Are Charter Schools Getting More Money into the Classroom? A Micro-Financial Analysis of First Year Charter Schools in Massachusetts
October 2000
Paul Herdman, Marc Dean Millot
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This report examines the first-year finances of Massachusetts charter schools. By exploring the financial statements of the Commonwealth's first fifteen charter schools, we gained insights into how the boards of trustees of these schools managed the tension between meeting their academic goals and simply surviving as new organizations.
We examined the revenue and expenditure patterns of these schools and compared their spending to national district norms. Finally, based on our findings, this paper offers recommendations to charter school leaders, policy makers, and foundations.
This study builds on "Supplying a System of Charter Schools: Observations on Early Implementation of the Massachusetts Statute" (Millot and Lake, 1997). That study examined the capacity of the different types of applicants and the factors that limited their ability to operate an independent public school.
Some of the obstacles identified by Millot and Lake (1997) were that these schools faced difficulty in finding appropriate sources of technical assistance, facilities, and start-up financing. This report looks more closely at these same fifteen schools in that same year, fiscal year 1996, but it focuses on the financial issues associated with these challenges.
This work was funded by the Gund Foundation and was conducted by the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education.
