EdVANTAGE Blog

One of the hanging issues left by the Governor’s veto of the budget bill amending provisions of law dealing education is that a freeze on required school district payment levels to charter schools was not extended.  This creates much larger costs for districts, most notably Buffalo and Albany, than they were expecting when their local budgets were adopted.

The Governor  vetoed  the bill because of overall cost concerns, not the charter school tuition freeze, which he included in his proposed budget.

The Buffalo News has run point-counterpoint columns on charter school funding. 

A charter school advocate argues, among other points, that charter schools are more efficient than district schools and receive only two-thirds of the per-pupil public funding of district schools.

The chief financial officer of the Buffalo public schools argues that, “The fundamental flaw in the charter tuition formula is the assumption that district costs are variable and follow the student. To the contrary, 86 percent of the district’s operating budget is fixed or mandated.”

She explains that the district carries substantial “legacy costs,” such as retiree health insurance, which must be paid, and has a more experienced and therefore more expensive workforce than charter schools.

The assertion that that charter schools receive only two-thirds the per-pupil funding of district schools is recited often and it is wrong.

The actual expenditure base used to calculate charter school tuition is between 75 percent and 80 percent of total district expenditures, on average.  On top of the basic tuition payment, charter schools also benefit from public funding for transportation, various instructional materials, and some special education services.

One of our repeated criticisms of the charter school law is that the funding mechanism virtually assures an adversarial relationship between charter schools and district schools, because the tax dollars going into charters come out of district schools and districts rarely, if ever, achieve savings to wholly offset that cost.

It is true that charter schools do not have an entitlement to public assistance in paying for facilities.

The law also discourages a district from collaborating with a charter school, for example by providing space, because it loses control over a portion of its budget:   if spending cuts become necessary, the district cannot require a charter school to contribute to cost reductions, it must pay the tuition prescribed by law.

The tuition freeze is an attempt to address that reality.