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EDITORIAL
OP-ED; Charter school foes exploit fiscal crisis
Thomas M. KEANE, Jr.

02/14/2003
Boston Herald
All Editions
017
(Copyright 2003)

School reform could well be a casualty of the commonwealth's fiscal crisis - not because money is tight, but rather because tight money makes for a good excuse.

Over the last few weeks we have seen calls to halt the MCAS graduation requirement and to delay voter-passed bilingual education reforms. Yesterday saw the kickoff of a major push to kill charter schools as well, including a moratorium on opening new charters and a prohibition on them increasing their enrollments.

Many of these demands, couched in fiscal terms, come from groups that have been long-time opponents of reforms. It's easy to dismiss them because they are so transparently motivated.

Not so with the call to roll back charter schools. Even reform advocates concede that were a vote taken today on a moratorium, it would easily win in the House and pass more narrowly in the Senate. Their thin line of defense is a hoped-for veto from Gov. Romney and then a prayer that the Senate would uphold him.

The root cause of all this is the way that charters are funded.

The state reimburses charter schools based on average per-pupil expenditures. So, for example, if a town spends $8,000 per kid in its district schools, a charter school located in that town would get $8,000 for each child it educates.

The problem with all this is that the state would then cut any aid it gives to that town by the amount it just sent to the charter school.

It was that discovery that galvanized two Framingham parents, Susan Tsantes and Pam Richardson. The state was reimbursing $1.8 million to a new charter school in Framingham, Richardson says, meaning the town suddenly was receiving $1.8 million less. She was "astonished."

Short of funds, Framingham started threatening that it would have to close a school, cut teachers and reduce programming.

It's hard to argue with Richardson and Tsantes. Both have kids in Framingham schools. From their perspectives, charter schools were hurting the quality of education their kids were receiving.

Funding has always been the soft underbelly of the state's charter school law. On the surface it seems fair. If a district spends $8,000 in operating costs educating a child and that child leaves for a charter school, then in theory the district will have saved $8,000.

In practice, however, that isn't really true. The theory assumes that all operating costs are what economists would call variable costs. But many expenses - such as pensions for retired teachers or administrative overhead - are fixed or can only change slowly.

Now this is not as unfair to local school districts as it might seem. Operating costs typically don't include the cost of the school building (capital costs are separately accounted for). Charter schools, however, still have to pay for their own buildings, meaning that in some respects they are actually under-reimbursed.

Still, there's enough of a mess here that it makes for a good argument. For a while, the state recognized that, and its funding formula was based on a sliding scale, with reductions in state aid being made over a number of years after a charter school opened.

But the state eliminated that program in last year's tight budget. Richardson and Tsantes are right: Charter schools hurt local school budgets.

But there's a disconnect between the problem they see and the solution.

One could have imagined Richardson and Tsantes taking a very different course. They could, for example, have been outraged at the tactics of local school boards, which use kids as pawns in their battles against educational reform. They could have pushed for the state to come up with new funding approaches - such as extra money for districts with charter schools - that reward reform efforts. They could have demanded that there be additional charter schools so that more kids could take advantage of them. They could have insisted that their local districts adopt charter-like innovations, providing their schools with more independence and parents with more choice.

But instead, they decided the solution was to turn back the clock. They created a so-called grassroots organization, the Alliance for Educational Equity, making common cause with long-time charter opponents such as the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. They simultaneously trash charter schools - calling them experimental and unproved - and then charge they're unfair because not every kid can be in them.

"Equity" in education is often a code word. It means don't change anything, because any change - at least at first - might only benefit a few. In many respects, charter schools are revolutionary. The wealthy have always had choices in education. The promise of charter schools was that they might extend those choices to everyone.

Instead, Richardson and Tsantes have decided that they would just as soon give those choices to no one.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.