Emails (excerpted), Greg Worthington, M.Ed., Ph.D. Student - Educational Policy and Planning Program, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Texas at Austin, Aug. 10 and 13, 2018
On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 10:01 AM Selby, Gardner (CMG-Austin) wrote:
Professor Jabbar:
I just left you a voice message because I seek to visit by phone or email for a fact-check I am trying to compete today. At issue: The accuracy of this tweet, including your analysis of the idea that scarce dollars going to charter schools drive down state aid to school districts.
For all our stories, we rely on attributable on-the-record information. I would be happy to hear back by phone or email.
Appreciated,
g.
Want our fact checks first? Follow us on Twitter.
W. Gardner Selby
Reporter / News
Austin American-Statesman
PolitiFact Texas
From: Huriya Jabbar
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2018 10:20 AM
Hi Gardner,
Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, while my work does examine charter schools, I do not have deep expertise on the nuts and bolts of charter school financing in Texas. My basic understanding is that the state's share of funding for public schools has declined over the years, with a greater share coming from local property taxes, which is mentioned in a follow-up tweet. And it is true that charter schools receive funding from the state, not local revenues. However, I can't comment on the link between charter school funding and traditional school district funding.
The only experts I can think of on this topic are part of advocacy organizations, but they may still be helpful in understanding the specifics of the policies: David Hinojosa at IDRA (david.hinojosa@idra.org) and Chandra Villanueva at CPPP (Villanueva@cppp.org). One of our PhD students, Greg Worthington, might have some more specific details here for you, too: greg.worthington@utexas.edu
Sorry I can't be of more assistance!
Huriya
----
HURIYA JABBAR
Assistant Professor | Education Policy and Planning
Dept. of Educational Leadership and Policy
The University of Texas at Austin |
On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 2:19 PM, Selby, Gardner (CMG-Austin) wrote:
Please see below? I’d welcome your on-the-record response.
g.
Want our fact checks first? Follow us on Twitter.
W. Gardner Selby
Reporter / News
Austin American-Statesman
PolitiFact Texas
From: Gregory Worthington Sent: Friday, August 10, 2018 4:51 PM
I saw the tweet and it's mostly accurate. Charter schools do get 100% of their public funding from the state because they aren't allowed to levy taxes (since they're run by private organizations). Per IDRA's calculations (Texas Divestment of Public Education), the state dropped it's share of funding public schools from 49% to 41% between 2007 and 2017, while the share paid by local tax payers has jumped up from 51% to 59% in that same period. However, in 2005, the state's share of funding public education did get as low as 36%, also per IDRA's calculations (State Share of Texas Public School Funding). The folks at CPPP have predicted this gap to continue to widen such that the 2018-2019 school year will see the state footing 38% of the bill and local taxpayers footing 62% (Texas Relies Too Much on Local Taxpayers to Fund Public Education).
However, this is set to change this upcoming biennium because of the public education funding bill passed during this last special legislative session, HB 21. The bill repealed special revenues sent to public school districts (PSDs) that was a boost for poorer districts to pay for specific kinds of expenditures in regards to high schools and transportation. Now all charter management organizations (CMOs) will get these funds, too. The problem here is that many CMOs don't operate high schools nor do they provide transportation for their students either.
Another aspect of the bill (and perhaps the most controversial part of it) was that this bill was that they allotted PSDs and CMOs $60 million each. The problem here is that CMOs teach only a sliver of Texas' entire student population. PSDs get a boost of $11.80 per student (if we're using 2016-2017 enrollment numbers) from that $60 million. Charter schools received a boost of $219.91 per student. And though the $60 million for charters is said to be for facilities funding, critics argued that the language in the bill was loose enough for charter schools to be able to spend the money on however they pleased.
The aftermath of HB 21's passing was that virtually all non-urban PSDs and CMOs receiving public funds for their schools got money while urban ISDs didn't. CMOs got additional funding across the board. Wealthy rural PSDs got additional funding. There was some allotment in the bill that would send money for students needing services for dyslexia regardless of where there PSD was located. There was also funds allocated for career and technology but this has nothing to do with academics and therefore has no real effect on improving students' test scores, which make up a great deal of how Texas' public schools are held accountable. Also, the weight for the bilingual allotment was increased from .1 to .11, which is an effectively small increase.
Here are some links from Texas Legislature Online website about the bill
https://hro.house.texas.gov/pdf/ba851/hb0021.pdf#navpanes=0
https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/BillSummary.aspx?LegSess=851&Bill=HB21
...
Regards,
Greg Worthington, M.Ed.
Ph.D. Student - Educational Policy and Planning Program
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy
University of Texas at Austin
...
On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 10:30 AM, Selby, Gardner (CMG-Austin) wrote:
How does funding of charter schools result in less money to districts?
2:43 p.m.
Aug. 13, 2018
I think a more comprehensive question you may want to ask is this: How do charter schools hurt public schools financially? It's all about competition for students and it gets a bit complicated in regards to policy and disbursements. For example, in terms of competition, when multiple students leave their neighborhood public school en masse the way they sometimes do when they enroll in a charter school, not all costs of educating that student leave with them. M&O costs don't drop when students leave that school. Electric bills still have to get paid. You still have the same number of custodians to clean the school and the cleaning supplies needed to clean the school are still basically the same amount as before. The list goes on.
How much this costs a campus or district exactly, I'm not sure but that's a lot of money. As schools lose revenue (i.e., per pupil funding) faster than costs can be reduced can spur loss of other functions or professionals that are beneficial to students such as programs, student services, curriculum writers (not all districts have them but those that do have a great blessing with them). These losses begin to compound on each other and make the school less competitive with the charter schools they're now forced to compete with. Such a school can begin losing more students and the whole thing becomes a bleeding out. Now apply this to the long-standing inequities in school funding, specifically for the public schools serving our vulnerable and marginalized communities that have never been adequately funded, and you have a very huge problem for public schools in those communities that were already hurting.
Another way public schools get hurt has to do with students receiving extra services that have extra funding for those services coming with them, such as students receiving special education or bilingual education services. If a charter school enrolls a student such as this and are counted towards a charter school's enrollment for whatever period of time that Texas has divvied up the school year into, the charter school gets the money for that student. But if the student leaves the charter school for whatever reason (be it that they're kicked out, counseled out, pushed out, etc.) and the student back to their locally assigned public school, the money that should come with that student stays at the charter school. Now the public school has to educate that student AND provide for the extra services they need but without that extra money that comes with them. And the fact that charter schools are notorious for not even having special education or bilingual education specialists (despite being required to) makes this issue much more problematic and controversial.
I don't know how often this happens here in Texas and everybody's system for determining funds disbursements and how long those periods are. Some states only have one census day that determines how much each school gets for the whole year for their students, specifically in terms of the extra money need to provide certain students for extra services. I know that in DC, this has been a problem for some schools. My brother worked at a public school in DC and said that every school year, like clock work, they'd receive a sizable number of students requiring special education services right after the school census day, meaning they just received a substantial amount of students requiring extra services but without the money needed to provide for those extra services. I don't know how common that is in DC for all schools but that apparently happened regularly at my brother's school.
In regards to policy, one issue here involves recapture (i.e., Robin Hood). In order to determine whether an ISD is in need of having some of its local revenue recaptured and redistributed to more needier ISDs, they take the total property wealth of that ISD and divide it by the ISD's weighted average daily attendance (WADA). So, if a district's denominator (i.e., WADA) is reduced in this ratio, then the ratio becomes larger, thus putting that ISD closer to or into recapture. This is what happened to Houston ISD. HISD has over 35,000 students living within its boundaries attending charter schools. In the first hearing for the Texas House Public Education Committee during the last regular legislative session, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath himself testified that had those 35,000 students were attending HISD schools, HISD would without a doubt never had entered into recapture territory.
Of course, Robin Hood was meant to take from wealthier ISDs to give to underprivileged ISDs to help even the playing field. But Houston ISD student body make-up in 2016-2017 was 77.1% economically disadvantaged, 62.1% Latinx, 23.9% African American, 31.9% bilingual. Other ISDs like Austin ISD are in similar situations. Once you enter into recapture, you have some options (as laid out in Sec. 41.003 of the Texas Education Code) to deal with that. Some of these options include paying into Robin Hood, consolidating with another ISD (which no one wants to do), or begin to bring in students from neighboring ISDs to enroll in your school should they want to. But if ISDs do nothing (perhaps by choice), then TEA will begin to siphon off the wealthiest chunk of the ISD and give it to the next ISD, which could possibly push that neighboring ISD into recapture, thus creating a possible domino effect.
Another policy-level issue with school choice involves HB 21 from the last Texas special legislative session. A bunch of money intended to assist public schools with specific functions (high schools, transportation, support staff) was repealed and given to everyone regardless of whether they operated high schools, provided transportation, or needed the extra support staff and that includes charter schools. Poorer districts now have less money for those specific costs. That's less money for our most vulnerable student populations. Add this to the fact that charter schools received a substantial amount of more money per pupil when that could've been spread out evenly, which would've sent public schools an additional $53,890,759 over the biennium (if we're just using 2016-2017 student enrollment numbers statewide).
One could argue that charter schools didn't advocate for all of these specifics of or changes to HB 21 but their mere presence seemed to warrant those aspects of HB 21's final form. However, there are two things true about charter schools and school financing legislation. First, state legislators who are advocates for school choice put pressure on Dan Huberty (House Pub. Ed. Committee Chair and author of HB 21) to make some of those changes to HB 21. In the regular session, Huberty's school funding bill (which didn't pass) had increased weights for bilingual education. Sen. Larry Taylor (Senate Education Committee Chair) had them taken out completely in their version of the bill in which they also attempted to pass voucher legislation.
Second, charter school lobbyists have shown they're not for helping out public schools at all. They constantly frame their need for funding in terms of the needs of charter schools, not the whole public education system. A great example of this occurred this past summer during the Texas Commission on Public School Finance. Here's a video clip you should watch briefly: Texas Commission on Public School Finance (March 19, 2018). At the 2:55:30 mark, they introduce school choice lobbyist Todd Ziebarth from the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools. At the 3:09:25 mark, Rep. Diego Bernal begins to talk to the lobbyists about how Texas schools need a bigger pot of money so that the tension between charter schools and public schools is not so hot. He asks these lobbyists if they could agree on that. The one lobbyist speaking side steps the question and begins explaining how he advocates that charter schools should be funded through state funding formulas and addresses nothing of what Diego says.
Some people might be confused about why they only take about their needs or why they don't want to help public schools at all but school choice lobbyists aren't confused about this. This is because the whole theory that the concept of school choice is based in forces schools to compete with each other for funding via student body counts on campuses. The school choice concept was designed to get replace public schools because its creator, Milton Friedman, believed the public school system is inefficient, obsolete, and ultimately an overreach of government authority. He argued that while government might be responsible for providing funding for schools, it isn't supposed to administer that education and by doing so works to violate individual liberty.
Thus, school choice policies ultimately work to replace the public school system with a market-based education system. School choice advocates, like Sen. Larry Taylor, will frame school choice as friendly competition between schools for the sake of improving public schools but there are absolutely winners and losers in school choice, whether they'd like to admit it or not. In a school choice context, schools become businesses that are trying to either edge each other out in market share or bury their competition forever. The only way you do that is to take your competitor's money by convincing their students to leave their current school and enroll in yours.
Regards,
Greg Worthington, M.Ed.
Ph.D. Student - Educational Policy and Planning Program
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy
University of Texas at Austin