Education Week - August 7, 2013 - 17

EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 7, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Contractor Joe
Martinez paints door
trim inside the South
Side Middle School in
Memphis, Tenn.
Originally South Side
High School, the site
now houses a
traditional public
school and a separate
charter school. Some
charter schools around
the country are
seeking locations to
share with traditional
public schools.
hensive information on charters’
access to affordable facilities.
Preliminary data from April, col-
lected from a survey of nearly 1,000
charter schools in 10 states, show
that charters spend roughly 10
percent of their operating budgets
on facilities. And that has a direct
impact on the academic quality
of charters, said Nina S. Rees, the
executive director of the National
Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
“Every penny that’s spent on facilities
is a penny that’s not spent
on the classroom,” she said.
Jim Griffin, a former president
of the Colorado League of Charter
Schools, said the issue also affects
what kind of services and programming
the schools can offer. (Mr.
Griffin is now the president of Momentum
Strategy and Research.)
In nine of the 10 states sur-
that charters typically spend on
facilities-related costs, including
lease and loan payments as well
as maintenance and other upkeep
of the properties.
But the newly formed Charter
Schools Facilities Initiative—a
collaboration between the Denverbased
Colorado League of Charter
Schools and the Washingtonbased
National Alliance for Public
Charter Schools—has launched a
national effort to gather compre-
veyed, for instance, fewer than 50
percent of charters reported having
kitchen facilities that qualified
schools to prepare meals on site
and met federal guidelines for the
free- and reduced-price lunch program.
(While a lack of such facilities
does not exclude those schools
from participating in the federal
program, it may increase their
expenses by forcing them to buy
vendor meals that cost more than
the federal reimbursement rate.)
Many charters also do not have
access to gyms, libraries, computer
labs, and science labs, the survey
found, and fewer than a quarter of
the charter schools surveyed met
regional and national standards
for overall facility size.
“We have to break this challenge
down into its parts and recognize
that there are options, and there
are improvements that the state
can make to public policy that don’t
have to dip into the public treasury,”
said Mr. Griffin. He cited examples
such as requiring districts
to share derelict or underutilized
school buildings with charters or
creating credit-enhancement programs
that allow charters to negotiate
loans at more-affordable rates.
‘Bogus Comparison’
Still, some researchers say that
charter advocates are oversimplifying
the debate around facilities.
“To suggest that charters pay
100 percent through their operating
budget [for facilities] and
districts get them for free is really
a bogus comparison,” said Bruce
Baker, a professor and researcher
at Rutgers University’s graduate
school of education in New Brunswick,
N.J., who studies school finance.
“The fact that the money
flows are not simple and direct
means that making those comparisons
isn’t easy,” he said.
Gary Miron, a professor of education
at Western Michigan University
and a researcher at the
Boulder, Colo.-based National Education
Policy Center who studies
school finance and charter schools,
said that while policies vary from
state to state, many traditional
public schools pay for at least
some facilities costs out of their
operating budget as well.
“It is true that [regular public
schools] have low-cost and lowinterest
bonds that have been
issued over time, but this notion
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that charter schools have to take a
big chunk of their operating budget
[for facilities]—districts have
to do that, too,” he said.
But Mr. Baker, from Rutgers,
agrees that regular district schools
receive more systematic support
for facilities than charters do.
“Clearly, the funding should be
fair, and one of the baseline issues
that comes up with charters is that
most states from the outset did not
set up a mechanism for charters to
finance their capital,” he said.
Around the country, states and
districts have experimented with
different ways of providing moreequitable
access to facilities for
charter schools.
New York City, for instance, has
embraced co-location, an arrangement
by which charter schools
are housed in the same facility as
district-run schools and sometimes
other charters, for free. So far, 159
charter schools, or 64 percent, are
co-located.
But the United Federation of
Teachers, New York City’s affiliate
of the American Federation of
Teachers, has called for a moratorium
on co-locations and has filed a
lawsuit against the New York Department
of Education, challenging
the legality of the arrangements.
The lawsuit does not question the
legality of co-location as a practice,
but seeks to stop those decisions
from being made over a year in advance
of the proposed sharing of facilities,
explained Michael Mulgrew,
the president of the union.
In some cases, co-locations have
been arranged three years in advance,
which does not allow parents
17
and community members to accurately
assess whether the agreement
is a good fit for their school,
especially if demographics and
programming change dramatically
during that time, Mr. Mulgrew said.
In addition, in some cases, colocation
has forced schools to cut
back on the programming and
services they provide to students
in order to make room for another
school, negatively affecting those
teachers and students, he argued.
Some charter advocates acknowledge
that co-location can be
challenging since charters often
depend on the cultivation of a distinctive
culture and school model.
But Sara Batterton, the senior director
of real estate and facilities
for Uncommon Charter Schools—
a network of 38 charters in New
York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts—said
the practice is working.
Uncommon Schools currently
operates 14 schools in Brooklyn
that are participating in the colocation
program, and Ms. Batterton
said she would like to see the
practice replicated in other cities.
“The system in place in New
York City has allowed us to grow
and scale quickly and provides an
amazing partnership with the city
of New York and the city school
system,” she said. “There are understandably
challenges to sharing
any kind of space to any co-tenant,
but we’ve found really positive
ways of working together.”
> > The CHARTERS AND CHOICE
blog tracks news and trends on
this issue. www.edweek.org/go/
chartersandchoice
> www.edweek.org/go/webinars
In this webinar, Darrell West
will discuss key fi ndings
from his book, Digital
Schools: How Technology
Can Transform Education,
which examines new
models of education made
possible by enhanced
information technology,
and how new approaches
will make public education
in the post-industrial age
more relevant, effi cient, and
ultimately more productive.
Speaker:
DARRELL WEST
director of governance
studies and director of
the Center for Technology
Innovation, Brookings
Institution
Content provided by:
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Education Week - August 7, 2013

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