The Big Lie About Charter Schools

Democratic presidential candidates claim they take money away from public schools. That’s nonsense.

By David Osborne. Mr. Osborne, whose latest book is “Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System,” leads the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute. Excerpts:

"To begin with, charters themselves are public schools. The only difference is that they are operated independently of district bureaucracies, with more freedom to design their programs and choose their teachers but also more accountability. If charters fail—if their students fall too far behind—they are usually closed.

The same arguments made about charter school funding don’t make sense in other contexts. When a family moves out of a district, the district loses state and federal money for its child’s education, but no one accuses the family of draining funds from the district. When parents move their child to a private school, no one accuses them of sabotaging public schools.'

"Whether charters drain money from public school districts depends on the state. In over half the states with charters, when students decamp some or all districts get to keep their local tax revenue but no longer have to educate the children, so they actually increase their spending per pupil. In Massachusetts and New York (outside New York City), the state cushions any revenue loss. By law, Massachusetts districts should be reimbursed 100% of the state money for the student for a year, then 25% for the next five years—though the state has only met about 60% of that funding since 2015."

"And the pension problem is exaggerated. As districts lose students, they reduce their number of teachers, which also reduces payments to the pension fund. If the pension system has been properly funded, there’s no negative impact. The real problem is that most states have fallen behind on their funding obligations, and now some districts are being forced, as in California, to play catch-up.

Mitigating the cost of building maintenance and utilities takes a little creative thinking. Districts can rent empty classrooms to preschool and adult-education providers. Once their schools are down to 75% capacity or below, they can lease the extra space to charter or private schools. In cities that aren’t afraid of charters, such as Washington and Denver, many school buildings house both a charter and a district school. When that’s not enough, districts can close buildings that are more than half empty and lease or sell them to charter schools.

None of this decreases the public education available to students, and it often improves the quality. But leaders of the teachers unions scream when school boards contemplate any of it."

"Charter schools give millions of children—two-thirds of them nonwhite—the opportunity to get an education, go to college and move up the socioeconomic ladder. Even the unions’ favorite source of charter studies—they keep calling back to an outdated report of theirs—Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, has found that by their fourth year in a charter, students learn about 2.5 months more in reading every year and around two more in math than demographically similar students with the same past test scores who stayed in local district schools. In urban districts, by their fourth year students are gaining a little under half a year in reading and a little over in math—every year—over their district peers.

Graduation rates, college-going rates and college completion rates are also higher among students who enroll in charter schools. And as a handful of studies have shown, competition from charters can push district and school leaders to improve their schools, to make them more attractive to parents."