The District is illegally underfunding its charter schools by providing additional money and support services exclusively to D.C. Public Schools, a new report says.
The study, which the Friends of Choice in Urban Schools and the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools requested and submitted to the DC Public Education Finance Reform Commission, says the District has provided up to $127 million annually in extra money to DCPS in recent years. D.C. law requires public and charter schools to receive equal funding on a per-pupil basis through the District's Uniform Per Student Funding Formula.
The report argues, though, that the District has regularly circumvented its own formula. "In recent years, the D.C. government has disregarded uniformity by providing DCPS with millions of dollars in addition to UPSFF funding, money not provided to public charter schools," the study reads. "Direct extra funding for DCPS, subsidies from other agencies and free in-kind services ... constitute local funding outside the UPSFF that is not given to public charter schools." Mary Levy, the report's author, said the funding disparity was plainly illegal and that the study was "simply about equal treatment."
| Extra funding |
| A new report says D.C. Public Schools receives millions of dollars in additional funding beyond what's allocated on a per-student basis to DCPS and to charter schools. The study says that in various academic years, DCPS has raked in up to: |
| ? $72 million in bonus appropriations and overspending coverage |
| ? $60 million in support services from District agencies |
| ? $45 million thanks to an inaccurate count of students, created using projected instead of actual enrollments |
"The law is very clear," said Levy, a former director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights' education reform project who specializes in D.C.'s school budgets. "If they'd just follow it, they'd make everyone's lives a lot easier."
Representatives of DCPS and the Public Charter School Board did not respond to requests for comment about the report.
In addition to Levy, the leaders of the groups that commissioned the report also blasted the District. Robert Cane, the executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, and Ramona Edelin, who leads the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools, decried the funding differentials as an "injustice."
| Examiner archive |
"These payments violate the requirement of D.C. law that DCPS and the public charter schools receive equal funding on a per-student basis," Cane and Edelin said. "They also violate principles of equity, which require that we give each of our school children an equal chance to succeed regardless of which public school he or she attends."
The Public Education Finance Reform Commission will meet on Tuesday but failed to post an agenda on its website, so there was no official word on whether the panel plans to discuss the report.
