PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL: ..The controller’s report asserts that it’s not fair for the district to pay whatever the charters bill them and then not get reimbursed, which has been an issue since Gov. Corbett dropped such reimbursements back in 2011. But the report also offers a detailed and much overdue look at some of the surprising ways that inequities continue to erode the traditional public system.
Most surprising: the controller points out that the charter schools have run substantial fund balances every year since 2008, while the fortunes of the District have eroded. Charter schools as a whole had $117 million in 2013, at the time the school district was looking at a hole of $70 million, and was forced to make drastic cuts across the board…
The lack of reimbursement is a big driver in the district’s woes. A third of all students are now in charters, and the district pays charters out of its own budget for each one. The logic: every student entering a charter means that cost is no longer a responsibility of the district. That’s faulty for a number of reasons. The district’s fixed costs don’t necessarily go down if one or two students leave a school for a charter. But, more importantly, considering that 30 percent of charter students come from parochial or private schools, those are costs that were never in the district’s budget but must be paid out to charters nonetheless. That’s the height of unfairness, especially to public-school students whose educations are being shortchanged… (more)
