Charter Schools Demanding Higher Tuitions, and Getting Them. Taxpayers Soon to Realize They’ve been Taken.

Both voucher and charter schools are demanding higher student fees from state taxpayers, behind the scenes, but no one is hearing about it. They’re complaining they can’t make the kind of improvements they would like, because they can’t compete with public educations per student rate. It’s another excuse, and portends higher taxpayer contributions to private industry.

As proof, there’s already a large charter chain raking it in. And this is only the beginning:

NY Times: KIPP  charter schools receive more money than traditional schools and have a high number of African-American male students leave before reaching high school, according to a new study by Western Michigan University researchers. 

Those factors led the researchers to question the success of the phenom charter network of the Knowledge is Power program. (KIPP does not have any charter schools in Wisconsin.)
In the study, “What Makes KIPP Work? A Study of Student Characteristics, Attrition and School Finance,” Gary Miron and two other Western Michigan researchers … said their goal was to examine the network’s methods and model to see whether they could be replicated widely … the study concludes that KIPP schools enjoy significant financial advantages over traditional public schools. 

By analyzing Department of Education databases for the 2007-8 school year, the researchers calculated that the KIPP network received $12,731 in taxpayer money per student, compared with $11,960 at the average traditional public school and $9,579, on average, at charter schools nationwide. In addition, KIPP generated $5,760 per student from private donors, the study said, based on a review of KIPP’s nonprofit filings with the Internal Revenue Service.

Don’t be swayed by the KIPP supporters excuse that the lowest paying state, California, skewed the per student rate average. It may have, but that doesn’t excuse the higher rates everywhere else. Rates that will only go higher, and that’s my point.

Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called the study’s financial analysis “eye-opening.” 

“As wealthy donors have invested in KIPP, they have helped to demonstrate how a well-endowed, inspirationally run charter school can lift poor children,” Mr. Fuller said. “The question raised by this study is whether the model could be replicated if wealthy donors were to walk away.”

That’s an acceptable direction of the charter schools model?