Here are a few headlines you may have skimmed past earlier this summer:
“Providence Council president reverses course on Excel Academy charter school deal.”
“Anti-charter school stance on Providence City Council is making fiscal crisis worse.”
“With 16,000 on Waiting List, Prov. Council President Flips, Moves to Block Charter School Lease.”
If you’re an outsider to the charter school debate, the details of the fight can seem incomprehensible. And even as an insider I often find myself looking up obscure RI Department of Education documents in order to figure out what’s really going on. But it’s worth taking a closer look. The charter lobby succeeds precisely because education is complex.
But what they’re offering isn’t a solution.
First, why do I care? My older kid is a first grader at Asa Messer School, which is currently using the Carl Lauro School building (on Kenyon Street in Providence’s West End). All those headlines refer to a fight over a potential lease of one half of Carl Lauro to Excel Academy Charter School. Excel is a network of five schools, four in the Boston area and one in North Providence, and they wanted to relocate their North Providence school to the West End as part of a planned expansion.
Asa Messer has offered us a wonderful experience, but like most of the other public schools in Providence, it faces a daunting task. In America generally and Providence specifically, we have laid an enormous amount of responsibility at the feet of our schools. Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Andrea Elliott has written “Before a school even gets to be a school, it has to do so many other things. It has to keep kids whole: It’s often the provider of surrogate parenting, of clothing, medical care, and food…in the absence of a stronger safety net, schools are filling in the gaps left by very flawed systems.” In this context, schools in economically disadvantaged areas face real challenges in providing all students with a thoughtful, challenging, and supportive education.
So aren’t charters simply offering a worthy alternative to traditional public schools? Well, no.
And here’s where we get into the complexity of the issue: Charter and public schools receive the same per-student payment from the state and city, and when public schools lose students to charters they lose the money that goes with them. The theory is that the public schools have fewer kids to educate and therefore need less money. The reality, which is obvious to anyone with even the most basic understanding of budgeting, is totally different.
Say you’ve got a public school with two fourth grade classes, 25 students in each. A charter school opens down the street and 10 kids decide to go there for fifth grade. Now the public school, which had to prepare for a fifth grade class of 50 students, has 40. In Providence a school receives about $28,000 per student, so that loss of 10 students translates into a loss of $280,000 for the school.
And where are the savings? They can’t have 40 students in a single classroom so they still need two teachers. They can’t downsize a building to account for a loss of ten students so all the facilities costs remain fixed. Basically, when students are divided up between competing schools, public schools get less money to do the same amount of work.
But it gets worse.
While the Rhode Island Department of Education doesn’t allow charter schools to formally bias their student pool toward high-achievers, charters don’t need to do that because there are so many informal processes that accomplish the same goal. Families that have housing or food insecurity are less likely to take on the work of researching and visiting charter schools to find ones that could work for their family and then filling out the application that is required to enter the charter lottery.
And the demands on charter families can be significant. The New York Times podcast Nice White Parents says of Success Academy (a network of charter schools very similar to Excel Academy and Achievement First, the charter networks with the largest presence in RI) “lots of parents don’t apply…because they know the school’s culture and the demands it makes of families won’t work for them. And plenty of kids who do end up at Success don’t last long.”
The podcast goes on to detail how Success – like Excel and Achievement First – suspends students at far greater rates than comparable public schools, and how many families, if their child is suspended enough, will eventually pull them from the school.
In 2022-’23, the most recent year for which Excel has published statistics, its network-wide suspension rate was 13.8%. Meanwhile, most of Excel’s students come from the Boston public school district which that same year had a suspension rate of 3.8%. The year it opened, Excel’s Rhode Island school had an eye-watering suspension rate of 29%. Take that in: for every ten students, Excel issued nearly three suspensions. Not only that, but Excel’s suspensions do not fall equally across racial lines. In the 2022-’23 Black Excel students were three times as likely to be suspended as white students: for every two suspensions given to white kids, six were given to Black kids. Each of these suspensions represents days when a student isn’t learning, days when a student isn’t developing social skills, and critically, days when parents have to rearrange their work, or simply miss it, to take care of a child.
The data related to charter schools is even more striking when it comes to special education. Excel and other charters are aggressive in their claims that they welcome students with disabilities, but the money tells another story. The state education budget includes a fund that reimburses school districts when they have students whose education costs exceed $74,600 per year. Students who exceed this cost threshold are typically in wheelchairs and have teaching aides individually assigned to them because they need help moving around the school, using the bathroom, eating, etc. At Asa Messer, for example, there are three classrooms dedicated to serving these students.
Statewide, the reimbursement budget is around $15 million per year with the highest reimbursement totals going to the largest public school districts: Providence ($4.3 million), Cranston ($1.3 million), and Pawtucket ($795,000). By comparison, the statewide charter school reimbursement total is $34,050. RI charters enroll 14,159 students and they have so successfully excluded high-need special education students that they only have a little over $34,000 in reimbursable special education expenses! Cranston has $1.3 million in reimbursable expenses for only 9,712 students!
How can this be a worthy alternative to our public education system?
And where does this leave us?
Excel and many other schools have had their charters approved and will likely open somewhere in RI. Many politicians and journalists seem to accept as uncomplicated truth the idea that charters are a worthy alternative to public schools. But we can change this narrative, and, although it will be a long fight, we can stop charter expansion. A state-wide moratorium on issuing new charters would be a good start. A limit on the percentage of students from each district who can attend a charter, as exists in Massachusetts, would also be a step in the right direction.
More holistically, what we need is education – about who charter schools do and don’t serve. Providence schools struggle to equitably serve all their students with the budgets they currently have. The more money we give to charters, the worse that situation will become. If we want a city that takes care of all its children and sets them up to contribute to our communities, we need strong, well-funded public schools.
Tell your friends, tell your reps: Providence’s future success depends on providing equitable public education and the charter movement stands in the way of that goal.
Gabe Long is a parent of two, a resident of the West End, and a co-owner of Atomic Clock Photo & Video. He’s also active in the Asa Messer PTA.
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