Thursday, February 14, 2019

Do your homework

I'm intentionally not doing anything with this on any other platform, but I do want to note that Pioneer Institute demonstrates that they don't understand charter funding, school budgeting, or special education in their latest.
The idea that somehow only the districts that are suffering if they are majority locally funded for charters is patently false. The reason that districts are majority state funded is those are districts that lack local resources to pay for education. In a number of the districts that "only" receive minimal amounts of state aid, the state aid is a fairly minimal part of their funding. Districts receiving 17.5% of their foundation budget in state aid in some cases could entirely fund their school budgets themselves. And then some. It is ridiculous to point to such districts as the "only" ones suffering from charter reimbursement, when the minimum funding model is generally regarded a political necessity more than a budgetary one.
All general fund funding for schools is pooled in a school budget; state aid isn't something that is dipped into when the inclination takes a district. This is a silly framing of how this works. The charter tuition "only being paid for with state money" doesn't mean it hurts the district any less to lose the funding.
And charters, exactly like district (non-vocational) schools, get 3.75% of their enrollment as assumed in-district special education. That is it. No one counts anything, and the assumption for the charters is the same as it is for every non-vocational school.

Learn something before opining.

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