When Donors Choose, Some Win and Some Lose

As BPS parents, we know the budget cuts we experience year after year after year have increased the amounts that we're being asked to contribute for basic supplies. While it’s impossible to quantify how much is being spent on direct supply donations to the classroom or through community fundraising efforts, we are able to quantify our teachers’ reliance on crowd-funding to provide schools supplies. 

The website DonorsChoose was established in 2000 by a history teacher in New York City who hoped to connect the needs of his students with potential donors. For research purposes, DonorsChoose has more recently established a companion site with the open data they have collected via donations made through the site. Using their data browser, we examined the impact of budget cuts on teachers’ demand for supply money supplementation and were shocked by what we found.

*School year 2016 - 2017 still in progress. Data collected in March 2017.

Between FY12 and FY16, donations to Boston schools through DonorsChoose increased 12-fold from $40,050 in FY12 to nearly $500,000 in FY16. We’re now a little more than halfway through FY17, and already DonorsChoose has collected $450,000. There are currently almost 300 open records with over $417,000 in unfunded projects pending and more are added daily.

Why is it that we expect our teachers to bear the responsibility for resourcing our underfunded classrooms?
Also troubling to us are the equity issues raised by increasing our reliance on this method of crowd-funding. As we browsed through the open asks in DonorsChoose, we noticed that many projects expire unfunded, while requests from schools supported by more affluent parents are often quickly completed. We’ll talk about this more later in the post.

CASE STUDY: School Year 2015 – 2016 (FY16)

The FY16 budget season was difficult for Boston Public Schools. Faced with a $42M - $51M dollar shortfall, the budget that passed included the closure of the Rogers Middle School and the Elihu Greenwood, a reduction of 130 positions in the Central Office, as well as staffing and supply cuts on the school level. We analyzed donations via DonorChoose for FY16 to see how these budget cuts impacted teachers’ needs for supply supplementation. 

In FY16, our teachers asked for over $1.015 million in supply donations in DonorsChoose (up 30% from FY15), but only 49% of the projects were successfully funded. 450 projects totaling $520,000 expired without being funded and 520 projects totaling $495,000 were successfully funded.

Next we analyzed the FY16 donations by zip code and were again discouraged by the results. Not surprisingly, the highest amounts of DonorsChoose donations were collected by schools in affluent zip codes in Boston’s Downtown, South End and Back Bay neighborhoods, where students benefited by an average bump in supply spending of $77 to $123 per pupil.  

View high resolution figure HERE; See our collected data HERE

The Quincy Lower school accounted for all of the donations in zip code 02111*, which totaled $97,519, resulting in an average per pupil spending bump of $123. Students in Roxbury Crossing (02120), home to Madison Park, Fenway High, and O’Bryant Math and Science, saw an average per pupil increase of only $3.81. Some schools such as the Tobin in Mission Hill, the Timilty in Roxbury, the King K-8 in Dorchester and the Chittick in Mattapan, among others, did not collect any donations by this method, while some BPS schools did not submit any requests at all. It would be interesting to talk to teachers at these schools to see why they don’t use the site.

The projects for PreK to grade 5 classrooms were funded at a rate 35% higher than grades 6 - 12. This can in part be attributed to the lower cost of Pre-K to Grade 5 projects vs the technology heavy grades 6 - 12 classroom projects. There is also the impact of parent agency in how funding requests are amplified across networks, as well as the impact of more affluent social networks to support these project requests.

We aren’t asking our teachers and school leaders what resources they need to provide a world class education. Instead, the BPS budget continues to create an austerity environment that forces teachers and students into the marketplace of donor dollars. This budgeting environment perpetuates a power dynamic that those “other kids” need to beg for basics. Donors get to feel like they are helping poor students without having to really address the funding mechanisms that created these glaring disparities.

Another issue with this method of funding, which is in most cases for the most basic of school supplies, is it compels teachers to “sell” the worth of their students to the users of DonorsChoose. When teachers are forced to convey the exceptional nature of their specific students, this continues to perpetuate the “othering” of marginalized students.

Crowd-funding maintains the power dynamic of those with financial means deciding who the “winners” are based on the donor’s perception of the value or need of that particular classroom. Even the language of the project proposals emphasizes how deserving, hardworking and smart the students are, further marginalizing underfunded classrooms. This type of language is common for poor, urban students who have to prove they’re worthy of receiving resources at school, and the impact of this framing is felt by students, families and communities that read these descriptions about their children and communities. Contrast that to suburban, primarily white students whose schools are far better resourced simply because of the belief that those children are entitled to a robust public education as a pillar of American democracy is yet another example of how racism plays out in Boston.

In addition, each donation requires that the donors contributes to the cost of running DonorsChoose. If the funding isn’t fully met, the project isn’t funded, even partially. The money stays with DonorsChoose to be used either in a future project requested by the teacher or for a different project. This is a waste of philanthropic resources that may never reach the intended recipient.

Again, the burden of all of this sits squarely on the shoulders of the students and families with the fewest economic resources. In addition to this type of direct giving to teachers, many programs across BPS already rely on the largesse of foundations and corporations. As the city continues to fail to fully and equitably fund our public schools, we force our students with the greatest needs into a philanthropic Hunger Games where outside players with financial means get to decide who the winners are. This continues to widen the equity gap across the city with those schools that have a higher percentage of high poverty students from Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester and East Boston receiving fewer and fewer resources and then being blamed for failing to maintain the same results as better resourced schools.

This significant rise in crowd-funded schools supplies confirms that budget cuts are not “strategic reinvestments.” When there are reductions to the budget, whether they are via changes to student weights or fluctuations in enrollment, costs do not go away. The needs of the students and their teachers do not go away; they are either shifted elsewhere or result in detrimental impacts to classroom learning.

The proposed FY18 budget does not address these issues, and without a significant increase to our budget coupled with a restructuring of our budgeting procedures, this will only get worse.

This post was researched and written in collaboration with BPS parent and fellow blogger Tonya Tedesco. You can find her on Twitter @TonyaTedesco.

BPS Budget Cuts in Fiscal Year 2018

Boston Public Schools delivered the preliminary Fiscal Year 2018 budget to the Boston School Committee on February 1st. Despite the tightly controlled messaging from both the Mayor’s Office and the BPS Budget Office which promised that school level spending would increase by 3% next year, 49 schools are losing a total of $11.47 million, according to BPS’s own WSF School by Comparison spreadsheet.

The losses are staggering, especially after 3 consecutive years of similarly devastating deficits. Brighton High is losing $1 million; McCormack Middle School is losing $936,000; the Dever, the Tynan and Madison Park are all losing over $700,000 each. For a full list of schools experiencing losses this year, click here.

What is truly alarming to us is that the evisceration of our urban schools has become so commonplace that the Mayor’s Budget Office and school department didn’t even acknowledge these budget cuts at their February 1st budget presentation. Our schools are already operating on austerity budgets after 3 consecutive years of multi-million dollar losses. Donors Choose crowd-funding and parent councils deliver even the most basic schools supplies; many schools have only a part-time nurse; the cuts to Weighted Student Funding last year mean that there are more students in classrooms with fewer adults and fewer resources.  

This year, like many years before, our children will lose teachers and professionals who had gained their trust. Burke High will lose 4 positions, including a librarian, an English teacher, a math teacher and a para-professional. Charlestown High, Excel High, Brighton High and the McCormack will all lose their librarian. As more BPS school libraries become unstaffed or under-staffed, we are wasting valuable resources and risking the loss of a high school’s accreditation.

Twenty three of the schools receiving budget cuts this year are categorized as DESE Level 3, eleven are Level 2, and six are Level 1. Because these cuts are related to a decline in enrollment in a choice based system, a correlation must be drawn between a school’s DESE level and their desirability to BPS families. We must consider supplemental funding interventions for schools in which higher DESE levels have a detrimental impact on funding as a result. [See our data related to losses and DESE levels here]
 
Of greatest concern, at least one Level 5 and six Level 4 schools will suffer from budget cuts in next year’s budget. Dorchester Academy is losing over $100,000; Channing Elementary is losing over $380,000; Grew is losing over $200,000; Winthrop is losing nearly $200,000; Madison Park is losing over $700,000. Brighton High is losing over $1 million, as well as 90% of their current teachers in an attempt to turn the school around (Excel High is also losing 90% of their current teachers). How can a school be expected to improve when they are being given less resources to do it?
 
We analyzed the schools funded through WSF and were shocked to discover that the current funding system means that roughly half of our schools are on the losing side of the enrollment game. In the context of this graph below and the current national conversation about school choice during the DeVos confirmation hearings, we’ll certainly be continuing the conversation about how school choice can result in the unintended consequence of under-funding the schools already facing the greatest challenges.

Do you have information about FY18 Budget Cuts at your BPS School?
Contact me on Twitter @krissycabbage.

No On 2: Activism in Public Education and Beyond

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.”

– Alice Walker

As we sift through the election data from Massachusetts Ballot Question 2 and begin to draw conclusions to inform future directions, I felt compelled to write a personal reaction to the seismic shift in the political landscape this week, both on the national level and within the education reform movement.

A few weeks ago, I went to Wellesley College with BPS student Michael Jones from Boston Youth Organizing Project and Jessica Tang from the Boston Teachers Union to speak at an event called “The People Take Over the Election.” Because of our work on the No On 2 campaign, we were invited to talk about how grassroots movements can affect change on the local, state and national level.

Our story is one that you will not hear about in the mainstream press that continues to promote a false narrative that teachers unions alone opposed and defeated Question 2. The success of the No On 2 campaign was built on a sturdy statewide coalition made up of political leaders, organizers, school committees, teachers, parents, but most importantly, our students who are in under-resourced schools that are being crushed by budget cuts.

For students in Boston and other urban districts, adding MORE schools to an educational landscape in which librarians, AP classes, and Spanish classes have recently been cut; opening MORE schools when 5 students are already sharing ONE textbook due to a lack of resources; opening MORE schools when some of our leaders are telling us they may need to close some, none of this made any sense to them.

No On 2 was successful because our students brought a level of authenticity and unvarnished reality into a polarized political battle that was being fueled by millions of dollars of Dark Money and fed on longstanding racial and class divisions in Boston and beyond. Our students, along with Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson and other community leaders, parents, teachers and organizers, participated in debates, rallies, door-knocking, phone-banking, and conversations with our friends and neighbors. We wrote blog posts, created videos, and leveraged social media to spread our message across the state.

The No On 2 movement was natural and organic to us because we were speaking from the heart about the things we value the most in our lives: our children, our schools and our communities.

At the same event at Wellesley College, Karen Narefsky, a community organizer focused on affordable housing, brought up something that really struck a chord with me. She talked about how activism is not just something you do in isolation; it becomes a rewarding part of the collective human experience. I read a similar sentiment from BPS student Erik Lazo in this wonderful piece by teacher Emily Kaplan about the BPS Walkout and its natural segway into the No On 2 movement:

“With activism, you notice that you’re never too weak. If someone’s going to step on your toes, you don’t have to be okay with it. You can change your society. And being more connected with your community, you no longer need this isolated mentality...Not only do you experience whatever’s going on in your school, you experience what’s going on in other people’s lives. And then these experiences kind of intertwine with your own.”

Your collaborators in activism are your everything. They are your friends, your family, your community, your lifeline, and it becomes difficult to ever imagine a life before you were an activist.

For us, Question 2 had a happy ending. We defeated a reckless ballot question that would have destroyed our urban public schools in Massachusetts. We changed the narrative that charter schools are the preferred educational solution of the black and Latino communities. We defeated a 24 million dollar missile aimed at our privatizing our schools with grassroots collaboration.

There will be much more for us to write on this subject this in the future, but in the present there is a much more immediate cause.

We need to recruit a nation of activists to push back on the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic tide that is rising faster than any of us can fathom. We need to organize, strategize, rally, write, create art, do whatever it takes to defend our vulnerable neighbors and preserve the future of our democracy. We need to be nimble, reflexive, creative, proactive, tough and compassionate all at once. We all need to become the best activists we can be, and FAST.

The task at hand will feel daunting at times, but the really good news is that this will be the most fulfilling, worthwhile and essential undertaking of all of our lifetimes.

Question 2: The Big Short of Public Education

“Facts are stubborn things, and whatever be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts or evidence”
– John Adams

For the past year, there’s been much discussion among education journalists about the possibility of a “bubble” in the charter school sector after University of Connecticut Professor Preston Green III and his co-authors published a piece in University of Richmond Law Review, "Are We Heading Toward a Charter School 'Bubble'?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis." 

Professor Green presents some troubling parallels between the subprime mortgage crisis; a lack of government oversight, federal regulators allowing the expansion of a parallel system, multiple authorizers leading to new charter schools without proper screening, and predatory targeting of low income and African American communities. 

Many of Preston Green’s concerns were confirmed in a recent sweeping Federal Audit of charter schools that found:

“The Department’s internal controls were insufficient to mitigate the significant financial, lack of accountability and performance risks that charter school relationships with CMOs (Charter Management Organizations) pose to Department program objectives.”

These same concerns were reflected in the NAACP’s recent passage of a resolution calling for a moratorium on the further expansion charter schools until significant issues of accountability and transparency are addressed.
 

"We are calling for a moratorium on the expansion of the charter schools at least until such time as:
(1) Charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools
(2) Public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system
(3) Charter schools cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate and
(4) Cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.”

As the contentious battle of Ballot Question 2 continues here in Massachusetts, there is one area of concern that we haven’t heard discussed. Many of our most successful charter schools are highly dependent on philanthropic giving to thrive. In this post we’ll explore how MUCH they are dependent on philanthropy and how Question 2 might impact the financial stability of existing and future charter schools.

Let’s start with current philanthropic intake of charter schools. We examined the FY15 revenue for each Commonwealth Charter School and the results are surprising:

• Commonwealth Charters statewide took in over $81 MILLION in Private Grants and Philanthropy.
• Boston Commonwealth Charters took in over $35 MILLION in Private Grants and Philanthropy.
• Boston's Commonwealth Charters were supported by an average 18.3% Private Grants and Philanthropy, and an average of 64.9% Tuition revenue.
• Statewide charters do not do as well with philanthropy; some took in none at all, but the statewide average was 11.2% in Private Grants and Philanthropy and 76.5% Tuition revenue.

The wide variability in the amounts of Private Grants and Philanthropy to charter schools is of particular concern to us; all public schools should be equitably funded and that’s simply not the case. For example, the Sizer School in Fitchburg took in a whopping $6.2 million in private money in FY15, making up 57.3% of their total revenue. Tuition payments made up only 38.3% of their income. On the other end of the spectrum, Collegiate Charter School of Lowell did not report ANY Private Grants or Philanthropic donations in FY15, resulting in tuition payments accounting for 86.6% of their total income. 

View high resolution figure HERE. View all of our collected data from DESE HERE. View raw data from DESE HERE.

We found this wide discrepancy in private funding intriguing and decided to examine the student populations that were being served at the two schools on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

The Sizer School is located in Fitchburg. By state law, charter schools should be recruiting and retaining a demographic similar to the sending district, but Sizer enrolls a much more affluent demographic than the home district.

Fitchburg Public Schools has 53.2% Economically Disadvantaged students, while Sizer Charter enrolls only 28.5%. Additionally, Sizer enrolls lower numbers of ELLs, Students with Disabilities, High Needs, and Hispanics. The Sizer Charter School has 76.6% white students compared to 33.4% white students in the home district. 

Data collected from DESE

How is the Massachusetts charter school that has the LEAST philanthropic support doing with the mission of serving at-risk populations? Pretty well, actually. They're serving higher numbers of African Americans, Hispanics and English Language Learners than the sending district. The Collegiate Charter of Lowell serves 39.1% Economically Disadvantaged students while the home district serves 50.4%.

Data collected from DESE

We examined Boston Commonwealth Charter Schools as a group and also found a tremendous amount of private money, as well as wide variability in the data. Boston Charters benefit from 18.3% private money on average, while statewide the average is 11.2%.

View high resolution figure HERE. View all of our collected data from DESE HERE. View raw data from DESE HERE.

The award for the highest percentage went to Boston Preparatory Charter School, with Private income of nearly $7 MILLION, representing 49.5% of their FY15 revenue, while their tuitions made up only 44.8%. With only 415 students, that’s about $16,794 per pupil in private money.

These staggering numbers and wide variability raised a lot of questions for us:

• In the event of another recession, will our public charters schools succumb to market volatility? Does this reliance on private money add to the possibility of a “charter bubble”?
• If Question 2 passes and we add 12 more charters PER YEAR, will foundations and private donors be able to maintain this level of giving? Where is the ceiling for philanthropic giving in the education sector?
• How can we ensure equity for all children with such wide discrepancies in charter school incomes and per pupil expenditures?
• Is DESE or anyone else monitoring this? Could increased statewide monitoring of funding composition be used to distribute grants more equitably?

Let’s take a look at how our current Education Secretary Jim Peyser described charter sector philanthropic giving back in 2014, when he was still the Managing Director at New Schools Venture Fund, and implementing a 5 year “investment” in Charter Schools in eastern Massachusetts. The quote below comes from a 10 page “pre-reading” for participants in Philanthropy Roundtable’s May 6 Evening Discussion of Boston’s Charter Sector, led by Jim Peyser and Stig Leschly:

Exhibit 7: Growth Costs and Philanthropic Need
The figures below (chart omitted) include the (projected) budgets of five CMOs in the NewSchools Venture Fund Boston charters portfolio.  This includes Edward Brooke, Excel, KIPP, MATCH, and Roxbury Prep.

The average school in this portfolio reaches a breakeven point after 3 years of operation. These CMOs do not achieve breakeven during the 5-year time frame, however, because they are continuing to grow.  If we assume that the Boston CMOs stop growing at 18 schools and that in the aggregate the breakeven in FY2017, the all-in cumulative net operating deficit they incur to create 134 new schools is ~ $18.5m.

Wow! Just in case you missed it, our current Education Secretary told investors that in order for Boston’s CMOs (Charter Management Organizations) to expand they will need an additional $18.5 million in philanthropic giving over 5 years just to break even.

By the way, these same Boston CMOs already took in $26.2 MILLION in contributions from Boston’s philanthropic community in 2014 alone (data compiled from HERE).

Let’s stop and take in a couple of key points that Secretary Peyser’s presentation gives us:

1. When a CMO launches a school or expands, it costs significantly more than the funds it receives from state tuition dollars - a.k.a IT IS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN ITS EXISTING PUBLIC SCHOOL COUNTERPART.
2. Charter schools ARE DEPENDENT UPON PRIVATE FUNDRAISING IN ORDER OPERATE, LET ALONE TO COMPLY WITH MA REGULATIONS CONCERNING THEIR FINANCIAL HEALTH AND STABILITY.

Are you starting to wonder how the passage of Question 2 would increase Charters’ demand for philanthropic funds here in MA? Well, it’s funny that you should ask! According to documents we have recently acquired from KIPP Charter Schools in Massachusetts, the demand would be far more so than even Secretary Peyser’s 2014 calculations would suggest. Below is a figure from KIPPs expansion plan if Question 2 passes. They hope to have a total of 10 schools in Lynn and Boston, with philanthropic needs of $62.1 – $74.8 million. 

How “public” will our schools be if they’ve been established with millions of dollars from private investors? How sustainable is this model of expansion? Please vote NO on Question 2 until we can consider the answers to many of these questions.