By proposing a $24.1 million supplemental funding increase for D.C. Public Schools — but not for the city’s public charter schools — Mayor Vincent Gray not only broke his own campaign promise, but the law as well. Equal funding for charters is not just a good idea. It’s a statutory requirement under the D.C. School Reform Act of 1995. Yet the District has consistently underfunded its charter schools anywhere between $72 million and $127 million annually over the past five years, according to a study by Mary Levy that the city commissioned but refused to release.
Levy’s study only became public after two charter advocacy groups asked her to write the same report for them, which they then released to the mayor’s Public Education Finance Reform Commission. One of the study’s key findings makes it obvious why the District government tried to keep it under wraps: “[T]he use of projected rather than actual enrollment figures … results in $4 million to $45 million higher annual funding for DCPS.” In other words, DCPS consistently overestimates its own enrollment to gain an unfair advantage in the uniform per-student funding formula. This is one of the accounting tricks that put charters at a disadvantage.
This statistical gamesmanship is particularly egregious given the fact that charter schools are the ones doing the educational heavy lifting in this town. They serve 41 percent of the District’s public school children, but account for 39 of the city’s open-enrollment, high-performing schools — as objectively measured by the combined reading and math scores on the DC-CAS test. DCPS runs only 26 high-performing schools.
Charters are also most likely to be located in neighborhoods where the city’s most disadvantaged children live. For example, there are four higher-proficiency charter schools in Ward 7, compared with just one higher-proficiency DCPS school. The same pattern can be found in Ward 8, which has six higher-proficiency charter schools, but not one traditional public school performing at a similar level. Charter school teachers not only outperform their DCPS counterparts academically, they do it for less pay in shabbier facilities. In contrast, affluent Ward 3 has no charter schools, but receives higher per-student funding under this lopsided system than charters east of the Anacostia River, which are educating mostly at-risk minority students.
Charters are also still being unlawfully deprived of their “right of first offer” on surplus DCPS property. The current situation is neither equal nor fair, and far from the “One City” promised by Gray.
