First, a Kafkaesque story:
After years of struggle, Erie School District faced insolvency, requiring a $14M bailout and a financial administrator to come up with a five-year-plan.
The administrator went to work, diving into the fine details of the district’s budget, and earlier this year came up with a proposal.
His plan included a striking opinion about Erie’s charter schools, the district’s second largest expenditure, beating medical insurance and pension costs: Charter schools threaten Erie’s best chance at achieving financial stability.
Last year, Erie spent $26.7M in tuition payments to charter schools. According to the financial administrator’s five-year projection, those payments will skyrocket 32.5%, to $35.4M.
Adding to the district’s frustration is the dismal performance of all Erie’s costly cyber charters and underperforming brick and mortar charter schools. Their one shining light is Montessori Regional Charter School, which performs better than district run schools, but with significantly fewer economically disadvantaged children, special education students, and English language learners than district schools.
What makes the opinion so striking is not the analysis, as education advocates have been proving that point for years. No, what is striking is that the author of the opinion, the appointed financial administrator, is none other than the architect of Pennsylvania’s hopelessly broken charter law, former PA Education Secretary Charles Zogby for Governors Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker, and budget secretary for Governor Tom Corbett, who oversaw an infamous $1 billion cut to education.
End of story, kind of.
Last week, Governor Wolf proposed long-awaited charter reform, much to the relief of educators, administrators, advocates, and prominent state Republicans who have until recently favored unfettered charter expansion.
Here’s what the Governor is proposing:
- improve access to high-quality education by limiting enrollment in underperforming charters and requiring transparent charter school admissions to stop schools from “cherry-picking” students
- aligning charter transparency and accountability requirements with those applied to traditional public schools
- align charter school funding with their costs and prevent them from overcharging
- charge charter schools for PDE and school district costs for services and time to review application, process payments and provide administrative supports
And here’s what Republican State Senator Wayne Langerholc, Jr., chair of the Senate Education Committee, said at last week’s hearing on charter funding.
“Our goal is to look at reforms that will improve the quality and accountability of charter schools, control costs and improve financial transparency, and bring greater equality to funding all levels of public education.”
Senator Langerholc raised eyebrows at the hearing with atypically pointed questioning of a charter operator who was decidedly less than forthcoming in his testimony before the committee.
Republican State Senator Pat Browne, chair of the Appropriations Committee, added that the Governor’s reform plan proved that funding charter schools was now a “crisis.”
With charter school performance across the Commonwealth sinking deeper and deeper, more and more districts hemorrhaging millions every year, and irate taxpayers growing increasingly vocal about local taxes pushing them underwater, the emerging bipartisan conversation is a clear signal that time’s up for PA’s broken charter law.
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