Despite Chancellor Michelle Rhee's prediction that there would be 45,000 students in her system this term, an increase from the 44,681 that attended last year, it looks like the flood gates allowing parents to enroll their children in charters shows no sign of closing. Bill Turque of the Washington Post reports today that DCPS enrollment dropped to approximately 37,000.
These figures represent a decrease 17 percent decrease for DCPS and mean that charters now educate 43 percent of all public students in the nation's capital at just over 28,000, a 10 percent increase over last year.
There is now no excuse for not restoring the extremely painful reduction in the Mayor's current budget regarding the charter school facility fund. Remember that Mr. Fenty proposed cutting these dollars by $24 million in a scheme to pay schools only what they were currently spending on space. The Council put back $16.7 million of the allotment resulting in charters receiving $309 less money per pupil this term.
But it is much more expensive to teach a kid in DCPS compared to a charter. CATO's Andrew Coulson estimated that the traditional schools spent $26,555 per student last year. I calculate that last term charters utilized $14,497 to educate a child. This difference in cost, just over $12,000 a head, multiplied by the decrease in the number of students DCPS anticipated in their classrooms, is much more than enough to cover the remaining $7.3 million in facility dollars taken away from charters. (This is assuming, of course, all students that went to DCPS schools attend charters this year. In his article, Mr. Turque says that the traditional schools lost about 7,700 kids while charters gained approxiately 2,643 so the savings could be even larger. The official count does not happen until October.) In fact, the city could even fund the Opportunity Scholarship Fund with plenty of money left over.
Doing the right thing and fixing the facility fund is much more important then just paying for space. The Mayor and Council's action sent a shock wave through the apolitical charter school financing that the city has provided since these schools were created. By injecting uncertainly into the annual allocation it certainly adds a strong disincentive for banks and other funders to support the growth of charters because they do not know if the government's funding stream will continue. D.C.'s political leaders need to correct this serious mistake immediately.
Comments