Benton Harbor Area Schools, a traditional public school district on Michigan’s west coast, made news this week by announcing a teacher contract that will deliver a 10% pay cut with a 20% health care contribution.
Many more districts will follow suit, but let’s pause on Benton Harbor to better understand some of the factors that got them here in the context of the state’s most recent legislation further expanding student choice options.
If every Benton Harbor student eligible to attend their schools did so, their enrollment would be about 6,500 students. Of those 1,438 attend 16 surrounding traditional public schools (under the state’s School of Choice law) while another 1,305 attend four charter schools, also in accordance with state law.
Choice has led to Benton Harbor losing 42% of their eligible student population. Translated to the $10,043 per pupil revenue Benton Harbor received in 2009-10, this is an annual loss of over $27 million, a major source of their $16 million deficit.
Yes, I get it. The market clearly has not been satisfied with Benton Harbor’s performance. But let’s go a layer or two deeper and examine student migration trends in Berrien County Intermediate School District, of which Benton Harbor is a part.
11.2% of all Berrien ISD students require special education services, but among its four charter schools that percentage is just 7.1%. This means that the county’s traditional public schools serve a higher percentage of special needs students – 11.4% to be exact. Benton Harbor Schools’ percentage is far higher at 15.2% – over double that of Berrien ISD’s four charter schools combined.
Not surprisingly, educating special education students is significantly more expensive than general education students. In Berrien County, the average expenditure on Basic Instruction per general education student FTE is $4,657 while special needs students (as defined by Added Needs Instruction) cost $12,891 per special education student FTE.
This confluence of choice, charters and special needs student costs translates like this. Berrien County’s four charter schools spend 13% of their total revenue on special needs student instruction while Benton Harbor spends a staggering 21%.
Now consider this. 1,300 Michigan schools (combined charter and traditional) did not make NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress. Among charter schools, 16.6% of those that did not make AYP failed on account of “Students with Disability” test scores. Among traditional public schools not making AYP on account of the same sub-group, this figure nearly doubled to 30%.
Should we be surprised? After all Benton Harbor’s special needs student enrollment is double that of the neighboring charter schools.
To recap, Benton Harbor’s neighboring charter schools just so happen to enroll proportionally 54% fewer special needs students. Educating these students increases Benton Harbor’s Added Needs Instruction expense 53% higher than charters. Meanwhile this disproportinatley enrolled student population represents the single most common reasons schools “fail” in the eyes of NCLB.
Is this why our legislators are so excited about charter schools? Is it progress when we uncap a system that sorts students disproportionately leaving traditional public schools with a heavier academic and financial burden?
Without regulation, the charter school movement is a major regression for public education in this country – and Michigan is leading the way.
2 responses to “Charter schools shameful sorting practice needs attention”
Thanks, Mr. Walsh, for your presentation here. You have made some salient points about why our professional association has been aggressively attempting to persuade legislators to make some major revisions to their bill before approving it.
Some other little known facts about Charter Schools are that the vast majority of them are K-8. Why? For a few reasons. One is that traditionally, districts spend more per pupil educating high school students than they do the younger ones, despite the average class size typically being much smaller in earlier grades. That means private enterprise derives less profit from high school charters.
Traditional districts spend more on high school educations because most public high schools offer a comprehensive program that requires more materials and equipment than do elementary and middle schools. High schools also require more administrative supervision to deal with disciplinary issues, and with more adjudicated youth, they typically require more mental health services. Because high school students apply to college and/or need help finding employment, they require the use of counseling centers to help them navigate life beyond high school. Because comprehensive high schools allow choice in academic programing, yet also have very specific graduation requirements, high schools must fund academic counselors to advise students in their course selection.
Without sports, music, visual arts, business courses, and other non-core or non-curricular offerings, most public high schools would lose their student population to drop out or transfers to other public schools of choice that offer these programs. Charters don’t have to pay for or produce those kinds of programs, and thus can put more tax dollars toward core content. Even still, they can’t compete with the comprehensive high schools’ achievement in the aggregate. 80% of charters score below or equal with public schools when sorted by socio-economic status of the students who attend the schools.
After I sent around a notice to GP teachers that the MI House had put its stamp of approval on SB 618, one of GP’s classroom assistants wrote back that she thought that the charter school bill would help GP’s schools. Her thinking was that if there are more opportunities for schools in Detroit, that those students wouldn’t try to come to GP schools. Her thinking is misguided. Many of the DPS students have tried the charters and found them worse than their neighborhood public schools were.
A community member, who went to a parochial school instead of GP schools, even though his family resided within our district, said he was really glad to hear about Gary Abud’s Teacher of Promise award and about some of the things that were going on in the science classes in both of our high schools. He was very disappointed that those kinds of things didn’t happen in his high school, even though his parents paid more tuition for him to go there than what we spend per pupil in GP. I tell this vignette to illustrate two points: one is that market theory doesn’t always work in reality. Maybe his parents were informed about what kinds of things were happening in the two different high schools and they chose religion over quality teaching, or maybe they didn’t know, and thought they would get what they paid for-quality at a higher price. The second point is that GP’s good salaries for teachers attract good teachers. I came here from a private school setting, as do many others. And every charter school teacher I have ever talked to, with very few exceptions, would leave their charter in a hot second, if there were public school jobs available at better pay.
I said that there are more K-8 charters than HS charters for several reasons. Another big reason is that finding good quality HS teachers, who are proficient in their content areas is very tough in some disciplines. Keeping them at low pay is even tougher. 50% of teachers leave the profession in the first five years of teaching because they can’t take the working conditions. Keeping them in districts like ours, when teachers have adequate supplies and equipment for teaching, when they can see a salary schedule that allows them to afford a middle class lifestyle after they pay off their college loans, is one thing. As you know, we’ve even lost some of our teachers these past few years. Keeping them in charters without good pay, without enough supplies, without a stable student enrollment, is another thing altogether.
Again, thanks for your thoughts, and for your vigilant voice for quality public education.
[…] we’ve seen out of charters and special needs students. I’ve treated this subject before in my analysis of the disproportional (selective?) enrollment of special needs students in charter […]