February 18th, 2015

5 take-aways on charter funding in Kasich budget

According to calculations prepared by the Ohio Legislative Services Commission (LSC), no charter school in Ohio would lose state funding under Gov. John Kasich’s proposed budget.

The LSC analysis also reveals:

1. Over half of Ohio’s local school districts lose funding in this budget proposal, while no charter school would lose money next year.
2. Only $2 million of the increase is going to charters with Performance Index scores above the local school district average of 99.1. Nearly 3 times that amount goes to charters with Performance Index scores lower than the lowest scoring district of 72.05
3. Of the $43.8 million increase to charter schools, at least $20 million goes to for-profit charters. (Not all schools run by these operators are both on the report card and in the LSC Estimate.)
   • The two largest for-profit charter school operators — David Brennan of White Hat Management and William Larger of ECOT — receive at least $6.5 million or 15 percent of the total increase to charters.
   • White Hat Management’s average increase is larger than the higher-performing Breakthrough Schools’ average increase.
4. The state will spend $8,021 per pupil for charters at the end of the biennium, up $354 from this school year. Funding for districts rises by $266 to $4,586 per pupil, and that’s before the money for charters is removed from the equation.
5. All districts lose more money to charters. The average local school district will lose another $56,000 to the charter school deduction – an increase of 3.6% to their charter transfer.

Here are the top 25 districts, ranked by additional losses to charters proposed in the Kasich budget:

 

NOTE – Additional data on operators and their performance, which were used in this analysis, can be found in the News and Analysis section of dev-oea-kyc.pantheonsite.io.