Education

by David Safier I could call this self parody, but for AZ legislators of the Republican persuasion, it's business as usual. You probably remember that both the East Valley Trib and the Republic ran a number of investigative articles starting a few months back exposing all kinds of problems with the tuition tax credit system … Read more

by David Safier Weird battle lines are being drawn in the payday loan wars these days. You expect the Ds and Rs to be on opposite sides here, with the Ds for ending payday loans and the Rs trying to figure out a way to keep payday loans without actually coming out in favor of … Read more

by David Safier Idiot's Guides have been big over the past few years. Goldwater Institute has created one for Republican legislators, a list it calls 100 Ideas for 100 Days: Budget Solutions and Ideas for State Elected Officials. To be fair, nowhere does G.I. say Dems can't use it as well, but . . . … Read more

by David Safier I'm not always encouraged by the ed reform ideas I'm hearing, and that includes what's coming from Duncan's Dept of Ed. But here's where I see promise. The idea seems to be to encourage lots of approaches to improving education. If that's true, we have a decent chance of finding a number … Read more

by David Safier

I've been wrestling with this one lately. A suit has been filed to give charter schools more money to make their allocations "equal" with district schools. That raises the question: do charters get less than district schools, and if so, should the state give them more?

The main issue here is the $7500 vs. $9500 per pupil figure that I've written about ad nauseam. The $9500 figure is ridiculous when you're talking about the amount spent on a student's education. The extra $2000 has to do with the cost of building more schools to deal with our expanding student population. It wouldn't be there if our population had remained stable or was shrinking. No reputable comparative national study from the left or the right includes the extra $2000, nor does Tom Horne. We spend about $7500 per student. End of story.

But when we're comparing schools within the state, it may be a different matter. Why shouldn't all schools, charter and district, have equal access to school building funds when they need to put up a school to house students? It's a compelling argument.

But I think the argument falls apart when you look at it more closely. Here are 3 reasons why charter schools shouldn't have access to extra government funds for building schools. I'll elaborate on them after the jump.

1. Charter schools aren't built to meet the needs of an expanding student population.
2. Charter school buildings are created (or redesigned) at the whim of the directors, not the Department of Education or a school district.
3. Charter schools can fail or have their charters revoked, leaving an empty building.

Here's the best analogy I can think of. I think people would complain mightily if a district wanted money to put up a few new schools it couldn't justify because of population needs. The complaints would grow louder if it left the building design up to the new principal and a group of friends. And they would reach eardrum-piercing levels if the district said, we don't know if we'll still be using the school a few years down the road.

That's a rough approximation of the situation when a new charter school is built.