DN Editorial: Frankencharters

IT WOULD be unfair to liken Philadelphia charter schools to a pack of vampires targeting the neck of the school district, but after reading a report on school funding by Controller Alan Butkovitz, we can't help likening the charter system to a fiscal monster - one that was built by Harrisburg lawmakers and then ignored by its creators.

The controller's report asserts that it's not fair for the district to pay whatever the charters bill them and then not get reimbursed, which has been an issue since Gov. Corbett dropped such reimbursements back in 2011. But the report also offers a detailed and much overdue look at some of the surprising ways that inequities continue to erode the traditional public system.

Most surprising: the controller points out that the charter schools have run substantial fund balances every year since 2008, while the fortunes of the District have eroded. Charter schools as a whole had $117 million in 2013, at the time the school district was looking at a hole of $70 million, and was forced to make drastic cuts across the board.

How do charters rack up so much extra money while the district schools go begging?

The lack of reimbursement is a big driver in the district's woes. A third of all students are now in charters, and the district pays charters out of its own budget for each one. The logic: every student entering a charter means that cost is no longer a responsibility of the district. That's faulty for a number of reasons. The district's fixed costs don't necessarily go down if one or two students leave a school for a charter. But, more importantly, considering that 30 percent of charter students come from parochial or private schools, those are costs that were never in the district's budget but must be paid out to charters nonetheless. That's the height of unfairness, especially to public-school students whose educations are being shortchanged.

In addition, the district gets extra money to educate special-education students, based primarily on the cost of those services. The charters get a special supplement for their special-ed students that is based on what the district spends to educate such students - not on how much it costs the charters. And generally speaking, charters spend less than district schools. They get $23,000 per special-ed student, with no accounting of their actual costs.

The report is illuminating, but the flaws in charter funding and oversight is illustrated by a real live example that also unfolded recently, when the Walter Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter school suddenly shut its high-school program. The fallout is likely to be devastating for months to come, especially for seniors who now, two months into the school year, have to find another school and catch up.

The Palmer school illustrates so much of what's wrong with the original charter law: The district is prohibited from imposing caps on the number of charter students, but can have written agreements with charters on enrollment numbers. Palmer exceeded its agreement, and enrolled twice as many students as it was supposed to. When the district balked at paying for those students, Palmer billed the state, and, for a time, got the money. But it now must shed half its student population.

Perhaps the timing of the Palmer disaster and the controller's report can generate the action that has so far been nonexistent in Harrisburg.

Lawmakers: you created this monster. Now it's time to rein it in before it does any more damage to district and charter students.