CURMUDGUCATION: My Support for Charter Schools

CURMUDGUCATION: My Support for Charter Schools

My Support for Charter Schools

In the last few weeks, I've been tagged once again as someone who will never support charter schools no matter what. This is not accurate, and School Choice Week seems like the perfect time to once again explain when I do, in fact, support charter schools. These are the characteristics that need to be in place.

Financial Honesty

Virtually all of the major charter/choice systems set up in this country are founded on a huge lie-- that a community can run multiple school district with the same amount of money it used to spend on just one district. That is simply never going to be true.

Charter fans object to the assertion that charters drain resources from public schools. "We don't say that a neighboring district drains resources from your local district," is the new argument. But in fact, we say that all the time. In Pennsylvania, we bitch non-stop about how Philly and the Burgh drain money from everyone else. And, with our 550 school districts, we've had a fifty-year conversation about how much better it would be for taxpayers if some of those districts merged.

Multiple, redundant school systems are financially inefficient. Of necessity, they increase the amount of total excess capacity that taxpayers are paying for. They duplicate pricey items like administrators, and they frequently remove resources from the public school without removing a matching level of cost. Opening charters financially destabilizes public schools.

Any honest attempt to open charters needs to be honest about the finances involved. There needs to be an honest discussion of how much more this will cost the taxpayers, whether that extra cost is to be made up by philanthropists supporting the charters or by the public school cutting programs. A really honest approach to opening charters would be to talk to the taxpayers and say, "We can have CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: My Support for Charter Schools