5 reasons why introducing charter schools in Puerto Rico is a bad idea

Last week, I travelled to Puerto Rico and found something I hadn’t expected. Sure, folks thought the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA, hadn’t helped enough after Hurricane Maria, but they were resigned, not angry.

One taxi driver calmly explained to me how he was planning, at 40 years old, to leave the island for Texas in hopes of new opportunities and higher pay. Hopelessness radiated from the Burger Kings, lavish hotels, and graffiti covered walls of San Juan’s tourist oriented service economy.

Yet, the island’s public school teachers were both angry and optimistic. They held a rally on Friday in Old San Juan to oppose Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s new education reform bill that would allow charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, into an already stressed public education system. They practically ran the Secretary of Education, who has described Maria as “an opportunity to create new, better schools,” off the stage after she tried to soften the blow of the governor’s plan.

I was there to help them make the argument that charter schools are a bad idea for Puerto Rico. I boiled it down to five reasons.

The first: despite the rhetoric about “choice” and “local control,” charter schools actually take control from families and communities. Instead of elected school boards, they are managed by private groups with little guidance or regulation.

This lack of democracy has a number of consequences, but one is particularly poignant when it comes to Puerto Rico. As Hurricane Irma approached Florida last September, residents of all ages huddled in shelters set up in government buildings, schools, and other well-built structures. But only a handful of the state’s 654 charter schools were available because their leaders decided not to open them or the school buildings weren’t required to meet construction guidelines for hurricane protections.

Can you imagine if Puerto Rico’s public schools, many of which served as shelters and community centers during and after Maria, weren’t available?

Second, charter schools tend to pull revenues away from public school districts faster than the districts can reduce their costs. This is because many of the expenses associated with educating a student who transfers to a charter school — and takes public funding with them — remain with the district due to fixed costs, such as building utilities.

In 2016, the Los Angeles Unified School District estimated it had lost over $591 million the prior school year due to declining enrollment, increased oversight costs, and special education costs. In 2012, Philadelphia’s school district found that students that transferred to charter schools cost them $7,000 more per student in the first year.

As Puerto Rico continues to suffer through a fiscal crisis, why destabilize the public school system even more?

The third reason is, as the “school choice” rhetoric goes, charter schools do in fact “disrupt” students and teachers. They can close up shop at any time during the school year and often do. Two weeks ago, a school in Sacramento, California, closed halfway through the year by handing students a letter on their way out the door as school ended, leaving dozens of families scrambling to find another school over the weekend.

As a trauma-induced mental health crisis sweeps the island, the last things students need is more disruption.

Reason number four: charter schools tend to avoid taking students with the highest special needs, which leaves the most expensive kids with local public schools. This could have dire consequences in Puerto Rico, which has more than double the rate of students with special needs than the rest of the country.

Finally, what’s this really about? It’s about states like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, where charter schools are nearly bankrupting public school districts, exporting their worst ideas, like online, “virtual” schools. It’s about the Trump-Betsy Devos privatization plan coming to an island in desperate need of real help, not more market forces proven to have failed elsewhere. It’s about real estate investors, hedge fund owners, and billionaires, the same folks that want to buy the U.S. territory’s power utility, trying to make a profit on the backs of Puerto Ricans, this time students.

Puerto Rico’s public school students need stability and long-term investment. What the governor is proposing is just the opposite. Charter schools are a politically cheap “solution” that would cost the island dearly in the long run.

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Jeremy Mohler does strategic communications for In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that advocates for the democratic control of public goods and services.

He’d love to hear from you: jmohler@inthepublicinterest.org