U-Ark Screws Up A Charter School Revenue Study, AGAIN: Part II
If this is true, it's really disturbing:
It is, of course, standard operating procedure for outfits like the U-Ark Department of Education Reform to claim their work led to particular changes in policy; that's how they justify themselves to their reformy funders. Maybe the connection between the report and the Colorado legislation (which is really awful -- more in a bit) is overblown...Colorado’s General Assembly on Wednesday passed a bill giving charter schools the same access to a local tax funding stream as district schools have, The Denver Post reported.The bipartisan compromise measure, which supporters say is the first of its kind in the nation, would address an estimated $34 million inequity in local tax increases. It came a day after the University of Arkansas released a study that found charter schools receive $5,721 less per pupil on average than their district counterparts — a 29 percent funding gap. [emphasis mine]
But if the U-Ark report did sway the debate, that's a big problem. Because the report is just flat out wrong.
As I explained in Part I, the claim that Camden, NJ, has a huge revenue gap between charters and public district schools seems to be based on an utterly phony comparison: all of the revenue, both charter and district, is linked to only the CCPS students -- not the charter students. Because the data source documentation in the report is so bad, I can't exactly replicate U-Ark's figures, so I invited Patrick Wolf and his colleagues to contact me and explain exactly how they got the figures they did.
So far, they remain silent.
But that isn't surprising. When U-Ark related its first report in 2014, Bruce Baker tore it to shreds in a brief published by the National Education Policy Center. The latest U-Ark report cites Baker's brief, so they must have read it -- but they never bothered to answer Jersey Jazzman: U-Ark Screws Up A Charter School Revenue Study, AGAIN: Part II:
