Charter schools may be celebrating twenty years of existence, but the milestone gets most of them no closer to the surplus classroom space and facility financing controlled by local school boards.
Charters struggle to access surplus classroom space and facility financing controlled by local school boards.
Where local facility financing and public school space has come through for charters, it’s been at the behest of mayors, governors, and legislators who understand that charter schools are public schools and any system that obstructs their ability to get classroom space treats some public school students differently from others. Consider one example that Nelson Smith highlights in the current Education Next: Milwaukee Public Schools had been spending $1 million a year to maintain twenty-seven surplus school buildings that they refused to sell to charter schools. Why sell to the competition? The state legislature had to step in to allow the City of Milwaukee to sell the buildings over the school district’s objections.
Most states that have charter school laws, even laws that provide charters with at least some facility funding, can tell similar stories, and changing the circumstances isn’t easy. When a Florida senator wanted to force school districts to share as much as $140 million in local facility funding with charter schools, editorial pages throughout the state tried reminding readers that charters were supposed to do more with less. The proposal later died.
Smith, the former chief of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, highlights some positive signs. One example he cites comes out of Indiana, where Governor Mitch Daniels signed a law allowing charters to lease or buy unused or unoccupied school district buildings for $1. The public already paid for them. Also, some legislatures in the past couple of years have approved some local funding for charter schools, but it hasn’t been enough to close the gap.
And opposition in large districts has intensified. A Los Angeles judge, for instance, recently ordered the LA Unified School District to make more of its classroom seats available to charter schools. State law says that school districts must offer “reasonably equivalent” space to charter students. The district plans to appeal, and an attorney for LA Unified followed the court order with an unwarranted rhetorical flourish: The order, he said, likely would “displace children from their neighborhood schools.”
When speaking to the NAACP convention this week in Houston, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney highlighted his success as Massachusetts governor in getting the Black Legislative Caucus to join his fight against a bill blocking charter schools in the state. If he wants to be a leading voice for school choice from the White House, he should urge more states and associations to find ways to get charters the classroom space they need. It’s hard to talk about the promise of charters and choice when charters have little choice in where to bloom.
