Special interests in Louisiana’s public
education system have not given up in trying to protect their power and
privilege, as indicated by a suit filed regarding funding of charter schools
that seeks to erode the state’s school choice options.
An alliance of regressive forces,
school boards and teacher unions, will argue
in front of state district court that, essentially, certain kinds of
charter schools are ineligible for funding through the main mechanism of apportioning
state financial support to public education, the Minimum Foundation Program.
They argue that some types, roughly 25 schools drawing $60 million from the
over $3 billion distributed, are not “public” schools and not run by a school
district of some kind. Therefore, they claim the MFP is ineligible through
which to channel money.
This echoes the decision
last year where the Louisiana Supreme Court determined that MFP money could
not go to funding the scholarship voucher program that pays parents a chit that
can be used at a private school, as it said the purpose of the MFP was for
public education. And even as this logic provides a rationale for a suit on
this basis, it also provides the grounds to reject it absent a very activist role
on part of the judiciary.
While the plaintiffs built the
basis of their suit
on many mentions in the Constitution and law of how funding is to go to “parish
and city school systems,” they ignore the very beginning of the article that
addresses the MFP: that the Board of
Elementary and Secondary Education shall “determine the cost of a minimum
foundation program of education in all
public elementary and secondary schools” (emphasis added). Thus, regardless
of whether the state charters a school directly, the MFP may fund it because it
is a public school. Only the most ideologically-driven judges could sublimate
the fact that there’s a yawning chasm between the state giving a voucher to a
family who then creates an appropriation to the state upon using it to pay for
private school tuition and the state funding a government-owned school whose operation
is contracted out to a non-government entity, to give this suit a chance at
succeeding.
But this is just a preceding
tactic in the larger strategy of the plaintiffs, which loathe charter schools for
differing reasons: for unions, because charters much more effectively weed out
subpar teachers and more appropriately tie pay to performance and are far less
likely to have unionized work forces; for school boards, because these take
power and money out of their hands and reduce the ability of school systems to
be used as political experiments or patronage dumps, and for ideologues because
charters’ presence makes them less able to shape education around a political
agenda. If these forces can detach the kinds of charter schools authorized directly
by BESE, not by local governments, from the MFP, the subsequent tactic is to
try to block funding for them.
In the case of voucher funding,
the state simply rerouted that money out of the MFP formula, which is created
by BESE but must be approved or not unchanged by the Legislature, into a
separate line item appropriation. In this instance, something similar could
happen, but the regressive interests’ hope would be that their legislative allies
could muster enough votes to amend out any line item appropriation for this
purpose from the operating budget.
That’s a longshot, for BESE
members, who largely support charters, almost certainly would approve of a
formula redone this way and Gov. Bobby
Jindal and his allies would present a budget with this funding. Further,
charter school sentiment is strong in the Legislature, not the least reason why
being academic
research generally on Louisiana charters but specifically on those
operating in New Orleans demonstrate these produce significantly better
outcomes than do traditional public schools. Still, it could happen.
What if, for example, to try to
roll back the Common Core State
Standards initiative now firmly rooted in Louisiana that enough typical
charter supporters say they would vote to strip charter funding to leaving in
CCSS measures? Many of these individuals typically make for strange bedfellows
with unions, but they have formed an alliance with them on CCSS opposition and,
with elections next fall, might want to grub for some votes from vested
interests actively involved in elections like unions, so it’s not beyond reason
that enough of them might sell out previous positions as a bargaining tool, and
even carry through with the threat that, in conjunction with the usual union-
and big-government-friendly Democrats, could defeat this budgeting option.
There are other solutions in that
case, such transferring such unfunded schools to the authority of the Recovery
School District, which only
just got out of the business of directly running schools, which the suit
does not dispute can fund its charters through the MFP. But the plaintiffs’ point
is, if not to minimize as much as possible the use of charters, to gum up the
works as much as possible. The suit must succeed for that to happen, but, if
so, then the politics get interesting.
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