Discriminatory: Should Charter Schools Fund Public Schools?

One of the more recent policy issues that has arisen in Florida is the amount of funding that Charter school should receive from the state. There are those on the Republican side that believe that they should fund Charter schools equally to how they fund public schools. Raplh Arza, who is a Republican legislator and a lobbyist for charter schools believe that it is discriminatory if the state does not fund both tradition public school and charter schools. He said, “lawmakers shouldn’t discriminate against kids because their parents choose an alternative to traditional public schools and it would be unfair to give traditional schools more money, even though they still vastly outnumber charter schools” (Clark, 2016). On the flip side Joanne McCall,

president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, says that “if they stopped diverting those dollars, just think what we could do for 2.7 million children” (Clark, 2016). Those dollars she is talking about are the those the public schools are to spilt with charter schools. For example, this past year 50 million dollars was given to 650 charter schools in Florida, and for the other 3,600 public school they received the same 50 million dollars. If we were to divide that real quick to per students enrolled for the charter school that turns out to be about $200 per student where it is about $20 for public schools. Arza says that parents choose to send their children to charter schools because tradition public schools either don’t pass muster or don’t offer the types of opportunities that parents want. The counter to this is that you must pay thousands of dollars for each student to be enrolled and not everyone can afford to have their child opt out of public schools. If you take away money from the public schools you are restricting them to revamp their facilities and improve their programs in order to raise the bar of expectation. Diverting money to private schools basically traps the public school system from improving for the betterment of the students. I agree with Jacksonville Rep. Reggie Fullwood, when he says, “there seems to be an over-concentration on choice rather than a focus on making regular neighborhood schools better” (Clarke, 2016). My father is a school teacher in the state of Florida and I agree that there needs to be a seriously inquiry about actually helping the school districts improve their system and that hasn’t been the case from what I have seen from the legislative side.