Charter school resources don’t always correlate with ranking

In charter schools, as in traditional public schools, money doesn’t always guarantee results. One school, Paul Public Charter School, manages to do a lot with a little.

The DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) has recently released data detailing the amount of private money contributed to each charter school over the past three years. The amounts vary widely, as reported in the Post. And the schools receiving more private funds aren’t necessarily the ones that are ranked higher on the PCSB’s measure of academic performance.

It’s no surprise that the KIPP DC schools, which have received an average of $3,621 per student over the past three years, are in the top tier of the PCSB’s Performance Management Framework (PMF). But so is Paul, located in Ward 4, which got only $132 per student.

Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science received a whopping $6,588 per student, including in-kind donations from the university. But its PMF ranking is only about 4 percentage points higher than Paul’s, 69.6% as compared to 65.8%.

The private funds are in addition to the approximately $9000 per student in government funds that each charter school receives. Per pupil allotments are higher for students who have disabilities or are English language learners.

The PMF score is based on a number of factors, including student performance and growth on the DC CAS standardized tests, attendance, re-enrollment, and, in the case of high schools, graduation rates. The PCSB calculation of private funding is for a school as a whole, whereas the PMF score may apply only to a specific division of the school, such as middle school or high school.

Of course, the amount of private funding and a school’s PMF score don’t necessarily tell the whole story. School populations vary in terms of needs, and schools with a lower proportion of low-income students may perform well academically even without a lot of extra resources. Washington Latin Middle School, for example, is in Tier 1, with a PMF score of 71.5%, and received only $436 per student. But only 24% of its students are low-income, as compared to 62% at Howard and over 80% at KIPP.

On the other hand, Paul’s student body is 72.4% low-income, and the school still managed to achieve a high PMF ranking with only a small fraction of the money available to Howard.

Conversely, some of the schools in the lowest tier of the PMF, Tier 3, received fairly sizeable private donations. Ideal Academy took in $1,193 per student but received a score of only 29.7%. And Septima Clark, a Tier 2 school that was taken over by another charter school due to academic problems, received $1,190 per student but scored only 37.1%.

Paul’s DC CAS scores this year were also impressive, with 81.2% of students proficient in math, an increase of 13 percentage points over last year. In reading, 61.1% were proficient, up about 1 percentage point over last year.

It’s not clear how Paul achieves such impressive results on a relatively low budget, but soon the school will have a chance to try out its methods on a broader age range. The school, which has been serving grades 6 through 9, is adding a 10th grade this fall and plans to add an additional grade each year until it goes all the way through 12th.