Thursday, August 22, 2013

Kids in School Districts Get Hit Again

Over at Innovation Ohio we've shown how three things will conspire to remove even more money from kids in traditional public schools than is being removed already.

Charter schools will receive a nice boost in per pupil funding, as well as the removal of the eSchool moratorium and 49 new brick-and-mortar schools this year. Doing estimates based on their per pupil funding in the latest budget, as well as average enrollment at these schools, shows that Charters could well remove another $124 million from kids at traditional public schools this year.

That's up to nearly $950 million from $824 million last school year, when kids in traditional schools lost 6.6% of their state revenue because Charters removed so much money from their districts' coffers.

Remember that under the state's new report card system, 60% of Charters' cumulative GPAs are Ds and Fs while nearly 55% of traditional districts' cumulative GPAs are As or Bs.

The state has to start cracking down on these mostly failing schools so our few great Charters can thrive and our traditional schools can start implementing programming that can make a real difference in our children's lives.

But instead, giving little regard to the quality of the Charter School, the state is now increasing their number by nearly 15%. And chances are, most of those schools will be failing. But at least we have to wait 5 years to shut them down. So there's that.