Charter Schools on Back Burner in Favor of Budgets

Reforms to North Carolina’s charter-schools law won’t move until the General Assembly wraps up the budget, a development that could mean the bill won’t be finalized until this summer or even next year.

Senate Bill 8, No Cap on Number of Charter Schools, has sat dormant in a joint House and Senate conference committee since mid-April. It’s going to stay there for the immediate future in favor of more pressing fiscal matters, sponsors say.

“We left it there until the budget process is further along,” said Sen. Richard Stevens, R-Wake, a co-chairman of the conference committee and the primary sponsor of the bill. “Nothing has changed since it went to conference.”

That has frustrated school-choice advocates, who have pushed for the bill as their top agenda item this legislative session.

“It’s getting so late that it’s doubtful any [new charter] schools can open in August of 2012, so it does very little for the charter community and the families of this state,” said Eddie Goodall, president of the North Carolina Alliance for Public Schools and a former Republican representative from Union County.

Goodall said the bill is being used as leverage. “It’s a totally partisan, caucus-driven issue,” he said. “Republicans support Senate Bill 8, Democrats don’t, and that tells people that it’s a partisan issue. And that’s sad.”

A tangled process

Charter school advocates began the legislative session in January with high hopes. Lifting the 100-school cap was an integral plank of the new Republican majority’s agenda, and a one-page bill doing that was among the first introduced in the Senate.

Then the challenge began.

A Senate committee transformed the measure into a 21-page, comprehensive reform of North Carolina’s charter-schools law. The changes included establishing an independent charter-schools commission under the Department of Public Instruction, overhauling governance and funding structures for charters, and freeing up local boards of education to convert existing schools to charters without forming a nonprofit corporation.

Republicans also ceded to Democrats’ demands to require charters to offer free lunches and transportation to students.

The full Senate passed the legislation in late February on a mostly party-line 33-17 vote. Three weeks later, a House committee took up a retooled version of the bill in response to Democratic objections.

Incorporating a host of changes, the House version bore little resemblance to the original bill. Republicans added concessions on capital funding, stripped the authority of the charter-schools commission, and limited the number of new charter schools per year to 50.

Despite the concessions from Republican sponsors, only one Democrat — Rep. Marcus Brandon of Guilford County — voted for it on the House floor.

“Everything they brought up was given to them in exchange for absolutely nothing in terms of votes,” Goodall said. “We’re all wondering why the bill was even watered down with no Democrat support before or after.”

Back in the Senate, members took a unanimous vote not to concur with the House version, sending the bill to a conference committee in mid-April.

Despite the lengthy process, Goodall still thinks both sides will work out a version that Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, will sign. He objected to the idea of scrapping the bill and starting from scratch.

“That would be exactly what the anti-charter people would like to see done,” he said.

Tax credits stalled

Although charter legislation has commanded the most attention this session, school choice advocates quietly have pushed another major reform — tax credits for families who send their kids to non-public schools.

House Minority Leader Paul “Skip” Stam, R-Wake, has run two bills with that aim in mind. The first would make middle- to low-income families eligible for up to $3,500 a year in tax credits for pulling their children out of public schools. The second is tailored to families with disabled kids and would make available up to $6,000 in credits.

Both measures have garnered intense opposition from public-school teacher groups, claiming the tax credits would be detrimental to public education.

The bills would have a net drain $14.6 million for the next fiscal year. But beginning with the 2012-13 fiscal year, the tax credits would generate around $51 million in annual savings for state and local governments. The savings are reaped by fewer students in the public school system easing the burden on school districts and state administration.

The bill authorizing tax credits for disabled students passed the House Education Committee in April. The all-encompassing tax-credit bill remains in that committee and hasn’t seen any action.

David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.