Let's discuss charter schools -- a topic you've seen a lot of on this blog over the years, but has kind of gone away recently for obvious (COVID) and non-obvious (Vouchers/School Funding) reasons.
Despite House Bill 2, which was supposed to slim down our notoriously poor-performing charter school sector and the closure of the nation's largest online school -- ECOT -- which closed because the school literally stole hundreds of millions of tax dollars to educate kids they never educated, we are currently spending more on charter schools than any other year on record.
By a mile.
Despite this massive recent increase (an extraordinary $111 million jump ... over two years), it's not because we've had more students attending charters than ever.
No. That record remains the 2013-2014 school year when 122,130 students attended charters.
As I've recounted for more than a decade, because of the way we fund charters, that means that local property taxes have to subsidize charter school kids.
It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Rocket Science to understand that if you're removing $8,500 in state aid from a district for a kid the district was only getting about half of that from the state to educate that the difference has to come from somewhere.
This year, that subsidy is slated to be $148 million. And in some districts, it's really high. Like in CONTINUE READING: 10th Period: Let's Talk Charter Schools | National Education Policy Center