The Price of Privatization
From vouchers to charters, privatization sticks taxpayers with hefty bills
Peter Greene has a great new post out explaining the cost of vouchers. The bottom line: a large amount of voucher dollars go to students who were ALREADY in (or destined for) private schools. That is, the cost reduction to school districts is ZERO while the funding loss is significant.
Here’s how Greene summarizes this:
The voucher argument is that if the money just follows the students, everything comes out even. Public schools lose money, but they also lose students, so no biggie.
There are some obvious problems with this--can you run four schools for the same money that you ran one school? Remember that time that your school district was cash-strapped, so they addressed the problem by opening more school buildings? That's right. It never happened.
READ MORE from Peter Greene on vouchers and other education issues.
In Tennessee, a new nonprofit called Public School Partners is aiming to explain the true cost of charters (Full disclosure: I’m a supporter of PSP and have helped get the group organized).
Over at Tennessee Education Report, I note more about the work of PSP and the calculator that helps users assess the fiscal impact of charter schools on local school districts.
Nate Rau at Axios recently covered the launch of PSP, explaining the group’s rationale:
The expansion of charter schools has spread beyond Nashville and Memphis in the last few years. As charter schools have applied to open in suburban and rural counties, scrutiny of their financial impact has escalated.
Charter schools are funded with tax dollars but operated by independent nonprofit organizations.
The issue reached a crescendo this year as charter schools affiliated with Hillsdale College applied to open new schools in Tennessee.
A similar project in Pennsylvania found that operating charter schools there had a net negative fiscal impact on school districts.
Overall, RFA’s study finds that as charter enrollment expands, the fiscal impact is consistently negative in both the short- and long-term, indicating that even as students depart for charter schools, school districts experience significant long-term fiscal impacts.
Bottom line: Charter schools are an expensive proposition for local districts. Vouchers, too, pose real fiscal concerns that are not simply mitigated by student migration.
The cost of privatization is high and the ROI is typically a net negative.
An Update on North Carolina
I’ve been reporting here on efforts in North Carolina to move to what can best be described as a disastrous merit pay scheme - one that not only keeps teacher pay low but also will serve to demoralize those in the profession.
Justin Parmenter has some updates on how the move to merit pay is playing out: