A key thread connects many of 2016's biggest political conflicts over school choice: Money.
In Nevada, the nation's most ambitious educational choice program was challenged in court, and technically prevailed, but it may still wither away unless lawmakers agree to fund it.
In Louisiana, lawmakers cut funding to a statewide voucher program, leaving hundreds of students in the lurch and sending state officials scrambling for a temporary fix.
In Massachusetts, opponents blocked a bid to allow one of the highest-performing charter school systems in the nation to expand. A crucial part of the argument was that more charters would undermine the funding of existing public schools.
Episodes like these have many reformers arguing that overhauling education funding could be crucial to the future of the school choice movement.
"Our school funding system in the Unites State for K-12 education is fundamentally broken, and in my opinion it is the biggest barrier to enabling and having a diversity of school choice," Lisa Snell, the director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation, said last month during a gathering of education reformers in Washington.
Many private school choice programs — including the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in the nation's capital — are funded through standalone pots of money that insulate them from public schools. That means their backers, and the families that rely on them to pay tuition, have to ask for annual appropriations and leaves them vulnerable to shifting political winds.
The new definition of public education depends on funding systems in which money truly follows individual children and districts are able to thrive even as more students attend non-district schools. Snell said scholarship programs should be designed to avoid this problem. When parents sign up to enroll their children in private schools with the help of a Florida McKay scholarship or a voucher in Indiana, they receive funding automatically — just like public schools, including charters. If lawmakers take no action, families still get scholarships.
Ensuring money follows the child, however, raises another issue: The impact on existing public schools.
Special needs. Orange County schools used restraints on students with disabilities more than 1,000 times during the past school year, but the district uses them less frequently than the state average. Orlando Sentinel.
Charter schools. The City of West Palm Beach identifies a site for a planned municipal charter school. Palm Beach Post.
Tony Bennett. The former state education chief accepts a $5,000 fine for using state computers for political purposes in Indiana, but an inspector general's review clears him of any ethics issues in the school grading scandal that led to his resignation in Florida. Politico. Associated Press.
Advanced Placement. Alachua County students passed nearly two thirds of their AP exams. Gainesville Sun.
ESOL. Hillsborough County teachers face firing for failing to get training to teach English for Speakers of Other Languages. Tampa Bay Times.
Finance. An aging state accounting system affects the flow of payments to Florida schools. Associated Press. Santa Rosa district officials say their fiscal situation is improving. Pensacola News-Journal. The Walton school district is looking to replace its chief financial officer shortly after finding out it had run down its reserve balance. Northwest Florida Daily News.
Top teachers. Florida is set to name its Teacher of the Year. Lakeland Ledger. Gradebook. Daytona Beach News-Journal.
A new report on how charter schools are funded in Florida is a reminder that being different typically comes at a price. Though state policymakers are indeed charting new approaches in the field of public education, their budget writers are still ciphering students in the same old ways. The impact is difficult to overstate.
How Charter School Funding Compares, written by the respected nonprofit Florida TaxWatch, looks beneath the hood of a state funding system that ostensibly delivers the same per-student allocation whether the student is in a traditional public school or a charter school. But what it determines is that charter schools are funded, per student, at roughly 68 to 71 percent of a traditional public school.
This finding might seem at odds with a state that has allowed charter schools since 1996 and has positioned itself among the national leaders with 180,000 students enrolled. But TaxWatch describes the dilemma this way: “Because the charter school model is both a relatively new entrant to the state’s public education system and a rapidly expanding educational delivery option, there is much discussion, and confusion, concerning the differences in funding between charter schools and traditional district schools. Because of a variety of factors, largely stemming from the relational dependency of charter schools on their local authorizing agency, commonly the local school board, questions of equal distribution of funding from federal, state, and local sources have emerged.”
The charter school math works like this: the per-student allocation removes between 2 and 5 percent for district School Board oversight, doesn’t include some local and federal sources or some spending categories deemed not relevant, and takes most of the capital money off the table entirely. That's how a Florida charter school student ends up worth 70 cents on the public school dollar. (more…)
In this week's Washington Post, Laura R. Walker, president and chief executive of New York Public Radio, and Jaclyn Sallee, president and chief executive officer of Alaska-based Kohanic Broadcast Corporation, defended taxpayer-funded journalism. According to Walker and Sallee, the federal government currently allocates $430 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in turn provides “financial support for locally owned and operated public radio and television stations, and acts as a journalistic firewall between the government that provides this funding and the public media journalism it funds.”
Given the success of public radio and television and the growing criticisms of school boards, the governance and management structure of publicly funded media may be a model publicly funded education should consider emulating. (more…)
