Mr. Math asks: Are charters getting a smaller hit than traditional schools?

by

by David Safier

I don't claim to know the answer to this, because the flow of budget money is very tricky. But my simple math skills give me the impression that charter school budget cuts are significantly less than those for traditional public schools.

Here's the math. K-12 schools are supposed to get a budget cut of about $120 million (The figures keep changing, so I don't know if this one is still operational). Charter schools are supposed to have a $4 million cut.

According to the Arizona Charter Schools Association, a non-governmental booster organization for charters, 8.7% of Arizona children are in charters.

Let's divide 4 by 120. The answer is 0.0333.

So by my way of figuring, charter schools cuts are about 3% of traditional public school cuts, yet charter schools have over 8% of the kids. If that's true, charter school cuts are close to a third of traditional school cuts.

This is very rough estimate. I really should be looking at the size of the total charter school budget against the size of the traditional school budget. But I don't have those figures, so I have to use what I can get my hands on.

Can anyone help me out on this?

2 thoughts on “Mr. Math asks: Are charters getting a smaller hit than traditional schools?”

  2. Mr. Safier;
    If you take $124,ooo,ooo as the total amount to be cut (from K-12 eduction)and multiply it by 8.7% (the percentage of children (in K-12 education in Arizona) you get
    $10,788,000 as a fair share cut for charter schools. The budgets of each system do not seem relevant. If cuts are to be made they should be on a per student basis. But then who said that the AZ Legislature considers “fairness” in their “deliberations”?

Comments are closed.