As Mike McShane points out in a paper released yesterday, we have witnessed significant growth in the number of states creating voucher, tuition tax credit, and Education Savings Account programs in recent years. But for school choice to fulfill its promise, reformers need to work not just on the demand side, but also on the supply side by helping new and better schools take root and flourish.
As McShane put it, “If we want choice programs to truly transform the educational landscape across the country, they have to be able to spur high-quality schools to scale up and create new seats for students, and they have to be able to spark the creation of new high-quality schools.” Throughout his paper, he outlines the nuts and bolts of school finance across the private, charter, and traditional public school sectors. To help serve more students and families, he argues that the private school sector must get up to speed with how the charter school sector has supported schools. Using data from the American Federation for Children and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, he highlights how charter enrollment has been almost 10 times as much as that of private school choice enrollment since 2000 — roughly when each program started.
So what’s happening in the charter school sector that has led to this growth? How are charters creating new seats for students in ways that could serve as lessons for the private school sector?
Using data from a 2014 Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) report, we examined programs across the country that support charter school growth and expansion. These eight programs support charters in a number of ways: making district facilities available to charter schools; funding a per-pupil stream for charter facilities; offering capital gains to charter schools; allowing charters to tap into a local taxing authority; publicly funding loan programs; offering credit enhancement for charters; offering tax-exempt debt through conduit issuers; and allowing charter schools to participate in the Qualified School Construction Bond Program and the Qualified Zone Academy Bond Program.
The results might not be that surprising, but they are striking. There is a strong correlation between a state’s number of charter school facility funding and financing programs and the number of new charter schools started in that state in the past five years. While this is far from a sophisticated analysis — states with more laws that help finance charter school growth are likely more hospitable to charters in a host of other ways — it bears out a common sense proposition. The easier you make it to form new schools, the more new schools you’ll get.
California alone, which offers seven of the eight programs outlined in the LISC report, has seen the creation of 521 new charter schools over the past five years. In Colorado, which has six of the eight programs, 68 new charter schools have emerged. And had Florida not offered charter schools four of the eight programs highlighted in the report, it’s likely that parents would not be able to choose from the 344 new charter schools that have sprouted up over the past five years.
It’s easy to focus on parents, students, and the demand side of school choice in education reform conversations. But we also need to keep in mind the regulatory and financial conditions that allow schools of choice to open and then expand. Simply put, if schools cannot cover their capital costs, they cannot serve families and students. The programs in the LISC report are helping charters find a way to do just that. Not every program can be adopted by private school choice programs, but McShane’s new report helps shed light on how school choice programs can focus on the finances of school expansion to help spark more, new, and better schools.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1j466Nu
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment