The $500 Million Student

Good day, CharterFolk.

I again find myself having missed my weekend publishing window. This week it was moving my daughter into her new apartment for grad school and, yes, biting off another meaty topic requiring enough time to do it justice. Thank you for your continued understanding.

I turn today to Fordham’s study of Missouri’s watershed funding breakthrough for charter schools in 2022.

For decades, the Kansas City and St. Louis school districts had per-pupil funding levels thousands of dollars higher than charter schools because the districts refused to share local funds with charter schools.

The pain became unbearable.

Charter schools were receiving 25–30% less funding per pupil while, in many instances, having to pay for facilities out of operating revenue on top of it.

Finally, the state addressed the problem.

The remedy?

Forcing the locals to cough up a fair share of their local funding?

No.

The state agreed to make charter schools whole, providing state funding equal to what they would have gotten had they received as much local funding as district schools do.

Advocates, myself included …

… celebrated what we believed would be the achievement, finally, of funding equity.

But now, as the districts continue seeing declining enrollment while retaining all the local funding, their per-pupil funding is going through the roof.

So the state’s obligation is rising far beyond original projections.

St. Louis is roughly a half-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise.

We can see the theoretical end state were its enrollment to continue declining until it served but a single child.

The $500 Million Student.

$500 million.

The amount, at least conceptually under the current funding architecture, that the state would be on the hook to provide for each of tens of thousands of students attending charter schools.

An absurdity, obviously.

But one that lays bare the trade-offs and unintended consequences that arise as charter advocates pursue the conceptually straightforward but practically and politically fraught challenge of simply getting our kids the same funding that flows to other public school kids.

Fordham offers other great value:

• Validating how severe the historical inequity was.
• Showing the new funding increased charter revenues by thousands per student.
• Confirming much translated into more teachers, student support and higher teacher pay.
• And finding preliminary evidence of improved math performance.

All good.

But also some not-so-goods:

• The program was projected to cost about $62 million a year. In 2025–26, the tab is nearly $189 million, roughly three times as much.
• Projections show it getting much bigger.
• And despite this heroic state effort, charter schools still aren’t at full equity because the two-year time lag keeps them perpetually behind.

All of it demonstrates that Missouri is living up to its billing as the “Show-Me” State.

In this case showing what can happen when even a breakthrough policy solution is carried forward to its logical end.

The thing I’ll offer is an additional data point about the political reality surrounding Missouri’s breakthrough.

The Political Solution

Some people have a shorthand that Missouri is smooth sailing for charter schools politically.

No doubt, Republican and some Democratic support at the state level is strong.

But the State Senate has a tradition of unlimited debate and “Senatorial Courtesy” that essentially gives a small number of senators, if not a single senator, the ability to filibuster legislation they find objectionable.

For years, a small number of St. Louis senators were more than happy to filibuster charter funding equity.

Year after year, the legislation went nowhere while the inequity got worse.

Until early this decade, when charter leaders, advocates and parents changed their approach.

It didn’t start with a demand for a particular solution.

It started with a demand for conversation.

A chance to meet.

To make their case.

Local parents sat down with their locally elected representatives and made plain what hadn’t been registering:

The overwhelming majority of students being harmed by the disparity were Black, and allowing that inequity to continue constituted a grave racial injustice.

Whatever differences legislators had about charter schools, the parties at loggerheads had finally gotten into a room.

And that’s when a solution emerged.

Not the policy solution that many of us, Fordham included, now argue would have been best.

Not one requiring St. Louis and Kansas City to share their local dollars.

That would have been an absolute political non-starter.

Instead, they found the political solution first:

Make charter school kids whole without requiring the locals to give up their local money.

As long as the additional funding came from the state, those who had wielded the filibuster would refrain from doing so again.

State policymakers found the resources, and the landmark breakthrough proceeded.

It throws into relief the political realities accompanying Fordham’s recommendation that local districts share an equitable portion of local tax proceeds.

From a policy solution standpoint, it’s easier than heck.

From a political solution standpoint, it’s harder than hell.

Look at Georgia.

There, the problem is even more deeply embedded.

The state constitution prevents local tax dollars from simply following students to charter schools authorized at the state level.

So Georgia has tried another approach: create a financial incentive for districts to authorize more charter schools themselves.

A couple have.

But what happened with the four new schools approved to open next year?

All four were authorized at the state level.

Suggesting that even with a new incentive, the policy solution we seek remains frustratingly far off.

Then look at the political hardball legislators in Indiana had to play to get Indianapolis Public Schools to give up a fair share of its local funding.

They literally had to threaten to dissolve the district altogether just to get it to compromise.

But forward-looking legislators could see what was coming were the state to commit to making charter schools whole forever.

Now their foresight, combined with Fordham’s findings, is working its way into the discussion happening across the country.

Last week we saw the Governor of Oklahoma propose that local districts begin sharing local tax proceeds with charter schools.

Apparently he can see what’s coming and wants to avoid the emergence of the $500 million public school student in OKC and Tulsa.

Half Indy, Half Missouri

And then there is Colorado.

This week, some CharterFolk may have seen that Denver Public Schools is proposing a new $44 million local mill levy.

What got less attention?

The fact that the district proposes to share about $9 million with its charter schools — an almost perfectly equitable amount.

How’d that happen?

Back in 2017, Colorado passed a law requiring districts to share local mill-levy funding equitably with district-authorized charter schools.

Exactly what Fordham now recommends for Missouri.

But with a wrinkle.

Not all Colorado charter schools are district-authorized.

Some are authorized by the statewide Charter School Institute, and local mill-levy dollars generally don’t follow those students.

So Colorado created another solution:

Have the state make them whole.

This year, Colorado is spending nearly $57 million doing exactly that.

Making the state, essentially, half Indy, half Missouri.

Half requiring local dollars to follow charter students.

Half having the state compensate when they don’t.

All while confounding other facile assumptions we often bring to the work.

Like the idea that forcing locals to share a significant portion of the local revenues can only come in red states where state policymakers are willing to play hardball.

Or even presuming that big cities are the ones with whom you have to play hardball.

That may have been the case in Kansas City and St. Louis.

But where in Colorado are local proceeds being shared most equitably?

The exact opposite.

Big-city Denver is sharing its mill-levy revenue, while the state is sending equalization dollars to charter schools scattered across communities elsewhere in Colorado.

Meanwhile, shifting financial conditions and authorizing incentives keep forcing us to update our assumptions.

CSI authorizes roughly 18% of charter schools, but three of the nine schools opening this year …

… are CSI-authorized, meaning more future growth could fall under the architecture where the state carries the equalization burden.

What’s that make Colorado?

Half Indy, half Missouri, and trending toward Georgia?

CharterFolk, you get the point.

This is amazingly complicated.

Some states are all Hoosier.

Some are all Show Me.

Many are at risk of going full-on Peachy.

While the remainder look like odd mashups of all three.

Clinging to beliefs that these issues are simpler than they actually are does no one any good.

“Just make local dollars follow kids” may be the cleanest policy answer.

But political realities may make it impossible in one place and achievable in another.

A solution that works politically today may create fiscal problems ten years from now.

A structure that works in one part of a state may prove impossible in another.

And changes in enrollment, taxation, authorizing and politics may require us to revisit designs that once seemed settled.

Understanding the Architecting Responsibilities that Await

Just about a year ago, I wrote that the charter school movement’s advocacy responsibility was beginning to shift – from fighting primarily for funding equity to helping architect better public education systems.

The Fordham study, and the wildly different approaches emerging across states, make that shift feel even more urgent.

Maybe that’s simply the nature of the work ahead.

We aren’t going to design the architecture of public education once.

We’re going to have to keep architecting it.

The time in my career when I spent the most time with architects was when I worked at High Tech High and helped oversee the development of several new facilities.

It’s where I first heard a term I’d never encountered before.

A design charette.

Getting all the stakeholders together to talk conceptually about their hopes for a new project before pen was even put to paper.

Talking it out.

Hashing out solutions.

Dealing with constraints.

Making necessary compromises.

Ultimately generating a vision people could buy into and get excited about.

And wouldn’t you know it, CharterFolk.

In doing the research for this piece, I discovered that we actually have a Charette High School in our movement – a terrific charter school in Providence built around urban planning, civic engagement and helping young people design a better city.

How fitting.

Emblematic, perhaps, of the spirit so many CharterFolk bring to this work:

Bringing together people who don’t always start on the same page and helping them design something better together.

Sometimes the common sense and common decency of what we seek is so plain it can seem an affront that we should have to make once again the case that charter school kids deserve the same resources as other public school kids.

And, goodness knows, there are cases where discussion gets us absolutely nowhere with recalcitrant forces.

But other times the issues are downright vexing – ones that cut to our deepest values and don’t lend themselves to easy answers.

We saw that in St. Louis again a couple years ago when the teachers’ pension fund approached collapse.

Charter schools weren’t the ones that structurally underfunded the pension for decades. Our teachers were already paying in 40% of the contributions and taking only 10% of the benefit.

So was it fair to ask CharterFolk to do even more to keep the whole thing afloat?

Hardly.

But letting retired teachers lose benefits they had been promised their entire careers wasn’t acceptable either.

So people got together.

Charter and DistrictFolk.

EducationFolk.

And they hashed it out.

A solution emerged that not every party loved, but one they could live with and one that prevented retired teachers from being left out in the cold.

It’s why I’ve been particularly intrigued by a little-followed development coming out of Colorado this year – a cleverness instigated by our friends at the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

Not a thunderbolt.

Not something requiring all districts to share all local tax proceeds equitably with all charter schools.

Not, in fact, a substantive solution at all.

A process requirement.

Now, before a Colorado school district may bring a facilities bond to voters, it must:

• Engage its charter school community.
• Give charter leaders a chance to present projects they believe need funding.
• And either include those projects or explain why they were excluded.

In other words, a precursor to the solution that proved so important in Missouri …

… the conversation …

… has now become a required process step.

Will conversation immediately produce the perfect policy solution?

Of course not.

The Fordham study itself shows us that a solution people hashed out in the early 2020s may not prove viable in the early 2030s.

And, remarkably, a story coming out of St. Louis yesterday shows just how broken big urban school district decision-making can be.

$24 million of precious public resources spent on school facilities a couple years before the district decided to shut them down?!

It’s both heartbreaking and infuriating.

But imagine, CharterFolk, what better design might have emerged had all the parties been required to get together and hash things out the way the new Colorado law contemplates.

It’s why it’s so important we all recognize what architects actually do.

They bring people together.

They surface constraints.

They propose compromises.

Until a workable design can be brought forward.

And as conditions change, they design again.

This is what our new architecting responsibility will look like.

Not presuming that we already know the perfect end-state policy.

But working to establish more processes requiring the people responsible for educating a community’s children to confront vexing issues together — all while learning aggressively from what other states are trying so we can get to better designs in our own states more quickly.

Before we unwittingly design our way to the $500 Million Student.

Before anything goes to voters.

Before local funds begin to flow.

Before concrete is poured.

Force the conversation.

It starts, CharterFolk …

… with a charette.