65% solution: Districts spend one-third more in classrooms than charters

by David Safier

An article in today's Star looks at the percent of their budgets Arizona districts spend on classroom instruction. It comes up with districts spending about 57% in the classroom, considerably lower than the proposed 65% Solution bill being pushed by Russell Pearce and his district-school-bashing cronies.

When I ran the same numbers on a selection of Arizona charter schools, they averaged 36% spent on classroom instruction, about 1/3 less than school districts.

Districts: 57%. Charters: 36%. More than a 20 point difference.

In case you think I cooked the books on the charters I chose, I included BASIS Tucson in the charter sample. BASIS spends about 51% in the classroom, which is still 6% lower than the average district. If I leave BASIS out of the sample, the other charters average about 32%.

I created my comparison as carefully as I could, using the Districts' and charters' own calculations of expenditures.

Districts and charter schools submit identical Maintenance and Operation Fund Expenditures forms to the state, with number codes supplied by the Auditor General to indicate the category of each expenditure. All district and charter expenditure forms can be found online.

Code #1000 is for "Classroom Instruction." When I pulled up the form for TUSD and divided its "#1000 Classroom Instruction" expenditures by its total education expenses, I got 55.5%. The Star article used 53.5% as the figure for TUSD, so my calculations differ from the Star's by 2%, showing I was using a similar calculation.

I performed the same classroom instruction calculation on the same forms submitted by charter schools and arrived at an average of 36%, 21 points lower than what the Star article arrived at for the districts. Even if my charter figures changed a few percentage points if I used exactly the same method as the Star article, the difference between the classroom spending of District and charter schools is still dramatic.

I took my investigation one step further and looked at administrative expenditures of Districts and charter schools. According to the Star article, districts spend an average of 9.2% on administration. My calculations for TUSD showed the district spending 8%, so once again, I'm in the same ballpark.

Using the same calculation, the percentage spent on administration by charter schools in my sample varied from a low of 12% to a high of 40%. (BASIS came in at 30%.) The average was 23%.

If, as Pearce and his cronies say, districts spend too little on classroom instruction and too much on administration (though to my mind, 9% on administration doesn't seem out of bounds), they should be breathing fire and tearing their hair out over the expenditures at charter schools — something like 1/3 less on the classroom and 3 times more on administration than Districts.

I have a suggestion. In the 65% Solution legislation, add the phrase "and Charter Schools" after every mention of "District Schools." They're all public schools, so they should be subject to the same scrutiny. Either that or withdraw the ridiculous piece of legislation and look at how to increase school funding instead of playing the Republican game of blame-the-schools to divert attention from the Republican legislators' failures.