Editorial: Who should pay for charter schools?
In public education, charter schools are the disrupters. Designed to be autonomous, charters are public schools overseen by their own boards and the State Office of Education, not local school boards. Free from the constraints of school districts, charters have blazed new trails.
Not all of those trails have led to success, but enough have succeeded that there are 100 charter schools with roughly 10 percent of Utah public-school students. They are now hitting a scale that makes it more difficult to fly under the radar as experimentalists. It seems the disrupters are becoming part of the mainstream, and that is putting charter-school funding on a crash course.
Charter schools receive most of their funding directly from the state, but part of their money comes from the local school districts where their students reside. That makes sense in that it takes away some of the money that would have gone to educate the students in public schools and sends it to the charters that actually do educate them.
But that has set up a taxation-without-representation dynamic. The districts collect the money without any say in how it's spent by charters. That issue is getting new attention because of a legislative change in the funding formula that has some Utah school districts looking at property-tax increases to fund new charter-school expenses. Those increases are sure to bring complaints from property owners.
Charter schools are here to stay. Utah legislators have nurtured them as a challenge to the public-education establishment, and they gave them wide freedom to try out their models. Many have succeeded in cultivating niches and delivering quality educations. Others have failed or fallen victim to for-profit vendors who see opportunity in charters' lack of regulation and some parents' desperation.
There are proposals to fund the schools through a statewide tax. It would be like a 42nd school district (and one of the largest) scattered across the state with 100 or more separate governing boards. Its only accountability to the public would be the state school board, whose members are elected from candidates chosen by the governor. The statewide tax would solve the school districts' taxation problem, but it's not a recipe for responsible government.
The charters have made valuable contributions, but they haven't shifted the paradigm like true disrupters. Public schools also are here to stay, and they operate on a system overseen by locally elected leaders who know the students and the taxpayers. We shouldn't undermine that on the hope something better will emerge.Editorial: Who should pay for charter schools? | The Salt Lake Tribune:
