Charter Schools Are Coming to MO, and It's Not a Good Thing

Yesterday the Missouri House voted 83-76 to allow Charter School expansion in the state of Missouri. This means if it passes the Senate, there will be Charter Schools coming to a district near you in the very near future.

This is a bad thing for students in Missouri. Proponents of Charter Schools will tout "school choice" as a reason this is a good thing. That's a very clever lie. I'll get back to that in a minute. Charter Schools are going to hurt every public school in the state, whether the Charter School opens up down the street from you or on the other side of the state, and here's why.

All public schools, including Charter Schools, receiving funding out of the same budget. Imagine the budget like it's a huge pie. Every school gets their little slice of the pie. Since there are hundreds and hundreds of school districts in the state of Missouri, let's give an example that is easier to understand.

Pretend there are only 10 school districts in the state of Missouri. They all have to share the same budget from the Department of Education. Right now, the funding formula is estimated to be about $67 million short of being fully funded for the 2017-2018 school year. So these 10 school districts are already having to figure out how to "do more with less."

Now a charter school opens. So that money has to be divided 11 ways. They're all $67 million short of being fully funded, and they're having to do even more with less because the money is getting divided by 11 instead of being divided by 10. That is a really simple way to understand what is happening with school finance in regards to Charter School expansion.

Opponents of Charter Schools will argue that this is throwing money away! They're siphoning money away from the general fund of all public schools (see: example above), they don't have the same oversight or regulation of other public schools, and they're very hard to shut down once you open them.

From the St. Louis Post Dispatch: “We’ve been baffled. We don’t like what’s going on, but we can’t do anything about it,” state board Vice President Victor Lenz said last week. “We’re tired of having to approve something that obviously shouldn’t be going on.”

He's referring to the fact that Board members knew they would be sued for violating state law if they didn’t give Confluence Prep an extension on it's current charter. Never mind that Confluence is a failing organization with 2,900 students currently attending their schools.

This follows the debacle formerly known as Imagine College Prep. In 2012, Imagine College Prep (doesn't that sound fancy?) was shut down for poor performance. This displaced 3,800 students and had them scrambling to find a new school. That is 11% of all public school students in St. Louis.

Do you see a pattern here?

And never mind the money for just a minute, even though it's a lot of money. Never mind the poor academic performance for just a minute, even though it's more "broken" than what legislators claim is going on in public schools. Let's talk about the moral dilemma that is caused by Charter Schools.

Here is the flaw with the entire thought process. It's really the question we should be asking, this whole "school choice" question (told you I'd get back to this). Legislators are saying that Charter Schools will fix a "broken" public education system by giving parents a choice. That is a broad, sweeping statement that sounds good, but let's dig a little deeper. Let's boil it down to one school and see how well their argument works.

Let's call our failing public school "Public High," with a student enrollment of 1,000 kids. Test scores are low. Graduation rates are low. The college and career readiness data, or "what happens to these kids when they graduate?" is embarrassing. So "Charter High" opens up down the street from Public High. Parents now have a choice on where to send their kids, since Public High is so broken and terrible and awful.

Charter High can take up to 700 students. Of those 700 open spots, 500 come from Public High. The other 200 are from other neighboring schools. So here is the million dollar question...

What have we done to fix Public High? What about those 500 kids that we left behind?

Do they not get a school choice? Do they just have to stay in the "broken school?" Don't these kids matter, too?

The way I see it, we have two choices:

One, how about we fully fund current public schools? I think it's a good idea to support those schools and fix those schools so that all students have a shot at a good education, not just the ones fortunate enough to pick up and go to a charter school. Let's fix the problem where it's at.

Or two, invent a new kind of school to give parents more school choice options. Let's call these schools "Perfect Make Believe Schools." So if Public Schools are "broken," and then Charter Schools fail (again), we can just transfer these students to Perfect Make Believe High School.

So to Charter School folks out there, I know there are some good Charter Schools and a lot of people that care about kids. So no disrespect to those people, but personally I don't think this is a good idea. To our legislature, here on Just Win Today, we try to share positive stories and ideas. Charter Schools would not be a "win" for kids in Missouri. Fix the problem where it's at. Fix our schools. Fully fund our schools. Do what's right for the kids in Missouri. #JWT