Contact: 
Bruce Baker: (732) 932-7496 ext. 8232, bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu
Dan Quinn, (517) 203-2940, dquinn@greatlakescenter.org

Charter Schools: Successful Academic Outcomes Difficult to Link to Spending

New Report Analyzes Charter School Finances in New York, Ohio and Texas to Determine How Much Is Spent By Prominent Charter School Operators

EAST LANSING, Mich. (May 3, 2012) – Charter school advocates often claim that charter schools deliver higher performance at a lower cost. But do they? A new study out today highlights the need to better accurately compare similar schools – making more relevant comparisons.

Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas was produced by the National Education Policy Center with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice and the Albert Shanker Institute.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, along with Ken Libby and Katy Wiley of the University of Colorado, found that current data fail to capture the entire financial structure of programs run by major charter management organizations – there is more information needed to better inform policy.

The goal of the study was to generate comparisons of revenues and expenditures per pupil for a subset of privately managed charter schools and traditional public schools operating within the same cities and states.

After reviewing the financial information currently available, the authors wrote, "it remains difficult to characterize fully the expenditures of charter schools and the financial relationships between CMOs and their schools."

"Data quality and financial reporting remain significant barriers to conducting accurate and precise comparative expenditure analyses across traditional public and charter school sites."

The report found that the cost effectiveness of charter schools compared to traditional public schools is "plagued" by inconsistent and incomplete financial disclosures and the fact charter schools operate differently than traditional schools in many ways.

Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations explains that most studies highlighting or documenting a successful charter school have sidestepped or downplayed cost implications while focusing on specific programs and strategies in those schools.

The researchers recommend looking beyond average expenditure differences, "We must also begin to dig deeper into understanding the cost structure of providing specific programs and services — most notably, those programs and services that work, or that make successful charter schools tick."

Researchers concluded that better charter school financial disclosure and additional research delving deeper into which programs produce better academic outcomes and how much those programs cost is needed.

"We need such measures in order to make more accurate judgments about the relative efficiency of charter schools and about the relative equity of their available resources."

Find the brief on the Great Lakes Center website at:
http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The mission of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice is to support and disseminate high quality research and reviews of research for the purpose of informing education policy and to develop research-based resources for use by those who advocate for education reform.

This brief was made possible in part by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice and the Albert Shanker Institute.

It also available on the National Education Policy Center website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu

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