The Relatively Unexplored Frontier Of Charter School Finance

Matthew DiCarlo:

Do charter schools do more - get better results - with less? If you ask this question, you'll probably get very strong answers, ranging from the affirmative to the negative, often depending on the person's overall view of charter schools. The reality, however, is that we really don't know.

Actually, despite uninformed coverage of insufficient evidence, researchers don't even have a good handle on how much charter schools spend, to say nothing of whether how and how much they spend leads to better outcomes. Reporting of charter financial data is incomplete, imprecise and inconsistent. It is difficult to disentangle the financial relationships between charter management organizations (CMOs) and the schools they run, as well as that between charter schools and their "host" districts.

A new report published by the National Education Policy Center, with support from the Shanker Institute and the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, examines spending between 2008 and 2010 among charter schools run by major CMOs in three states - New York, Texas and Ohio. The results suggest that relative charter spending in these states, like test-based charter performance overall, varies widely. In addition, perhaps more importantly, the findings make it clear that there remain significant barriers to accurate spending comparisons between charter and regular public schools, which severely hinder rigorous efforts to examine the cost-effectiveness of these schools.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 5, 2012 1:36 AM
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