The Washington Examiner
Fund public schools fairly, Mr. Mayor
By FOCUS
Monday, June 7, 2010
Examiner columnist Jonetta Rose Barras recently took the District's public charter schools to task for "whining" about the inequality in public funding between public charter schools and traditional public schools.
Publicly funded but independently run, charter schools educate 38 percent of all public school students in the District.
Incorrectly, she accused charters of not celebrating the nearly 22 percent pay increase for District of Columbia Public Schools' teachers that will result from the new union contract agreed between D.C.P.S. and the American Federation of Teachers.
Barras also falsely accuses the city's public charter school community of begrudging the city money spent upgrading D.C.P.S. facilities.
In fact, charters and my organization have been enthusiastic supporters of Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and better funding for all public schools-charter and traditional-and their teachers, whose salaries are a major component of school operating costs.
Our quarrel is with Mayor Adrian Fenty who has been unwilling to treat D.C. public charter schools fairly by providing them with equitable funding of operating expenses, including teacher pay.
The D.C. School Reform Act requires that the operating costs of D.C.P.S. and charters be funded through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. As its name suggests, the formula is designed to ensure equal public funding for D.C.'s public school children.
Under the formula, students at the same grade level or who need the same level of special education services are to get equal funding. Teacher salaries are a major component of school operating costs.
Yet the D.C. government has, whenever a new contract is signed, funded raises outside the formula. Charters, which also are public schools, get nothing.
The teacher pay raise in the latest union contract is no exception. Of the $135.5 million pay increase only 10 percent will be funded through the formula. But under the School Reform Act, all teacher pay must be funded through the formula, so that all of D.C.'s public schools-charter and traditional-can hire good teachers.
This is not the only inequality forced upon D.C.'s charter schools by Mayor Fenty's administration. D.C.P.S. gets more than twice as much funding for school buildings per student as the charter schools get.
Not coincidentally, the average charter school can only provide half the square footage per student as the city-run public schools.
And while every D.C.P.S. school occupies an actual school building, charter students often go to school in former warehouse, office and retail spaces that lack basics like playgrounds, playing fields, auditoriums, cafeterias and gymnasiums.
Creative but consequently unfair accounting by the administration provides many other funding advantages to D.C.P.S.
The city-run school system receives money for students the mayor estimates it will enroll whereas charters are only funded for students they actually enroll, giving D.C.P.S. millions of extra funding each year.
Charters also have to maintain their buildings out of formula funds but D.C.P.S. building maintenance is funded outside the formula.
Combined public funding inequities mean that D.C.P.S. gets nearly $5,000 more per student in local taxpayer funding than the public charter schools do.
Now that the bulk of the latest pay raise for teachers in the city-run schools is being funded outside the formula, the inequality between the two types of public school will widen further still.
It is the city's blatant disregard for its own law and for the needs of the nearly 28,000 District children who now attend public charter schools that have led some in the city's public charter school community to consider legal action against the city.
Thousands of charter students, and thousands more on waiting lists trying to get in, deserve no less.
Robert Cane is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a D.C. nonprofit that supports education reform through development of high-quality public charter schools.