2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools.
3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive.
4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar.
The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.
GP talked about charter schools as being non-secular. Where I live, charter schools are secular. Is that not the case where you live?
Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live? (Of course, this doesn't apply to private schools, which definitely cherry pick students, but we're talking about charter schools.)
Re: "public schools don't have a profit motive", this is technically true, but there are plenty of people working for public school districts who contribute little yet draw large salaries and lifetime pensions. A charter school that doesn't make ends meet is forced to shut down. A government-run school district that doesn't make ends meet gets given more money. (This is true in San Francisco at least. I realize that teacher and admin compensation varies widely across the US.)
BTW in most places (even places like Arizona which are relative pro school choice), the per-pupil funding of charter schools is much much less than the per-pupil funding of government-run school districts.
Because charter schools (at least here in California) have to accept any student, just like any other public school, they don't contribute to the cycle you describe. (Obviously private schools do, but I don't think you're advocating outlawing privately-funded schools.)
> Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live?
Here they’re required to educate BUT they can do a lot to deter expensive students. If they don’t have support staff, kids with special needs won’t apply. If they require a test to advance grades, those kids will leave. If they require lots of homework, anyone without a nanny or stay-at-home parent and lots of support will leave.
My wife used to teach at one of those schools and it followed an arc over a decade where they started claiming they were cheaper but once they added the legally required support staff they were only cheaper to the extent that they paid their staff less by hiring young teachers and burning them out before they got old enough to expect better pay or have major health insurance expenses.
That is basically the arc of every charter school: every few years you’ll hear about someone doing miracles on a tight budget, but over time it’ll either disappear as regression to the mean sets in or turn out to be some form of selection to avoid expensive children. There just isn’t one weird trick an entire profession has somehow missed.
In my state charters often advertise religious-adjacent or patriotic angles despite being ostensibly secular. Though it is more common for true religious schools to be private non-charters, which sets them up to have some extra hoops for state funding.
In AZ also keep in mind that the funding difference is complicated by education scholarship accounts, which are bankrupting the state.
I agree, and I think a policy shifts should include:
* NOT subsidizing private schools
* NOT determining school funding based on child count
Like so many things, schools are a public commons / good / investment in functioning society that a given goal should be determined, books kept, waste prosecuted (criminally), and services provided according to a defined standard. Then whatever that costs rolls into the next budget as the base tax rate for that year.
Which is entirely not how things are run right now. Government inefficiency frequently relates to 'yearly budgets' and places that look to continue to spend a given year's budget because otherwise it'll go somewhere else. Rather than just doing what's necessary when it's necessary irrespective of how much or little doing the most effective and efficient thing costs.
There's also the elephant in the room on how IEP (btw for the acronym haters: "Individualized educational program". Those of older gens may know it as "Special Education") needs more funding but absolutely no one wants to give that funding to the specialized care-takers/educators who train specifically for such situations. Definitely some not so PR-friendly reasons for this. It's a mess all around.
My daughter has a genetic condition and needed an IEP. The middle school she attended would not give her an evaluation until we indicated we knew they were legally required to evaluate her and they should consider this an official request.
All my previous requests were rebuffed as they tried to steer her towards a 504 plan (504 is not legally binding).
I had to pay to have her evaluated by a Pediatric Neuropsychologist (about $500, despite my excellent American Insurance). He diagnosed ADHD and referred to a Neurologist who found nothing, but referred to an MRI, which found stroke damage, then we were referred to a geneticist who identified her mitochondrial disease and put us into a Pediatric Developmental office.
Finally we got some resources that helped us navigate the school issues to get her IEP.
It was so much time, money, and effort.
One district in my area has lost like 40% of their school psychologists since the pandemic resulting in widespread use of 5/4ths contracts, expanding case loads, uncovered schools, and offers to do extra cases at piece rates. It's (IMO) trending towards some kind of collapse.
As a taxpayer I hate waste. As a long-serving business owner I accept that some level of waste is a cost of doing business.
There are several problems with the concept of "waste".
firstly it's most obvious in hindsight. It's much less obvious in foresight. We spend money with an objective in mind, and in some number of times we fail to meet that objective.
Take marketing as an example. It costs money to attend an event. Will we get a return? sometimes no.
Of course the easiest way to avoid waste is simply not to take risks, not to spend anything. If we prioritize "avoid waste" we create an environment where "nothing is attempted".
Your suggestion to criminalize this with personal accountability makes things worse. What you'll get is no money spent at all, because the risk of spending -any- money could see you in jail.
Secondly, in order to criminalize waste you need to detect it, measure it, prosecute it, defend it, and so on. None of that comes cheap. So you spend money to save money?
Of course we already do this to some extent. We keep books. We have audits. If we detect waste we might examine it, consider alternatives, learn lessons to avoid it. But that's a long long way from the costs of criminal prosecution.
Thirdly you create perverse incentives for bad actors. Don't like a teacher? Accuse them of waste. You can probably find some cause. Your competitor got a contract at a local school? Be sure to loudly proclaim that as waste because you "would have done it cheaper". Sure you would do a crap job that may have failed in 2 years instead of 20, but who's to say?
Send a few teachers to jail - does that increase or decrease the likelihood of people growing up wanting to be teachers?
So yeah, I dislike waste. But preventing waste comes with a price, not just in money. Be careful in what you choose to optimize.
> every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them
Is this a state thing? In California, I don't get to stop paying taxes if my children go to a charter school. Or, am I just not understanding the point you're making re: "funding?" Are charter schools not also public where you live?
You lose a head at your school, you lose funding for that head. Some heads are more expensive to educate, like special education students, but the state gives you the same amount for each head. So as a school, you might want to keep the cheaper to educate heads and get rid of the more expensive to educate heads.
But if, theoretically, there were a way to count students, and also a hypothetical way to count money, someone might draw a correspondence between them?
2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools.
3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive.
4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar.
The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.