Want to Pass A Local School Tax Increase? Open Charters

November 3, 2008

Here’s a neat piece of research posted at Heny Levin’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.  The study is actually by Arnold Shober and it examines whether the presence of charter schools in a district affects the likelihood that voters will support a local school tax increase. 

It has been getting more and more difficult to obtain local support for school tax increases.  But, Shober wonders, might it be easier to pass a school tax referenda in communities that have more options paid by tax dollars?  Maybe people more satisfied with the quality and diversity of publicly-financed schools, including charter options, are more willing to provide extra tax dollars for all schools.

As it turns out, Shober finds that they do.  He analyzed data from 1,111 school tax referenda in Wisconsin between 1998 and 2005.  He concludes:

“Adding one charter school to the district that has none increases the likelihood of passage 4.1 percent; increasing the number of charter schools from 0 to 8 (the maximum for these data) increases the likelihood of passage 30.2 percent second only to the effect of a college-educated electorate (below). This suggests that charter schools do have some bearing on how votes perceive a school district’s responsiveness to active-parent demands. Indeed, authorizing charter schools is the only variable in this analysis that a school district’s administration could directly manipulate (save the actual ballot request).”

It seems that restricting families’ options and forcing them to attend dirstrict schools whether those schools serve their kids well or not is not the best strategy to get those same families to cough up more dough for the public school system.  People are more likely to be supportive of a public school system that helps them find schools that work for their kids — even if those schools are charters.

2 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Establishment Mindset

June 16, 2008

(Guest post by Jonathan Butcher)

In education policy, as with any policy area, when discussion turns to reform, there are some basic questions: what are the problems that need fixing?  Who are the interested parties—what is at stake?  Should the change come from the bottom up or from the top down?  Is it raining?  Did I leave my car’s top down?  Do I own a convertible?

Actually, those last few questions only come up if the discussion is taking place inside a government building in Washington because, as everyone knows, there is no place to park in Washington.  So if you left your top down and it starts to rain there is no way you will make it back to your car in time to put it up.  You probably had to park in a metro lot in some swanky Northern Virginia suburb where gas cost $5 before the recent spike in oil prices and there are more Lexus LX’s per capita than any place in the world.  

Change to large systems such as public education can be frightening—but it is often simply because the ideas are misunderstood.  Take a story in the Washington Post last week about charter schools in Louisiana, for example.  New Orleans is now the first city of its size where more than half of the students attend charter schools.  Certainly this is a drastic change: 

“For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers — critics call them opportunists — seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.”  

Hold the phone!  Replacing a system the Post said had a “dismal record and faint prospects of getting better” with new management and scrapping portions of the old system that helped drive it to such a dismal state?  And using public dollars to create this change?  This sort of reform hasn’t happened since…well maybe it was…let me get back to you.

Critics of this change offer a revealing look at the establishment mindset.  One critic charges that “Louisiana school authorities have ‘opened a flea market of entrepreneurial opportunism that is dismantling the institution of public education in New Orleans.’”  Note that this quote uses the word “entrepreneurial” and the idea of taking apart New Orleans’ public education system as though they are bad things.  Well yes, please, bring back union contracts, students sure missed them.  

These charter school operators are “opportunists” in the sense that they are taking advantage of an opportunity to open schools for children whose lives were throttled by Katrina.  One charter school was open for business six weeks after the storm hit, while a public school bureaucracy with more levels than Halo 3 was still looking for its PlayStation.  These charter schools are actually competing for talented teachers in an effort to make the best educational opportunities possible available to students―compare that to an establishment mindset that wistfully refers to the days of payscales.

There are sure to be some challenges for these new charter schools, and as with any change in public policy, the results may be less than perfect.  But students in New Orleans deserve something better than an otherwise “dismal” record.

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Posted by JButcher

Fear and Loathing in Carson City

May 8, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I authored a study released by the Nevada Policy Research Institute this week on the Silver State’s education system. Nevada’s education system must address two urgent problems: an ever-growing quantity of students and the low average quality of schools. In spite of these problems, Nevada’s State Board of Education has moved to clamp down on a reform which could help with both problems: charter schools.

Between the year 2000 and the year 2005, Nevada’s school age population increased by 21 percent. This decade began with about 340,000 school age children, but will be nearing 550,000 by 2016.

Nevada is struggling to keep up with these demands. Nevada’s public school spending going for capital outlay in 2003 was over 40 percent higher than the national average on a per pupil basis.

Nevada’s school quality issue represents an even more serious problem. According the Nation’s Report Card from 2007, 43 percent of Nevada 4th graders scored “Below Basic” in reading.

Research shows that children who fail learn basic reading skills in the early grades very often fall further and further behind grade level with each passing year. Moving into middle school, they can scarcely read their textbooks. They begin dropping out in larger numbers in 8th grade.

In other words-the Nevada dropout class of 2015 is moving through the pipeline.

Nevada’s quality and quantity problems are interrelated. The need to construct new public school facilities ultimately draws educational funds out of the classroom. Likewise, the percent of per pupil funding going to service school debt was over sixty percent higher in Nevada than the national average.

A comparison between Nevada and its neighbor, Arizona, however proves that there are solutions to both the quantity and quality problems. Like Nevada, Arizona’s surging population has required a large increase in the supply of schools.

Despite similar rates of enrollment growth, Nevadans spent almost twice as much per student on capital costs as Arizonans in 2003-$1,468 compared to only $776 per pupil in Arizona. Arizona’s interest payments per pupil were also about half of what is paid in Nevada.

How has Arizona managed to manage its quantity problem so much more successfully than Nevada?

In 1994, Arizona lawmakers passed legislation creating choice between public schools and districts, and also one of the nation’s most liberal charter school law.

In 2007, Arizona has 482 charter schools educating over 112,000 children. Arizona charter schools have proven to be extremely diverse- focusing on everything from the arts to back to basics academics to the veterinary sciences.

In addition in 1994, Arizona lawmakers passed a very robust open enrollment law which thousands of students use to transfer between district schools and between school districts.

In 1997, Arizona passed the nation’s first scholarship tax credit law. This program gives individual taxpayers a dollar for dollar credit against state income tax for donations to nonprofit groups giving private school scholarships. In 2007, this program raised $54,000,000 and helped almost 25,000 students attend 359 private schools around the state. Arizona lawmakers created three new private choice programs in 2006.

Arizona’s ability to keep capital costs below the national average came about largely because of this embrace of parental choice in education. Choice options have relieved the need for Arizona’s school district to incur debt in the process of absorbing the increase in the student population.

What has parental choice done for school quality in Arizona? Charter schools comprise an amazing nine of the top 10 publicly funded high schools in the greater Phoenix area. The lone non-charter school on the list is a magnet school, also a choice based school.

Nevada, by comparison, has been hesitant in expanding parental options. In the five states surround Nevada (Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon and Utah) and these states have 482, 710, 30, 81 and 60 charter schools respectively, collectively educating hundreds of thousands of students. With only 22 charter schools, Nevada is the tortoise of the region.

On November 30 of 2007, the Nevada Board of Education voted 8-0 to impose a moratorium on the approval of new charter schools. Board members told the press that the freeze was necessary because the state Education Department is being “overwhelmed” by 11 charter applications.

Arizona’s State Board for Charter Schools oversees 482 Arizona charter schools with a staff of 8. Nevada’s board overseeing cosmetology currently has 14 full time employees.

In addition, the Nevada legislature created a funding stream for charter school oversight of 2% of the per capita funding. Nevada policymakers must come to recognize the dire need for new high quality schools. Currently, even ultra-high quality charter school operators like KIPP are frozen out of opening schools. If those top 10 schools from Phoenix wished to replicate their success in Nevada, they would be shut out, an absurd denial of opportunity for children.

Nevada policymakers should loathe the status quo and fear the future unless they can radically improve learning, especially for the state’s rapidly growing Hispanic population. They shouldn’t fear or loathe charter schools.

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Posted by matthewladner

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