The final report of the Public Education Finance Reform Commission (PEFRC) has drawn some criticism from the charter school community, which feels the Commission did not address perceived inequities in funding between DCPS and public charter schools. Yet, a close look at the PEFRC report shows that the Commission deliberated all of the major issues of uniformity as it was mandated to do, and made decisions over many of them, even if the decisions were not what the charter school supporters were hoping for. The Commission failed to work through one important issue ‘ how to measure enrollment for the purposes of setting funding ‘ but this reflected a lack of time and low prioritization among all Commission members, including charter school representatives.
Take, for example, the issue of how school maintenance is funded. The PEFRC found that the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF) is based on outdated industry standards for maintenance and does not reflect actual costs, resulting in a formula that under-funds maintenance for both sectors.
The commissioners ultimately came to consensus that school maintenance, utilities, and custodial services should be based on the needs of each school building. If adopted, this recommendation would likely mean that maintenance funding would not be uniform if measured on a per-pupil basis, since different schools would have differing needs, but it would be uniform in that every school would have its maintenance requirements adequately funded.
Charter school supporters argue that smaller charters often deal with cramped, substandard facilities and that tying maintenance funding to actual costs would not allow them to build up funds to obtain more appropriate space. While the facilities problems of charter schools are legitimate, and there should be better policies for securing right-sized facilities, the argument that charters need more maintenance funding to use it for purposes beyond maintaining the school facility does not align with the true purpose of the funds.
The Commission also addressed the issue of mid-year supplementary funding for DCPS. Despite some qualms, the commissioners did not agree that if DCPS receives supplemental funding in the middle of the year due to a variety of reasons (bureaucracy, under-projected enrollment, etc.) charter schools should simply receive more money to equal that amount. In this case, the PEFRC rejected a recommendation for strict uniformity because most commissioners did not believe it made sense.
The issue of creating a uniform way to measure student enrollment also came up at Commission meetings, but there was not enough time for the PEFRC to talk through it. While this was unfortunate, it is important to note that no one on the PEFRC, including charter school representatives, made it a high priority during final deliberations. Since the release of the PEFRC final report, Mary Levy has offered some good ideas for better tying funding to student enrollment on behalf of the charter school community, including the accounting of increases for DCPS, net of transfers and drop-outs. These are worth exploring, although there are still some questions about how precisely to tie funding to enrollment as it changes during the year, since frequent mid-year adjustments are no way to efficiently run a school system.
The PEFRC report should really be viewed as a start of a longer policy conversation in DC, one that will hopefully be continued by an adequacy study with more time to dig into these issues.
Note: While Ed Lazere served as Chair of the PEFRC, the opinions expressed in this blog are those of DCFPI and not representative of the PEFRC.
