Stephen Dyer: Why Are Ohio Charters Collecting More and More Money?
Stephen Dyer is the Education Policy Fellow at Innovation Ohio; he’s been a reporter, a legislator, a lawyer and a policymaker. He knows his way around the Ohio education scene, and he writes about it at his blog 10th Period.
In a recent post, he looks at charter funding and the mystery of why more and more taxpayer dollars are going to the charter sector.
According to the latest Charter School funding report from the Ohio Department of Education, we are set to spend $999.7 million. The previous record was $955 million from the 2015-2016 school year — the high-point of the ECOT years.
Despite this massive recent increase (an extraordinary $111 million jump … over two years), it’s not because we’ve had more students attending charters than ever.
No. That record remains the 2013-2014 school year when 122,130 students attended charters.
It’s because Ohio politicians have continued bumping up the per pupil amounts flowing to charters. So now kids in Ohio charters, on average, get nearly $8,500 per pupil in state aid — about double what that same kid would receive in a local public school.
Dyer looks at charter spending and their results and asks why, exactly, is Ohio continuing to use taxpayer dollars this way. You can read the whole post, complete with charts and graphs, right here.