicate the funding levels of public schools in better neighborhoods. Neighborhoods they can't afford to live in. So they live in cheaper neighborhoods and pay for private schools. Whereas better off parents just pay the higher property taxes and home prices and send their kids to the public school.

Again, with those 2 exceptions.

Your model doesn’t take into account people who live in “cheaper” neighborhoods AND can’t afford private school tuition.

Once again, when looking at public school statistics vs. private school, you have to remember that public schools have to take EVERYBODY.

It’s like comparing two sports teams, one that gets to hold tryouts and make cuts to another that can’t make cuts and has to play everyone the same amount of minutes.

If the team from scenario B was consistently able to play to a tie with the team from scenario A, you’d conclude that it had better coaching and training methods, no?

 

[panamaican]

Your model doesn’t take into account people who live in “cheaper” neighborhoods AND can’t afford private school tuition.

Once again, when looking at public school statistics vs. private school, you have to remember that public schools have to take EVERYBODY.

It’s like comparing two sports teams, one that gets to hold tryouts and make cuts to another that can’t make cuts and has to play everyone the same amount of minutes.

If the team from scenario B was consistently able to play to a tie with the team from scenario A, you’d conclude that it had better coaching and training methods, no?

It's accounted for because there are private schools that offer financial grants and/or scholarships so they can compare people who live in cheap neighborhoods and can't afford the tuition. Because some of those kids get accepted into private schools and get funding and some apply but there isn't enough money for them and they remain in their public schools. Long term, they end up about the same.

PRivate schools look better on paper because, as you noted, they don't have to accept everyone and publics do so the public school numbers reflect low end performers that privates can get rid off. The same way wealthy neighborhoods don't have to sell houses to everyone and so their public schools don't include kids from families that can't afford all of the education assistance.

But that's about the student makeup of the classes. The individual kids would be fine in either location. The school's data is what would change.

 

[gatchaman]

edit

 

[gatchaman]

It looks like you didn't read what I wrote. I didn't discuss long term education/earning outcomes between publics and charters. I discussed financing for the education environment itself.

So your entire 2nd paragraph isn't based on anything that I actually wrote and doesn't logically arise from it either.

I realize it was a long post but you should re-read it since it appears that you missed some of the differentiating points.

When you stated, "This makes it harder for the public school to meet it's baseline criteria for providing a basic education to its charges." I think you imply that there will be longterm negative economic consequences to the left behind students because the implication of not getting a basic education implies an eventual lowerpay jobpool availability.

When I state, "it does not look as if you are measuring outcomes for public school students that do not lose on funding versus left-behind public school students as compared to public school students and private school students matched for family income." I am recognizing that this implication has not been studied the same way that private-public outcome earnings have been studied.

When you state, "I didn't discuss long term education/earning outcomes between publics and charters. I discussed financing for the education environment itself." I think we are agreeing. The earning outcome between publics and charters is not studied but implied.

When I state, "Also if left-behind students really are disadvantaged then doesn't this become an advantage to those not left behind? For example, the family income matched student will make $100,000 whether he attends public school or private school. However, the left behind student will make only $20,000, while he would have made $40,000 if not left behind. Isn't that still an advantage in the sense that $100G is even more than $20G than it is more than $40G." I am embracing the implication that the left-behind students will not get a basic education and will have employment opportunities at a half the income on average (the fraction is arbitrary, some number less than what it would be if not left-behind).

 

[Zankou]

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.

 

[aitkenmike]

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.

Except you are ignoring the fixed costs. Building maintenance, power, admin salaries etc... wouldn’t decrease short term from less kids attending, leaving less money/child after those costs are covered.

 

[tdluxon]

Most people can agree that education is an important public service. And most people can agree that the current system isn't serving the needs of our less fortunate students. THe concept of school choice and the expansion of charter schools to meet that need has become a standard point of discussion.

Yet a criticism brought against this particular direction is that charter schools are financially detrimental to the school districts where they're operating.and the students who are in those districts but not in the charter schools.

https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/report-the-cost-of-charter-schools-for-public-school-districts/
https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/ITPI_Breaking_Point_May2018FINAL.pdf

Here's a study out of California that shows that for those districts, the expansion of charter schools is literally taking money away from the other kids. It's not a simple one to one transfer of dollars, the students left behind are actually receiving less per student dollars.

School choice is an important concept but we have to make sure that it's not coming at the expense of other kids. As always it's one more reason to look closely at how we choose to fund schools. Perhaps the funding for charter schools should not come out of the same funding that we allocate for the public schools. Public school students should not be penalized so that charter school students can go elsewhere. And school choice should not be inhibited for those who wish to take advantage of it.

It's not a simple problem and deserves our attention.

There's a really highly rated charter school near me, it's basically a publicly funded private school for wealthy people who could afford to send their kids to private school if they wanted to. It seems totally corrupt.

 

[Zankou]

Except you are ignoring the fixed costs. Building maintenance, power, admin salaries etc... wouldn’t decrease short term from less kids attending, leaving less money/child after those costs are covered.

The same would be true of any new public school. If anything, with a growing *overall* population, you’d save money by treading water on existing infrastructure instead of having to build new public schools, hire new admin/teachers etc.

Long term, you aren’t losing money per student, you just have less total students. A specific private school has very few students normally, but that has no bearing on how much money the school has per student. If enrollment was *rapidy* crashing that excess volatility could be a problem, but small enrollment in itself isn’t.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Charter schools have been a huge problem in Florida but the problem is they pay big money in donations to mainly Republicans who make sure they are unregulated.
There have been stories of charter school teachers that don’t even have a high school diploma. Schools just taking the money and running.
Somehow the Rubes got tricked into thinking education is a bad thing.

I attended a Florida charter school myself, I have to say as a student I quite liked it. That said, as a student I was not poised to evaluate it on the nitty gritty level we are doing ITT. And I did get held back a bit from attending it. The school was young so it lacked the textbooks for certain math courses that most public schools had so I was behind in the math courses compared to some of my peers.

But I liked the uniforms, the girls looked cuter in them. Plus it was very small so many of the classes had the same faces and we all knew each other on some level which was nice.

I don't believe in charter schools. I think schooling is as much about learning to interact with other people than anything else. Plus charter schools isolate the stoner and drop out kids from the smart kids which makes things worse for the loser kids. I believe the big public high school with people from different back grounds makes our society a more tolerant place. When you start having charter schools all the Asian kids are going to be in the tech charter schools. All the white are going to be in the drama, humanities and arts schools. So that is going to increase resentment.

Additionally young teens do not really know what they want. We should be forcing teens to do PE and learn civics. A mandatory cirriculum for all teens is a good thing because it increases civic virtue

Fantastic point, couldn't agree more. I was raised by Muslim immigrant parents and I really think having to interact with a mostly non-Muslim student population through public schools was beneficial to me in the sense that it made me feel American by the end of it.

Some Muslims who go through public schools talk about experiencing Islamophobia(my older brother in fact) but thankfully that wasn't the case for me. I did get anti-Muslim jokes and statements thrown my way but 99.9% of the time they were friendly barbs since many comedians at the time engaged in racial or group based humor and it filtered into the schools. And I was dishing out such jokes much more than I was taking them if I'm being honest. But even if you do experience such discrimination by peers(I wonder if you have?) I think the net gain of being socialized into a common culture with fellow Americans is worth it.

Private schools can expel bad students.

Also parents that are spending more on education are probably more active in their child's education.

That's the first thing that comes to mind for me. My gut tells me selection bias would account for most of whatever difference you see in the aggregate outcomes between private and public schools.

Because once you account for differences in the students, private schools don't yield better students outcomes (2 exceptions - elite college prep schools and Jesuit schools). So private school teachers aren't actually giving you better results than their better paid public school counterparts.

However, the cost of private school acts as a barrier to lower income students and to families that don't care about education. So, it's probably a more enjoyable environment for the teachers, enough to offset the lower pay.

That's interesting. More often nowadays I try to consider the argument made by religious folks that there's something uniquely valuable about the context of a religious tradition for socializing a given population. In this case its perhaps not unique since you also mentioned college prep schools but just throwing it out there.

So private schools are better due to the default quality of the students in them and having nothing to due with teacher quality?

Legit this has been my theory I’ve kept to myself from my counselor wife and 3rd grade teacher sister. School quality has more to do with parental quality and social class than actual teacher and administrator skill?

Your wife is a school counselor? I've thought about going that route, is it a decent gig? I've heard they get paid more than the teachers and are better poised for advancement up the administration so it seems like if was going to go into the public school system that'd be my choice.

 

[HockeyBjj]

Your wife is a school counselor? I've thought about going that route, is it a decent gig? I've heard they get paid more than the teachers and are better poised for advancement up the administration so it seems like if was going to go into the public school system that'd be my choice.

I actually wouldn’t recommend it. You’re correct that they get paid more, but it seems there’s a severe shortage of counselor jobs out there for the number of counselors available

She’s having a heck of a time finding a new job at the moment, and knows that there are 45+ qualified applicants for one of the open counselor positions in our area she’s applied to

The odds are not on the counselors side. Seems very commonfor 30-60 counselors to be going after each open position

 

[emefer]

A scam to funnel more money from tax payers into the accounts of private corporations.

 

[SMillard]

The really, really shocking thing to me is that private school teachers make less money than public school teachers

I still can’t undeestand how having lower paid teachers (therefore wouldn’t the better ones not want that and wish to make more?) = those schools are better as evidenced in higher standardized test scores and fewer school discipline incidents

Private school teachers generally make less, but charter school teachers generally make more. My wife is a teacher at a charter school. The problem with the whole argument is that not all charter schools serve the same function. The one my wife works at generally is full of kids that have either failed in the public school system or been kicked out of the public school system.

Some of the things she's experienced this year with these kids that have been booted by the public school system and mind you this is middle school- first week a kid was repeatedly shitting on the floor in the bathroom. About the fourth day or so they finally caught the kid in the act (would hate to have been that person that caught them, don't want to see that). One kid was expelled for stabbing another kid four times with a pencil. A middle schooler was caught with enough weed and meth to cause an investigation, come to find out the kid was selling on campus. One boy thought it was a good idea to pull his dick out and run around the classroom trying to slap some of the girls in the face.

Not going to even talk about how much money we have had to put out of pocket, she has me copy tests for her at work because she is only allowed a certain number of copies a month, which since they don't work off text books she burns through her monthly allowance in about a week to week and a half.

 

[panamaican]

That's interesting. More often nowadays I try to consider the argument made by religious folks that there's something uniquely valuable about the context of a religious tradition for socializing a given population. In this case its perhaps not unique since you also mentioned college prep schools but just throwing it out there.

I can expand a bit on those 2 as well. In the case of the Jesuit schools, they have to be run by the order. So it's certainly something specific to the Jesuit environment and tradition.

The elite college prep schools appears to be based on a different set of socializing principles. Although only 2.2% of students attend a nonsectarian private school 26% of Harvard grads and 28% of those at Princeton., But that's misleading because that's about private schools as a group. Within the private school environment there are a subset of very exclusive institutions that account for a majority of the private school admittees to elite colleges. I think it's something less than 20 elite boarding schools and then a decent number of private day schools (think of the Phillips Academy and such).

These institutions are feeder schools for elite colleges. The difference that these high schools make seems to be in the social capital and cultural capital they add.

Spoiler

Quick aside: cultural resources, social resources and financial resources are the 3 sets of resources that elite college prep schools bring to bear. Financial is obvious, it's how much money they have to pour into educating their students. We're talking about multi-million dollar endowments for high schools.

Cultural resources are the mannerisms that they teach these kids. A how to on conducting yourself when engaged with people of power or influence. How to stand out in the crowd. How to identify and take on leadership roles. Those sorts of things.

Social resources are the networks that they bring to bear by carefully selecting their attendees. So kids with parents who can offer jobs, internships or letters of reference to the graduates after they've left the high school or after they've left college. Financial, cultural and social.

Thanks to the social and cultural capital the students acquire they can achieve better end stage results than kids from public or private schools, even if they're not more talented. And they're not more talented, attendees of these schools don't outperform other students at the elite college level but they do outperform them in life time earnings. Something to think about.

I won't go too far down my research rabbit hole but it's fascinating the extent to which some of these pathways are determined long before most parents/students are even aware that there is a pathway.

 

[HockeyBjj]

Private school teachers generally make less, but charter school teachers generally make more. My wife is a teacher at a charter school. The problem with the whole argument is that not all charter schools serve the same function. The one my wife works at generally is full of kids that have either failed in the public school system or been kicked out of the public school system.

Some of the things she's experienced this year with these kids that have been booted by the public school system and mind you this is middle school- first week a kid was repeatedly shitting on the floor in the bathroom. About the fourth day or so they finally caught the kid in the act (would hate to have been that person that caught them, don't want to see that). One kid was expelled for stabbing another kid four times with a pencil. A middle schooler was caught with enough weed and meth to cause an investigation, come to find out the kid was selling on campus. One boy thought it was a good idea to pull his dick out and run around the classroom trying to slap some of the girls in the face.

Not going to even talk about how much money we have had to put out of pocket, she has me copy tests for her at work because she is only allowed a certain number of copies a month, which since they don't work off text books she burns through her monthly allowance in about a week to week and a half.

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

 

[panamaican]

There's a really highly rated charter school near me, it's basically a publicly funded private school for wealthy people who could afford to send their kids to private school if they wanted to. It seems totally corrupt.

That's one of the potential downsides with letting public school money move with the students. @Lead had what I think is a better idea, let the charter prove it's own financial sustainability and academic competitiveness before we send public resources to them.