Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, November 05, 2009 6:01:14 PM
I got a kick out of the tagline to Howard Blume's Los Angeles Times article on lower enrollment at Los Angeles Unified School District:
The loss of students, apparently to charter schools in some cases, is bad news for the district's budget -- with funding based on attendance.
Well, sure, if you have less work to do, you get a smaller budget, right? Or at least a budget that isn't increasing at a faster rate. Isn't the budget supposed to enable you to educate students? Fewer students means that you don't need as much money. How hard is that to grasp?
Local independently run charter schools added more than 9,500 students this fall, a surge of almost 19% to more than 60,000. At the same time, enrollment is down more than 19,000 students, about 3%, at schools affiliated with the Los Angeles Unified School District.
By the way, the LAUSD, in budget and number of employees, is larger than the government of many states.
Many factors affect enrollment, including birth rates, the availability of jobs and housing prices, but the growth of charter schools hasn't abated. Charters are publicly funded and operate free of many district regulations.
In the LAUSD, some it could also be illegal aliens going home or to other places, due to the economy.
LAUSD, like many other public school districts, is largely using a model that is half a century behind the times. Charter schools are just a start. Separation of state and school would be better.