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D.C. school spending: Don’t forget to read the fine print

Scott Pearson
Fordham B. Institute Flypaper
October 15th, 2014

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Metro D.C. School Spending Explorer offers the public a great resource by sharing data on public school spending (at the school level) across the District. As with any financial data, though, the fine print is as important as the headline.

The map says that D.C.’s public charter schools had a total operating expenditure of $18,150 per pupil in the 2011–12 school year, compared with total operating expenditure at D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) of $15,473. But this is misleading. Many public charter schools rent their space, and rental payments are considered operating expenses. Meanwhile, school-system buildings are decades old and are almost exclusively paid for from the city’s capital budget—which is not included in the comparison. Moreover, more than $1,000 per pupil of DCPS maintenance expenses are provided free by the city—these expenditures aren’t included either.

The fine print found in the Fordham Institute map describes the real situation—public charter schools receive less money per pupil than DCPS. This disparity is carefully documented in a 2012 study commissioned by two charter advocacy groups. It found that the total amount of extra non-uniform local operating funds DCPS receives compared to public charter schools ranges from $72 to $127 million annually. The report also makes the case for why some of these disparities exist, noting that charters are schools of choice, while “DCPS operates as a system of right, which requires schools be available across the city to serve every neighborhood at every grade level.”

Indeed, the District government’s own funding adequacy study, issued a year later, found D.C. education funding to be inequitable, and “these disparities in funding are contrary to D.C. law.” The funding inequities are also the subject of a lawsuit against the city jointly filed recently by the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools and individual charter schools. The outcome of this lawsuit likely won’t be known for years. Meanwhile, the city has taken some measures to reduce, but by no means eliminate, the inequities that have been so carefully documented.

These inequities have real impacts on charter schools. I frequently hear from public charter school leaders how they struggle to match salaries and bonuses paid at DCPS. As D.C.’s charter authorizer, we support the recommendation in the Adequacy Study that critical resources given by city agencies to both the traditional schools and charter schools should be funded through the Uniform Per-Pupil Funding Formula. This remedy would bring us closer to the funding equity required by law, as well as tap into fundamental fairness.

In the meantime, charter leaders have found innovative ways to support their programs and serve students. Charter school students outperform the state average in reading and math and, according to a recent CREDO study, receive the educational equivalent of ninety-nine extra days of school each year. Those are impressive results, especially given the funding inequities. It brings real meaning to the term doing more with less. D.C.’s charter schools and their students prove that every day.