In Defense of Unequal Funding for Charter Schools Advocates want more tax money for charters, but a longtime charter supporter says we should just say no.

Nearly six months after the election, the “Fair Funding for DC Kids” posters, decorated with childlike handwriting, still dot front lawns across the city. The signs aren’t just remnants of the political season. Today, they represent an early shot in the city’s coming battle over education funding. The advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools launched the placard offensive during the 2010 mayoral campaign. Now that its candidate is comfortably ensconced in the mayoral suite, FOCUS intends to remind Mayor Vince Gray and the D.C. Council of the organization’s clout as they begin deliberations over how to close an anticipated $600 million gap in the District’s fiscal 2012 budget.

This budget season, schools are expected to take a sizable hit. But charter proponents are determined to evade the knife. During this past year, their complaints about allegedly unfair funding treatment have become more animated.

“It was clear from the very beginning that, as public schools, charter schools were to be publicly funded,” Robert Cane, FOCUS’ executive director, tells me in his group’s small, stylish headquarters on U Street NW. “The law required the council develop a uniform per-student funding mechanism.” Once an innocuous operation with a $60,000 budget, FOCUS, under Cane, has become a muscular organization with 11 full-time employees, nearly $2 million in revenues, and growing political power.

“Some hanky-panky goes on outside of the formula and that’s where the inequities lie,” Cane continues. “If everybody just followed the formula and did what the formula says, I wouldn’t have any complaints at all.” The basic or foundational per-pupil allotment for fiscal year 2011 is about $9,000.

The words “inequity” and “parity” have been crafted into both war song and mantra by Cane and other charter advocates. Some elected officials, including Gray, have hummed the refrain, opining that there should be “parity” between charters and traditional public schools. Even before his victory over Adrian Fenty, Gray, as D.C. Council chairman, had placed a clause in the fiscal 2011 Budget Support Act requiring the creation of a commission to study the alleged “inequity” facing charters. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi also is examining the charge.

An independent organization must be identified who actually will be responsible for convening the commission, says Ron Collins, head of board and commissions in the Gray administration.

Consequently, members have not been named. Still, charter proponents feel certain there will be more government money. “They will find some under-funding,” Cane says.

Not so fast, say advocates for traditional public schools. In a budget-season counter-offensive, they’ve accused Cane and company, essentially, of being greedy whiners. What those in the charter sector call inequities, Cane’s critics say, are basic features of a system that’s based on competition. Charters, their logic goes, can’t expect to receive all the bennies without any burdens: For example, charters aren’t neighborhood schools obliged to accept any child simply because they share the same ZIP code. Their teachers don’t have to be certified. There isn’t a 13-member political body hovering over them, demanding answers to every trivial question. When charters can’t provide for a child’s special-education needs, one mental health professional tells me, that child is simply “sent back to his home school,” meaning DCPS. The trade-off for being able to avoid those sorts of obligations, traditional-school boosters say, is that charter schools shouldn’t be guaranteed the same amount of money.

“Limitations on traditional public schools are huge compared with limitations on charters,” says Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union. “We have a fist-fight going on here, and we have tied the hands of traditional public schools.”

“It’s too easy to paint this as charter schools have been neglected or ignored in some way,” says former D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso. “They are at risk of inviting a level of scrutiny that is going to limit their flexibility over time.”

For years, I have been a strong supporter of education choice, even for those vouchers that once again are the focus of a nasty battle between some in the city and Congress. That’s why it’s been a little odd to survey the coming school-spending showdown and realize I’m on Saunders’ side, not Cane’s. The best thing the cash-strapped District government can do for the city’s charter schools, it seems to me, is to just say no.

This isn’t because charter schools are a bad idea. Just the opposite: It’s because guaranteeing a perpetual gusher of tax dollars is the surest way to undermine the basic tenets the schools were supposed to represent—excellence via competition and independence from government bureaucracy. I’m concerned about stats that show many charters are not meeting their educational mission. Responding to this situation by throwing money at the schools means abandoning the notion that they would live or die by their own records. As Reinoso notes, it’s also a recipe for turning quasi-independent institutions into bureaucrats’ playgrounds. It’s the logic of government: Guarantee funding to subpar charters now, and before long you’ll be stripping even the stellar ones of their freedom to innovate.