Charter school critics claim there’s no financial transparency for charter schools – they need to look at the non-reporting Kentucky gets for its regular public schools

I hear a constant load of “noise” from critics of charter schools claiming these schools of choice lack the sort of fiscal transparency supposedly found in traditional schools.

Really?

Check an example of how Kentucky’s traditional public school financial reports look.

To begin, I blogged just 11 days ago about the first round of detailed school level financial accounting information ever released from the Kentucky Department of Education. Prior to this, the state only reported an overall per pupil spending amount in each school, but the numbers reported never looked very credible.

To be sure, just one year of detailed reporting isn’t much of a track record.

However, not only is detailed school level reporting just starting for Kentucky’s traditional public schools, but, as I pointed out in the blog, a number of examples in that first round of school level financial data, which is for the 2016-17 school year, show the reports are basically useless.

One of my 2016-17 examples was the report for the supposed revenue for schools in Floyd County, which is shown in Table 1.Except, as you can easily see, nothing was actually reported for school-level revenue at all.

Table 1(Click on Table to enlarge if necessary)

All the revenue was reported against the district central office only. The actual distribution of that revenue to schools isn’t shown at all.

In essence, this isn’t a school-level report.

Now, this was for 2016-17 data.

The 2017-18 school funding data just showed up in the Kentucky Department of Education’s web site, available from links here.

Was there any improvement?

I pulled up a couple of new reports to check.

In the case of Floyd County, the new report still is garbage. Table 2 shows how the so-called school level revenue report for Floyd County looks for 2017-18.

Table 2(Click on Table to enlarge if necessary)

This is the same nonsense we got for the 2016-17 school term.

We cannot tell anything about the funding that actually reached each Floyd County school from this. It is TOTALLY non-transparent.

And, this is starting to get serious. As I mentioned in my earlier blog, Education Week recently reported that the federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires Kentucky to report school level expenditures. That reporting is supposed to start this year.

I don’t think a report that looks like the last two years of what we got from Floyd County is going to pass muster.

Right now, I’ll bet that in states that have charter schools they know a lot more about the money going to those schools than we know in Kentucky for schools in Floyd County…and probably a lot of other Kentucky schools in other districts, too.

So, if anyone tries to push their nonsense about charter school finances being hidden, just show them what is happening in places like Floyd County and tell them they are clueless.

Report updated on April 24, 2019 to clarify the discussion is about new financial reports with more detail than ever previously available and to make some grammatical improvements.