Last week, I received an email from the Philadelphia School Partnership expressing outrage over a recent report by Public Citizens for Children and Youth that recommended the School Reform Commission should not approve any of the 40 pending charter school applications. The group said PCCY’s recommendation was deeply flawed.

Thirteen of the 40 applicants – representing 13,000 new charter seats — deserve approval, PSP said. The reason? These 13 schools are being proposed by high-quality charter school operators, with many of their existing schools serving a similar cohort of low-income students as District-run schools but receiving better school ratings. According to PSP, to reject these applications wouldn’t just be mistaken, it would be “outrageous.”

After reading the email, I clicked through to a public statement released by an entity called Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners – an advocacy affiliate created by PSP – and read a similar analysis. According to PSAP’s spokesperson, Mike Wang, rejecting these quality applications would be “irresponsible.”

PSP’s email and its sister’s statement move me to several observations.

The Philadelphia School Partnership never mentions the cost of approving new charters. As I, and others, have written in the past, the District suffers a sizeable loss when a student leaves a District-run school and goes to a charter. The District incurs an even greater loss when a Philadelphia student who was enrolled in a parochial or independent school attends a charter.

I won’t repeat the calculations, but when I wrote about this topic previously, the net loss to the District per student was roughly $7,000, on average. The loss results from the District losing roughly $10,000 in revenue (which it pays to the charter) and being unable to reduce its operating costs on account of the student’s departure by more than a few thousand dollars.

Some charter advocates assume that the loss is the fault of District management in failing to take the necessary steps to reduce its costs quickly and dramatically. In my opinion, the District’s experience in dramatically reducing costs over the last several years – school closings, mass layoffs, sales of school buildings, etc. – has proven the fallacy of that assumption.

PSP’s failure to consider the $7,000 loss per student makes it easy to create an appealing sound bite. According to PSP, there is only one thing that matters: “access to quality schools for more families.”

Of course, if cost were not a factor, one might believe that the only question should be the quality of the new school. Should a new school – by some unspoken measure – be a “better school,” then it should be approved. This approach would mean – at least as PSP judges it – that some 13,000 new “seats” ought to be opened. Indeed, not to do so would be “outrageous” and “irresponsible.”

But let’s do the math: If the net loss is about $7,000 per student, opening 13,000 new seats would impose a loss of $91 million on the District. And that loss is just what is suffered in one year; as I previously discussed, the loss continues year after year unless and until the District is able to mitigate it from school closures and the sale of fixed assets.

To anyone paying attention to the sad saga of the District’s attempts to fund its operations over the last several years, the failure to consider $91 million in annual costs is, frankly, outrageous. No right-headed person could believe that the discussion of a new $91 million loss shouldn’t be front and center in the debate. That’s what PCCY said. That’s what the SRC, the body legally responsible for the entire District, must consider. But for PSP, the only question is getting more families in new charter seats.

In its advocacy for charter operators, PSP ignores the impact that its proposal will inflict on the families of the other students in District-run schools.

For purposes of illustration, think about these numbers: If there are, say, 130,000 students in District-run schools and 13,000 will migrate to new charters (though the data suggest that 30 percent of charter seats would be filled by students not previously attending District-run schools), a potential $91 million loss must be absorbed by the remaining 117,000 students. That’s about $775 per student. In other words, to pay for 13,000 new seats, the average loss for each student who stays in a District-run school is $775.

That’s a hefty burden to be borne by the schools that serve the students who stay. These are the same schools limping along with an inadequate number of counselors, nurses, librarians, and attendants. Another $775 per student taken from them? How is that fair? How is that equitable? You would think that PSP would at least discuss the point. But no. There is no room for that type of consideration when the only thing that matters is getting some students into “better” seats at charter schools.

PSP doesn’t mention that if the SRC wanted to create more new seats in charter schools, it could do so through the Renaissance Schools process. In fact, several of the operators who have submitted applications are currently running Renaissance charters. Renaissance charters cost the District a fraction of the $7,000 per new charter seat.

Even more important, PSP doesn’t consider what would happen if the District could turn that $7,000 per-student loss into $7,000 additional funding for District-operated schools. I bet that Superintendent William Hite would say that he could create a lot more “high-performing seats” if he had that kind of money added to his budget instead of taken away.

One final aspect of PSP’s argument should be noted. The provision that required the SRC to consider new charter applications was added to the law by the same statute that allowed the imposition of a tax on cigarette sales in the city. That tax was imposed to help plug the District’s structural operating deficit. How much is that tax expected to generate? According to a recent report, the city’s projection of new money to the District in the first year of full collection is $83 million, and each year after that the amount declines.

That means that PSP’s approach to approving new charters would use every last nickel of that funding and then some. But that’s fine, right? Because the one thing that matters is “access to quality schools for more families.”

In the end, PCCY’s recommendation is only outrageous and irresponsible if one starts from the premise that the interests of the students that remain in District schools are unworthy of consideration.

The Philadelphia Public School Notebook – January 23, 2015 – Read article online