Charter operators are grasping at funding straws. They now want access to public school referendum tax dollars. But charters do not provide the same transparency of budget, expenditures, or governance and decision-making that public schools do. Before local property taxes go to charters, we should know how much their teachers are being paid and if they are getting insurance and benefits. We should know what is being spent in the classroom versus what is being spent on administrative costs. And we should know that we have a democratic voice in their governance—we should be able to elect their board members. In other words, to receive local property taxes, they should look and act a lot more like public schools than they do now.

Charters are not the only underfunded schools in Indiana.

In the months leading up to May and November—election season in Indiana—parents, teachers, and community leaders meet, strategize, and hammer out the logistics of campaigns. They donate time and money, make calls and knock on doors, because they want their local school districts to be able to continue to offer theater and music, world languages, p.e., and art. They want reasonable class sizes. And they want to retain teachers, coaches, janitors, and bus drivers. They can’t depend on the state of Indiana to provide what’s needed. Their unpaid volunteer labor is required just to get a question on the ballot, and to make a case for why voters should say “yes.”

Indiana is a referendum state, and has been for over a decade. What we call a “referendum” is known in other parts of the country as a “school tax levy”—a self-imposed additional property tax taken on by local voters to augment state funding for public schools. Usually this is for construction efforts, like building an addition or replacing windows. But in Indiana, it is also for day-to-day operations, like paying a classroom teacher. For example, the operational school tax levy, or referendum, for Monroe County Community School Corporation pays for 80 classroom teachers. 

What brought Indiana public schools to such dire straits? Then-governor Mitch Daniels centralized the bulk of school funding and then cut the state school budget by $300 million in 2009. Indiana has underfunded its schools every year since. Not only has school funding not kept up with inflation, but lawmakers have channeled billions in public funds into private schools (through the school choice voucher program) and charter schools, which are called public schools in statute but are privately managed and appoint their own boards. 

Simply to maintain adequate levels of staffing and programs for students, school districts must pass referenda. In this way, referenda are an instrument of disparity: districts that have the capacity—in terms of a tax base, volunteers, and businesses and individuals willing to pitch in to pay for a campaign—can pass a referendum and maintain the quality of their schools. School districts that don’t are forced to make painful cuts, losing teachers and programs.

Now, with House Bill 1072, which passed out of committee Thursday, Jan 20, 2022, legislators want to force school districts to share those desperately needed referendum funds with charter schools attended by children living in the school district boundaries. The state’s Legislative Services Agency calculated what the cost of this would be in the fiscal note attached to the bill: “In 2021, there were a combined 67 school operating or safety referenda levies. If school corporations were required to distribute a portion of their levies to nonvirtual charter schools, charter schools would have received an estimated $24.8 M of the $402.8 M certified referenda levies.”  In other words, had the proposed law been in place in 2021, 6% of the money generated by school referenda would have gone to charter schools.

This is offensive on multiple levels. To state it baldly: Charter schools do not share the basic mission of serving all students in a community. They do not welcome and make room for every child. They do not answer to communities through elected boards. They should not be funded at the expense of the schools that do.

Here are seven reasons that lawmakers should reject House Bill 1072:

1. HB 1072 is taxation without representation. Charters can be authorized by distant entities with few if any connections to the community. We don’t get to vote for charter school board members. They don’t even have to live in the county where the charter school is located. Do Indiana charter school board members even need to live in Indiana? In Monroe County, a charter school is refusing to follow the county health ordinance, which shows how little obligation their leadership feels to the general public or public health officials. 
2. Charters are part of the reason that school districts need to pass referenda in the first place. Read the fall 2021-22 public corporation transfer report to see where money is already leaving your own district. The charter and voucher programs enable the flow of taxpayer dollars into privatized and private environments, through the money-follows-the-child state tuition support model. 
3. HB 1072 will transfer local property taxes outside our counties. Children attend charters in neighboring counties, so if the referendum money follows the child, it will leave the county that passed the referendum. It could potentially leave an urban school district and flow to a wealthier suburban one, for example. It would also flow out of the lasting infrastructure of our public schools into a much more precarious environment (since 2002, over 50 charter schools have closed in Indiana, disrupting the education of thousands of families, many low-income).   
4. Charters are not part of the general and uniform system of common schools that is required by the Indiana Constitution. They do not share the obligation to serve all children in the community, but rather have a limited number of seats that can be available by lottery only. They are not required to provide lunch and transportation. In Monroe County, they serve a smaller percentage of children who qualify for free/reduced lunch. They are under no obligation to think about systemwide equity, but strive to maximize the “best” for the select (self-selecting) population of their own school.
5. Charters have access to special funds that are not shared with public schools. These programs include PPP loans and the Charter School Program. Also, the state provides additional funding for charters to make up for the local property tax dollars that they don’t receive. In 2021, that amount was increased to $1,000 per child in fiscal year ’22 and $1,250 per child in fiscal year ’23. 
6. The nonprofit status of charter schools can mask lucrative deals that bilk schools of funds intended to be used for education. Public education dollars should be spent on students, not to enrich enterprising individuals. 
7. Lack of oversight. The school district dispensing the funds has no control over how the charter school chooses to spend them, and no mechanism through which to correct the situation if the charter misspends the money.​

House Bill 1072 now goes to the full House for consideration. Contact your legislator and tell them to vote NO. Let sharing referendum funds be a local decision as it involves local tax dollars.

P.S. Want to get more specific about who to contact? Back in the dark ages…oh actually, back in 2020, it was controversial to even imagine giving school districts the option to share referendum proceeds with charters. An addendum to a bill that was sneaked in at the last moment said that districts *could* share referendum proceeds with charters. That addendum barely made it through.

These senators voted against the amendment. Ask them to vote NO again. 

Sen Alting (R)
Sen Becker (R)
Sen Bohacek (R)
Sen Boots (R)
Sen Breaux (D)
Sen Buchanan (R) 
Sen Crider (R)
Seon Donato (R)
Sen JD Ford (D)
Sen Freeman (R)
Sen Glick (R)
Sen Grooms (R) (retired, replaced by Kevin Boehnlein)
Sen Koch (R)
Sen Lanane (D)
Sen Melton (D)
Sen Mrvan (D)
Sen Neimeyer (R)
Sen Niezgodski (D)
Sen Randolph (D)
Sen Ruckelshaus (R) (replaced by Fady Qaddoura)  
Sen Stoops (D) (retired, replaced by Shelli Yoder)
Sen Taylor (D)
Sen Tomes (R)
Sen Walker (R)
Sen Young (R)

These representatives voted against the bill when it came back from the Senate with the new language. Ask them to vote NO again.

Rep Cook (R)
Rep Frye (R)
Rep Lyness (R)
Rep McNamara (R)
Rep Pressel (R)
Rep VanNatter (R)
Rep Vermillion (R)
Rep Young (R)


And if you live in one of these districts, your district passed an operating or school safety referendum in 2016 or later. Contact your legislators and tell them to vote NO on HB 1072. 
 
Anderson Community School Corporation, Madison County
Avon Community School Corporation, Hendricks County
Barr-Reeve Community Schools, Daviess County
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation, Bartholomew County
Beech Grove City School Corporation, Marion County
Benton Community School Corporation, Benton County
Bremen Public Schools, Marshall County
Brown County Schools, Brown County
Cannelton City School Corporation, Perry County
Carmel Clay School Corporation, Hamilton County
Clark-Pleasant Community School Corporation, Johnson County
Clinton Central School Corporation, Clinton County
Crown Point Community School Corporation, Lake County
Culver Community School Corporation, Marshall County
Duneland School Corporation, Porter County
Eminence Community School Corporation, Morgan County
Franklin Community School Corporation, Johnson County
Frontier School Corporation, White County
Gary Community School Corporation, Lake County
Goshen Community Schools, Elkhart County
Hamilton Community School Corporation, DeKalb & Steuben Counties
Hamilton Southeastern Schools, Hamilton County
Hanover Community School Corporation, Lake County
Indianapolis Public Schools, Marion County
Lake Central School Corporation, Lake County
Lake Station Community Schools, Lake County
Lanesville Community School Corporation, Harrison County
Monroe County Community School Corporation, Monroe County
MSD Boone Township, Porter County
MSD Decatur Township, Marion County
MSD of Southwest Allen County, Allen County
MSD of Warren Township, Marion County
MSD Washington Township, Marion County
MSD Wayne Township, Marion County
Noblesville School Corporation, Hamilton County
Noblesville Schools, Hamilton County
Northeast Dubois County School Corporation, Dubois County
Oregon Davis School Corporation, Starke County
Prairie Heights Community School Corporation, LaGrange County
River Forest Community School Corporation, Lake County
School City of Hammond, Lake County
School City of Hobart, Lake County
School City of Mishawaka, St. Joseph County
School Town of Munster, Lake County
School Town of Speedway, Marion County
Sheridan Community Schools, Hamilton County
Smith-Green Community School Corporation
South Bend Community School Corporation, St Joseph County
Southeast Dubois County School Corporation, Dubois County
Southern Wells Community Schools, Wells County
Tri-County School Corporation, White County
Union Township Community School Corporation, Porter County
Vigo County School Corporation, Vigo County
Wa-Nee Community School Corporation, Elkhart County
West Lafayette School Corporation, Tippecanoe County
Western Wayne Schools, Wayne County
Westfield Washington Schools, Hamilton County
Westview School Corporation, LaGrange County
Zionsville Community Schools, Boone County

–Jenny Robinson and Keri Miksza

P.S. Our state Indiana Coalition for Public Education has clipped some excellent testimony on HB 1072:

Dr. Robert Taylor, executive director of the Indiana Association of School Superintendents, expresses his concerns about charters being prone to closing.

Representative Cherrish Pryor, House District 94, remembers how charters were sold as being able to do a better job with less money.

Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County (ICPE–Monroe County) advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.

​We are a nonpartisan and nonprofit group of parents, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, and other community members of Monroe County and surrounding areas.

Join Us. 

As Indiana’s legislators look to make school vouchers for private school tuition accessible for even wealthier families, they are also considering another form of vouchers called “Education Scholarship Accounts” (ESAs). These would be equivalent to debit cards loaded annually with $5,000 to $7,000 (plus up to $9,100 for some special education students) that parents/guardians could spend on educational services in lieu of sending their kid(s) to a public school. House Bill 1005 would make ESAs available for special education students, foster students, and active military families, but just as voucher eligibility has been expanded over the years, we can expect the same for ESAs.

Here’s how ESAs grew in Arizona between 2012 and 2020:

Source: EdChoice

While the ESA amount could be spent on private school tuition, it could also be used for therapy, transportation, school uniforms, and likely music lessons and sports camps. The language in HB 1005 is “qualified school, public school, or participating entity,” (p. 27, line 12), and the participating entities would be approved by the state treasurer. So what’s the hitch? If you are already homeschooling or paying private school tuition, free money probably sounds nice.

What are the problems with ESAs?

1. Diversion of funding from public school programs.
Creating ESAs is like waving cash in front of families to incentivize them to leave their public schools. It also gives state money to families who were already homeschooling or already in private school. Removing money from public school programs will weaken the public schools and charter schools on which 94% of Indiana’s students depend. 
​
2. High costs for à la carte education.
As parents of high-need special ed students testified in education committee hearings (also here), the amount of funding the state proposes to provide through ESAs would be insufficient to purchase comprehensive services in the private education marketplace. Some children receive full-time one-on-one aides in public school, for instance, because public schools are required to provide a free appropriate public education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Private schools have no such responsibility, and neither would a for-profit or nonprofit “participating entity.” Private entities could pocket state funds without fully meeting kids' needs, while public schools, which already don't get enough money for special education*, would be expected to provide full services with less.

Source (for average public school special ed expenses per pupil): Center on Reinventing Public Education report, “Ensuring All Students in Indiana Receive Their Fair Share of Funding.”

3. Lack of oversight.
The program would be overseen by the state treasurer rather than the Indiana Department of Education, and the bill expressly forbids government regulation of the schools/entities participating: It specifies that a state agency “may not in any way regulate the educational program of a nonpublic school that accepts money from an account under this article,” (p. 38, line 13).**

The public has an interest in the quality of the educational environment provided for children through state dollars. This begins with physical environment and infrastructure. Do the buildings meet the fire code and are they free of hazards such as lead paint or accessible toxic household cleaners? Is the drinking water clean? It extends to the psychological environment. Are children in safe and positive spaces free of manipulation and abuse? Under HB 1005, no state entity would have the responsibility to inquire.

Most centrally, though, the quality of the educational environment is bound up in curriculum. With HB 1005, no state entity would have the right to ascertain whether children are receiving a developmentally appropriate, challenging curriculum that adheres to state academic standards. The language of the bill appears to guarantee that state funds could be used for conversion therapy or religious instruction. 

4. No requirement for a certified teacher.
In fact, HB 1005 prohibits the state from making any teacher or staff hiring requirements for participating schools or entities (page 38, line 17). So it sounds like the state could not even require nonaccredited schools to verify that a potential hire does not have a record as a child sex offender. 

5. An environment ripe for scammers.
Because parents would be making the decisions about how to spend this money, service providers and vendors of curricular materials would advertise directly to parents. Many parents lack the knowledge and training to assess the quality of such programs and could be vulnerable to unscrupulous operators.

6. Incentivization of year-to-year rollover of dollars.
Parents could roll over as much as $2,000 per year. This means parents could spend as little as $3,000 on a child’s education in one year. What kind of education would a kid be getting for that sum?

7. Excessive administrative costs, or an invitation to fraud. 
How will the state treasurer ensure that the money is actually spent on kids’ education? Either the treasurer will spend lots of time and money to ensure that participating entities are operating responsibly and that invoices are accurate for services truly rendered, or not. In the first case, taxpayers will be paying a huge amount for inefficient administration even as public schools are under pressure to consolidate and reduce administrative costs. In the second case, we will see an explosion of a free-for-all which will deplete state coffers while encouraging fraud and exploiting children.

​Given Indiana’s record of lax oversight of charter schools, especially the virtual charter schools that have proven lucrative for their operators, a proliferation of fraud seems likely. And while legislators are the ones who will vote for HB 1005 (or the form of it included in the budget bill), it’s Indiana’s taxpayers who will foot the bill, and Indiana’s children who will pay.

To improve education in Indiana, we need to reject ESAs and instead invest in the essential community infrastructure of public schools.​ As parent and attorney MaryAnn Schlegel Ruegger says, "What special education students most need is for their public school special education services and general education classrooms to be adequately funded, to allow the time and attention and teacher expertise they need to be successful." 
​
​–Jenny Robinson and Keri Miksza

*Appendix A of the 2020 CRPE report shows how Indiana's special education funding lags that in Ohio, South Dakota, and New Orleans:

See also the Education Commission of the States' 50-state comparison of special education funding from March 2019.

**HB 1005 prohibits the state from regulating participating entities. An excerpt:

Chapter 5. Participating Entities

Sec. 1. It is the intent of the general assembly to honor the autonomy of nonpublic schools that choose and are authorized to become participating entities under this article. A nonpublic eligible school is not an agent of the state or federal government, and therefore: (1) the treasurer of state, state board, department, or any other state agency may not in any way regulate the educational program of a nonpublic school that accepts money from an account under this article, including the regulation of curriculum content, religious instruction or activities, classroom teaching, teacher and staff hiring requirements, and other activities carried out by the nonpublic school; (2) the creation of the program does not expand the regulatory authority of the state or the state's officers to impose additional regulation of nonpublic schools beyond those necessary to enforce the requirements of the program; and (3) an accredited nonpublic school that is a participating entity may provide for the educational needs of students without government control.

___________________________________________________
Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County (ICPE–Monroe County) advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.

​We are a nonpartisan and nonprofit group of parents, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, and other community members of Monroe County and surrounding areas.

The following is a guest post from Jessica Calarco, Associate Professor of Sociology, Indiana University​

​The COVID-19 pandemic is putting public education at risk. It has pushed some families out of public schooling and prompted others to opt out, as well.
 
As Emily Cox of the Herald-Times reported last week, MCCSC enrollment appears to be down 7% from last year. My own calculations (comparing numbers recently released by MCCSC to last year’s enrollment numbers) suggest that those declines are hitting the younger grades especially hard, with elementary enrollment down 12%. 
 
And MCCSC is not alone. A recent EdWeek survey found that more than half of educators in the U.S. are seeing enrollment declines in their districts' elementary schools, and especially in the lower grades, with nearly half reporting enrollment declines at the middle and high school level, as well. 
 
Some of these missing students have been pushed out of public schooling. When schools opened online this fall, some of these students didn’t have access to internet or a safe, quiet space to learn at home. Some needed more support than their family can provide at home, either because of disabilities, or because they are English language learners, or because their parents are essential workers. Some are staying home alone all day, and some may have siblings to care for, as well. These are the students for whom participating in online learning would be difficult or even impossible. Some of these students—especially if their families have more resources and more connections—have found alternative school options, and some just aren’t learning at all. 
 
Meanwhile, and even if they could participate in online public schooling, other missing students have opted out, instead. Some are being homeschooled by a family member, neighbor, or private tutor. Others in enrolling in online charter schools. And still others have opted to enroll in private schools or other nearby districts where schools opened in-person on time. 
 
These families are opting out for a wide range of reasons. My research with families here in Southern Indiana suggests that some families were dissatisfied with the online instruction their children received last spring, and they are confident that they (or a paid tutor) can better meet their children’s needs. Some families have found it difficult to juggle online school schedules with their work schedules, even if they are working from home, so they found an in-person option or created a homeschool schedule that doesn’t conflict with their own. Still other families have been frustrated by the uncertainty around public schooling plans, so they found an option that would give them a more consistent experience this year.
 
And of course, it’s understandable why families are opting out. The pandemic is still raging, and the risks of in-person instruction are high. Meanwhile,  public schools haven’t been given the money they need to reopen while keeping students, families, and educators safe—with enough teachers and space for small in-person classes, proper ventilation in every classroom, or enough bathrooms to not have to share. Furthermore, online learning is difficult or impossible for many students and families. And educators haven’t been given the time, training, or tech support to smoothly transition online. 
 
The problem, however, is that regardless of why students leave public schooling, the money follows them out. As the Herald-Times reported, a 7% decline in MCCSC enrollment will mean a loss of $5.2 million in funding from the state. And because this year’s enrollment determines funding for next year, MCCSC will lose that money regardless of how many students reenroll. Those funding cuts will almost certainly mean job losses for local teachers and local district staff. They will also mean bigger class sizes and fewer resources and opportunities for the students and families relying on public schools. Students and families who may need those resources the most. 
 
But lost resources aren’t the only problem here. As I argued recently in the New York Times, when families pull their children out of public schooling, those opt-outs “undermine the public’s confidence in the quality of public education and the necessity of funding it as a public good.” Essentially, the more families that opt out of public schooling, the more policymakers will feel justified in defunding public education and shifting school resources to private and for-profit options, instead. 
 
At the same time, however, it’s important not to blame the families who’ve opted out. The real blame belongs to the politicians who’ve refused to take the steps necessary to stop the virus. To the policymakers who, even more despicably, have treated this pandemic as a political and financial opportunity and not as a serious threat. They're the ones who have the most to gain from families opting out. And they're the ones making the situation worse.

—Jessica Calarco

Free lunch rates are a proxy for family income levels. To qualify for free lunch, you need to make 130%, or lower, of what the federal government has set as the poverty level for a family of a given size. In 2018–19, that was about $33,000 for a family of four. A high free lunch rate means that a school serves mainly low-income families, many of whom are likely dealing with the stresses of poverty: food insecurity, unemployment, multiple low-paying jobs, irregular medical care, transient housing situations, and transportation challenges. A low free lunch rate, on the other hand, means that a school serves a more affluent population with more of its basic needs met.*
 
In the course of looking into how free lunch rates are related to ILEARN passing rates, we got valuable information about what income levels different types of Indiana schools—all publicly funded—are serving. Among public, charter, Catholic, Lutheran, and “independent” (other religious private) schools, there are clear trends, and clear aggregate differences, in student bodies when it comes to wealth, poverty, and the stretch between.

How do free lunch rates differ at the different types of schools? Here are some takeaways:
 
1) Public schools serve the most students and the broadest range of students. Some public schools have very low free lunch rates, some have very high ones, and many are in the broad middle: they are densest in the 25% to 75% free lunch range. There are many public schools in the 0–25% range, and slightly fewer in the 75–100% range.
 
Because there are so many public schools, the dots representing schools form a large oblong shape, like a big diagonal fish, and you can clearly see the close connection of free lunch rate and ILEARN scores.
 
2) The bulk of charter schools serve higher-poverty populations, likely because many are in the urban cores of Indiana’s cities. Only eleven of the 59 charter schools pictured here serve a population in the first two quartiles of free lunch, the 0–50% range. The rest are pretty evenly distributed throughout the 50–100% range, but with a number clustered on the 100% mark. (There are about 100 charters in Indiana this year, but about forty do not have populations that were tested—probably because they are high schools only.)
 
Keep in mind that the number of charter schools is different than the number of charter students. About a quarter of charter students attend poorly performing online (“virtual”) charter schools. That’s not visible in the ILEARN data because those online schools are mainly high schools, whose students did not take English and math ILEARN.
 
3) Lutheran schools are clustered in the lowest poverty (0–25%) quartile, with some in the 25–50% range and only three total schools in the 50–100% range. Lutheran schools are not evenly distributed. They are serving well-off students, relatively speaking. They appear to have lower average ILEARN performance than public schools with similar free lunch rates.
 
4) Catholic (Archdiocese) schools are densest in the lowest poverty (0–25%) quartile, with a fair number in the 25–50% quartile, fewer in the 50–75% quartile, and very few in the 75–100% free lunch quartile. Their scores are no higher on average than those of public schools with similar free lunch demographics. As public schools do, they show a strong connection between scores and free lunch rates.
 
5) Independent schools (mainly religious schools that are neither Catholic nor Lutheran) are all over the map both in terms of free lunch rate and scores. While the free lunch/ILEARN score connection is present, many have lower scores than the public school trend line would predict.
 
Looking at these graphs, it’s impossible to argue that publicly funded schools that are not public are showing higher achievement (as measured by ILEARN) than public schools when you take into account the income levels of the populations they serve. That’s probably why some well-bankrolled entities advocating for “choice”—i.e., the diversion of public funds into private and privatized schools—have pretty much abandoned that line of argument. Others are still making it despite evidence to the contrary.
 
What, then, is the Indiana supermajority's rationale for moving public money into schools that do not have the same transparency requirements, obligations to serve all students, and democratic local governance as public schools? In the case of the Catholic and Lutheran schools, money is leaving the public school system, further depleting inadequate funds, to go to private schools that disproportionately serve more affluent students.
 
When state grades based on ILEARN are given to schools, they will reward the affluent and punish the poor, just as they did with ISTEP. This is not an occasional problem, a bug, but rather a feature that is baked into the school grading system. Teachers rallying at the Indiana Statehouse on November 19 will be demanding that legislators hold schools and educators harmless for low scores in this first year of ILEARN. But even if legislators and the State Board of Education respond as they should, it will not address the larger problem: that grading schools based on test scores consistently labels and harms schools and educators serving vulnerable populations.

Do your state representative and senator approve of that? Do they vote to transfer taxpayer dollars away from public schools into other, less accountable types of schools? Have you asked them? Have you conveyed your concerns? When you talk to your local legislators, we encourage you to print out these graphs, which use data from the Indiana Department of Education.
 
 –Keri Miksza and Jenny Robinson
 
 
*It’s important to note that free lunch rates don’t tell us about the extremes and are limited in their description of an area’s income. For instance, a school with a 20% free lunch population could potentially have a higher average income among its families than one that served 10% free lunch.