Charles Chieppo: Fighting charter-school success

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other advocates have developed an ambitious plan to place nearly half of Los Angeles's public-school students in charter schools within eight years. To fund the nearly half-billion-dollar effort, backers plan to tap Broad and several other foundations, along with a number of area billionaires.

Given the powerful, well-funded interests behind the plan, no one would describe it as the kind of grassroots effort the Founding Fathers had in mind when they dreamed of a dynamic democracy driven by engaged citizens. But you can't help but wonder if L.A.'s charter advocates arrived at their plan after studying Massachusetts's experience.

View fullsize

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker recently kicked off yet another battle to lift a state cap of 72 on the number of so-called commonwealth charter schools, which are independent of local school districts and more numerous than the in-district schools known as Horace Mann charters. About 3 percent of the state's public-school students now attend both types of charter schools, which are concentrated in urban areas.

The cap was last raised in 2010, driven largely by the prospect of $250 million from the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" grant program. A thriving charter sector was one of the criteria for receipt of the federal money.

Across the country, there is wide variation in the quality of charter schools. But few would disagree that Massachusetts' charters are the nation's best. One 2015 study, from Stanford University's Center for Research on Educational Outcomes, found that Boston charter schools are doing more to close the achievement gap than any other group of public schools in America. And a 2009 study commissioned by the Boston Foundation and conducted by Harvard and MIT researchers found that the academic impact of a year in a Boston charter school is roughly equivalent to a year spent in one of the city's elite public "exam schools."

And it isn't just Boston's charters. Massachusetts' K-12 public schools are the best-performing in the country, and across the state 18 charters finished first last year on state tests. That's a big part of the reason 37,000 state students are on charter-school waiting lists, a situation that Baker calls "a disgrace."

So why, given the outstanding performance of so many of Massachusetts' charter schools, is it always such a battle to allow more of them? Opposition from superintendents, school boards and teachers' unions is a very powerful thing in what is -- with the exception of Gov. Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, who are Republicans -- a one-party state when it comes to officials who are elected statewide.

Opponents make a number of arguments, but the main one comes down to the claim that charters drain money from traditional public schools. In a sense, they do. In Massachusetts, the money follows the student; when a student chooses to go to a charter school, the per-pupil funding goes along with him or her.

But what opponents rarely mention is that districts are fully or partially reimbursed for six years for each student they lose. During the first year, they receive 100 percent of the funding they would have received had the student stayed, then 25 percent for each of the next five years. That fact makes the opponents' money argument dubious at best.

Sadly, dysfunction breeds dysfunction. The resistance that Massachusetts supporters encounter in trying to expand the number and availability of charter schools is familiar to charter advocates across the country. Plenty of that resistance exists in Los Angeles, so the L.A. advocates' effort to do an end-run around democratic processes surprises no one.

In the end, we all lose when promising school reforms are blocked by interests threatened by changes in the status quo. Families are denied educational opportunity, local economies become less competitive because the potential of thousands of students is never realized, and citizens' faith in government sinks even lower.

Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is a research fellow at the Ash Center of Harvard's Kennedy School and the principal of Chieppo Strategies, a public-policy writing and advocacy firm. This piece first ran in governing.com, the Web site of Governing magazine.

Charles Chieppo: State tax cuts a dubious priority

BOSTON

Supply-side economics has been a subject of fierce debate ever since it came into the mainstream when Ronald Reagan was first elected president, in 1980. Do large tax cuts stimulate economic growth that makes up for the reductions in government revenue associated with lower tax rates, or do they just stimulate budget deficits?

As with so many questions, the answer is “it depends.” But in Kansas, where the administration of Gov. and former U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback has embraced the strategy, it’s looking like the result will be a whole lot of red ink.

Saying that they would provide a “shot of adrenaline” for the state economy, in 2012 Brownback pushed through a set of massive tax cuts. The income tax on small businesses was eliminated and the standard deduction for married couples filing jointly increased from $6,000 to $9,000. Three personal-income tax brackets of 3.5, 6.25 and 6.45 percent were reduced to two brackets of 3 and 4.9 percent.

Additional cuts enacted last year will push the top state income-tax rate down to 3.9 percent by 2018. By then, the total tax cut will amount to more than $4 billion. Even more cuts were passed in the waning days of the Legislature’s recent session.

So far, the results are not encouraging. In May, the Legislature’s nonpartisan research staff projected a $238 million shortfall in the approximately $15 billion state budget by July of 2017. But when tax revenues for April, May and June of this year came in a total of $334 million below benchmarks, the legislative research staff moved up the date for the projected shortfall by a year.

Moody’s downgraded the state’s bonds in May. This month, Standard & Poor's followed suit, citing Kansas’s “structurally unbalanced budget” and failure to match the tax cuts with spending cuts. By raising the cost of borrowing, the downgrades will exacerbate the failure to enact spending cuts.

S&P also said the tax cuts would leave the state with dangerously low reserves. Last month the Brownback administration said Kansas had $435 million on hand on June 30. The legislative research staff now says the number was $380 million.

And there’s little sign of adrenaline — at least so far. New business filings are up, but so are forfeitures and dissolutions. Overall, the number of net new businesses declined between 2012 and 2013.

The Reagan tax cuts did indeed provide a shot of adrenaline, helping topull the country out of its 1970s malaise and into the boom of the mid-1980s. But like the Kansas cuts, they weren’t accompanied by spending reductions and led to spiraling deficits. Supporters of the tax cuts counter that increased military spending during that time brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Whatever your view of them, there are two big differences between the Reagan tax cuts and what Gov. Brownback is doing in Kansas. The first is that federal taxes account for by far the biggest part of the overall tax burden. Changing state tax policy simply has much less economic impact.

Then there’s the magnitude of the cuts. When President Reagan took office, in 1981, the top individual income-tax rate was nearly 70 percent; by 1988 it was down to 28 percent. That kind of cut to a much larger portion of the overall tax burden had an exponentially greater impact than cutting Kansas’s top income tax rate from 6.45 to 3.9 percent over roughly the same amount of time.

Even if you believe in supply-side economics, the smaller impact that state and municipal taxes have on the overall economy and that, for the most part, the days of confiscatory tax rates are thankfully behind us make tax cuts a dubious choice as the centerpiece of local governments’ economic policy.

Charles Chieppo is the principal of Chieppo Strategies, a public-policy writing and communication firm.