Education

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.

by David Safier Here's the answer to the question, "How did the legislature come up with the $144 million figure for cutting soft capital to schools?" It comes from an email sent by LEAN Parents for Education. In order to receive federal stimulus money, all US states had to agree not to cut education spending … Read more

by David Safier The good news: good charter schools can be very good. For certain parts of the student population, they can be better than public schools. The bad news: bad charter schools can be just awful. They're run either by incompetents or profiteers — sometimes by incompetent profiteers — and the students are the … Read more

by David Safier Here's another comment from the teacher in Tempe whose comment I moved to the front a few days ago. He spotlights one of the ironies good teachers understand. They complain, rightly, about budget cuts and unnecessary restrictions. But when the students walk in the classroom, all that goes out the window and … Read more