Spending at Co-Located Schools
Buried on the DOE’s website is a
page that lists per pupil spending on a school-wide, district-wide, and
system-wide basis. Using this information, as well as expense data from
the 2007-2008 audits and the
recent IBO
report, we compared spending by charter schools and traditional public
schools that are located in the same building. We found that charter schools
spent an average of $365 less than their co-located traditional public schools.
You can see our calculations in a workbook here.
Some notes on our methodology:
- We did not adjust for charter school
demographics, save the case of Opportunity Charter School, which we know
enrolls a large number of special education students. For this comparison, we
looked at overall per pupil spending.
- Unlike the IBO's report, we include the total amount that charter schools spent in 2007-2008, which contains philanthropy and federal funding sources, such as Title I monies.
- For comparison purposes, we looked only at the
amount the co-located traditional public school spent per pupil on their
general education students (which includes part-time but not full-time special
education students). For reference, we
included the numbers for overall per-pupil and full-time special education
spending in our database.
- For charter schools, we looked at how much they
spent per pupil, as reported in their 2007-2008 audits. To this number, we
added $3,735, which is the estimated value of the amount of in-kind services
that charters received from the DOE in 2007-2008. (We decreased the IBO’s
amount by 5%, which was how much the DOE budget increased from 2007-2008 to
2008-2009.)
- Some charter schools did not have audits
available for 2007-2008. To correct for this, we looked at their expense
numbers from 2008-2009 and decreased them by 13% - the difference in the per
pupil amount given to charters in 2008-2009 from 2007-2008.
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