by Pat Drago and Sue Legg
This is not an easy walk into the woods, but you need to know where the funding for charter schools comes from and where it goes. It is your money.
There is a lot money to be made and lost with charter schools, and it is public tax dollars. As usual, independent schools tend to lose it, and large charter management chains come out on top. This is not always to the children’s benefit. How does this happen? We looked at the audits and found huge disparities in facility and fee expenditures. This meant that instructional parts of the budgets were reduced accordingly.
We wanted to know how these facilities were financed. If State funds were creating opportunities to make real estate venture capitalists wealthy, we wanted to know how this worked. Unfortunately, public dollars that go to private companies are hard to see. The lack of transparency for their financial records provides only vague outlines. We did find some clues by looking at how facilities are financed.
We wondered what other states were doing to ensure that state money was allocated for instruction and not for profit making ventures. We found some answers. As always, different approaches have their share of unintended consequences. As we groped in the darkness, there was a glimmer of light. The brave among you are invited to go down this path with us.
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The League is in a new lawsuit in the state of Washington. Charters were approved by the voters in 2012, but the League of Women Voters called the move unconstitutional. The Charter School Case filed by the League et al in 2013 was appealed all the way to the state’s Supreme Court. In 2015, the Court ruled that charter schools violated the Washington constitution. Charters were not public schools. In order for the legislature to fund charters, they must be governed by elected school boards, and of course, they were not.
