More on charters

My email two days ago about the financial pressure charter schools create and some of my ideas for compromise led three of my readers to share what's going on in their states:

a) In CT, the money doesn’t go with the child so the urban schools actually gain by charter school creation.S

 

b) That's more or less what happens in MA.  In Year 1 they lose 0% (full reimbursement), in Year 2 they lose 40% (60% reimbursement), in Year 3 they lose 60%.  Then that's it - full amount. 

 

c) There are similar proposals in NY.

In addition, I have another thought on what I wrote two days ago:

...when a charter school opens and draws students away, the revenue leaves the local public schools, but the costs don't go down at all since not enough students leave to warrant hiring one fewer teacher, for example.  ...with 22,000 fewer students to educate, the District can hire far fewer teachers and cut certain other costs, but the reality is that many costs are fixed or somewhat fixed and to the extent that a school loses only a handful of students (as appears to be the case in New Hampshire typically), there are virtually no savings at all.

When I wrote this, I was thinking of a static system, in which a school loses students overall when some choose to leave and attend a charter school.  But this is often not the case since school enrollment in this country is GROWING, as this NYT article, "In Schools Across U.S., the Melting Pot Overflows" (www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/education/27education.html), that I sent around the other day makes clear:

Some 55 million youngsters are enrolling for classes in the nation’s schools this fall, making this the largest group of students in America’s history and, in ethnic terms, the most dazzlingly diverse since waves of European immigrants washed through the public schools a century ago.

Millions of baby boomers and foreign-born parents are enrolling their children, sending a demographic bulge through the schools that is driving a surge in classroom construction.

Charter schools are taking significant market share in only a handful cities like Washington DC -- I recall that they're less than 2% of NYC students, for example -- so in many cases I suspect, the students that are leaving to attend charter schools are quickly replaced by other students and there's no financial hit at all to a school.  In fact, charters may improve the situation by alleviating overcrowding.