Charter Schooling & Citizenship
by Frederick M. Hess • Jun 22, 2011 at 10:00 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareU. Missouri's invaluable Mike Podgursky and Fordham's Amanda Olberg have just issued a study of the kind that we'd have been swimming in years ago, if ed reformers were serious about cost structures or charter schools as an opportunity to rethink the industrial school model. In studying the simple and immensely practical question of how charter schools handle teacher retirement when state law allows them to opt out of the state's pension system, Podgursky and Olberg examine just how much rethinking charters are doing when it comes to the familiar, expensive, and binding routines of schooling--and what lessons that holds for schools more broadly.
The inattention to this question is really pretty astounding. As Podgursky and Olberg remind us, pension costs accounted for 15 percent of teacher salaries in 2010, and pensions probably amounted to more than ten percent of all school district spending last year. Big savings there could alleviate the need for so many of the difficult decisions with which supes, school boards, and school leaders are wrestling.
The authors examined six charter-heavy states--including giant states like California, Florida, and New York, and charter hotbeds Arizona, Michigan, and Louisiana. In California and Louisiana, where school participating in the pension system are free from participating in Social Security, the participation rates were 91%+ and 71%,
