Cut funding to charter schools— but don’t stop there
The latest plan to fix Pennsylvania’s broken charter school funding system is sensible and would be a good start.
It should be only a start, though, to reforming public education funding. That’s because charters are only part of the problem.
The tension between traditional public schools and charters gets a lot of attention, but there is tension on other parts of the system that must be relieved, too. Some traditional districts have been underpaid, and others overpaid, for years because the state’s “fair funding formula” hasn’t lived up to its name.
It’s time to take a look at the whole picture. That’s a big job. That’s a messy job. Still, there should be no greater priority among lawmakers and the governor than education.
Charter school funding has become an unbearable burden for school districts and their taxpayers. Statewide, districts will pay $2.5 billion to charter schools this year. And the cost is rising because, during the pandemic, more families have opted to send their children to charters, especially cyber charters.
To make those payments, some districts have to cut programs, trim staff, forgo needed building improvements and raise property taxes.
“That is not the intent of the charter school law,” Gov. Tom Wolf said Friday at a news conference. “When the charter school law was drafted, the intent was to bolster, to bolster, our education system.”
The Allentown School District will pay $58 million this year to charter schools and is projected to pay $86 million in 2025-26.
The district would save $3 million a year under the plan outlined Friday by Wolf, state Sen. Lindsey Williams, D-Allegheny, and state Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Montgomery. Statewide, districts would save $229 million a year.
The plan calls for a uniform per-pupil tuition rate for students at cyber charters, instead of the range of rates that districts pay now. It also calls for changing how tuition for special education students is paid, to base it on actual costs.
Currently, the funding formula assumes that 16% of charter school students are special education, without considering the actual counts. And charters are paid a flat rate that doesn’t consider the level of those students’ needs.
A 2016 study by Penn State found that charter schools received $550 million in excess of what they spent to educate special education students from 200910 to 2013-14. That amounted to “a disguised subsidy for their general operations,” the study concluded.
The proposed changes would be enacted through legislation sponsored by Ciresi and Williams.
Cyber charter tuition can range from $7,300 to $18,000 per student, according to a 2019 report from Education Voters of Pennsylvania. That’s higher than the costs incurred by some districts that run their own cyber schools.
The Bellefonte Area School District in Centre County can educate a student in its cyber school for one-quarter of what it pays cyber charters, board member Donna Smith said during Friday’s news conference.
“We are being charged four times what we know it costs to educate a student in cyber school,” said Smith, a retired teacher. “And we are outperforming those schools in every facet.
“Who pays the price? Our kids do. They pay the price when we have to cut programs, which we have, activities, services, staffing and opportunities, in order to pay for those inflated tuition bills.”
Williams said lawmakers sought input from charter schools as they drafted their legislation, and included some of their suggestions. She said the bills boosted the proposed cyber charter tuition to $9,500 per student after hearing from officials that an initially proposed lower amount wouldn’t consider all of their costs.
Ciresi said the plan isn’t an attack on school choice. It’s an attempt to fund school choice fairly.
The Legislature needs to make sure traditional public schools are funded fairly, too. That means amending the fair funding law so it covers all state education funding.
The law, passed in 2016, was designed to account for factors such as poverty, tax bases, charter school costs and how many students don’t speak English as their first language. But it has been a failure because it covers only the “new” money allocated since the law was passed. That’s a meager 11% of the total.
Wolf wants to raise income taxes on the top-third of state residents as part of a plan to have the formula cover all funding. He says the additional revenue would allow districts to be “held harmless,” meaning they wouldn’t get less money than they do now, even if the formula says they should.
What’s the point of having a formula if you aren’t going to follow it? If shrinking districts don’t need as much money as they have received in the past, they shouldn’t get it. That money should be diverted to growing districts, or districts with other factors that drive up costs.
Scrap the income tax hike and implement the formula universally. And make all state special education funding flow through the 2014 special education funding law, too, as is proposed for charters. Currently, that also applies only to new money.
Wolf said at Friday’s news conference that there is bipartisan support for the proposed changes.
The plan looks to be a tough sell for the Republican-controlled Legislature, though. Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman said it doesn’t reflect “what the parents and students in Pennsylvania want and need.”
If Republican lawmakers are reluctant to tinker with charter school funding because they believe that would interfere with school choice, then I challenge them to come up with an alternative. Because what’s happening now isn’t working.
Here’s one idea.
The state used to pay up to 30% of each district’s charter school costs. It cut most of that allowance a decade ago.
Lawmakers could reinstate it, to show their commitment to both charters and traditional schools.