In an attempt to gain Democrats’ support and reduce the chances of a gubernatorial veto, Republican lawmakers have transformed Senate Bill 8, No Cap on Charter Schools, to such an extent that even some conservative advocates of expanding charters want nothing to do with the measure.

Concessions made on transportation, food, capital funding, and oversight have added new layers of restrictions and bureaucracy to a proposal that initially offered merely to remove the state’s cap on charter schools. And even with these givebacks, Gov. Bev Perdue has given no indication that she would allow S.B. 8 to become law.

Notwithstanding objections by conservatives and others in the charter-school community, the bill may face a final House vote tonight.

When S.B. 8 was filed in January, it was three paragraphs long and contained one simple objective — removing the cap on charter schools, now set at 100 statewide. The bill that emerged from the Senate a month later had grown to 21 pages and included provisions that gave charter schools more funding and an oversight commission that would operate somewhat independently of the State Board of Education.

House Democrats called the revised measure a “Christmas tree” bill and pledged not to support it unless the funding was removed and the charter commission was stripped of its autonomy. They also wanted charter schools to provide low-income students free lunches and transportation and meet higher academic standards (standards traditional public schools are not held to).

By the time the bill made it to the House floor Thursday, nearly all the Democrats’ demands had been met. House Majority Leader Paul “Skip” Stam, a Republican from Wake County, said the bill had undergone six hours of committee debate and a dozen amendments on the House side alone. Several more hours were spent in negotiations with the Gov. Bev Perdue’s office and members of the Senate, he said.

Funding

An earlier version of S.B. 8 called for two major changes to the way charter schools are funded. It provided that charters get a share of education lottery funds they previously were excluded from, and allowed counties to take on bond debt to provide capital funding for public charter schools, as they do for district schools.

The latest version of the bill says that if a county decides to provide capital funding for one charter school, it must provide it to all charter schools. Terry Stoops, director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation, said it’s a big commitment for counties to pledge capital funds for an infinite number of charter schools that may be approved in the future. If counties are forced to choose between funding all or none, they may choose none, he said.

Free food and buses

While the bill would provide more funding for charter schools, it also would place additional costs on those schools. It requires them to provide free lunches and free transportation to all children whose household income is less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level.

For a family of four, that’s a $41,000 household income, a fairly common income for non-metropolitan North Carolinians, noted Francis DeLuca, executive director of the conservative Civitas Institute, in “SB 8: Time to Walk Away”, an opinion piece Civitas circulated.

“As such, it will require charter schools to bus high percentages of students with no additional funds to purchase buses or to build cafeterias,” DeLuca wrote. “Such provisions erode institutional autonomy and flexibility, once a defining quality of charter schools.”

DeLuca also argued that traditional schools are not “required” to provide either of these services. General Statute 115C-263 states: “local boards of education shall provide to the extent practicable school food services in the schools under their jurisdiction.” And most traditional schools, he said, do not provide transportation to students within 1.5 miles of the school. Charter schools would have to provide transportation to all qualified students within a three-mile radius.

Oversight

An earlier version of the bill created a semi-independent charter school commission that would approve or deny new charters and oversee their programs. Decisions by the commission could have been vetoed by a two-thirds majority of the State Board of Education.

The latest version of the bill strips away all administrative power from the commission and gives it merely an advisory role to the state board.

Academic Standards

The bill would revoke charters from schools that fail to get at least 60 percent of their students to score “proficient” on state tests for two years out of any three-year period.

Stoops has called the mandate a double standard because district schools are not required to meet it. If they were, hundreds of schools would be closed, he said.

Not only do traditional public schools remain open when they fail to reach 60-percent proficiency, Stoops said, they also are rewarded with additional dollars from the state.

Democrats dissatisfied

Even after winning several battles, Democrats still were not satisfied with the final outcome and spent an additional hour and a half debating it on the House floor before the bill passed its second reading — mostly along party lines — Thursday.

Rep. Rick Glazier, D-Cumberland, one of the bill’s staunchest opponents, insisted he would’ve supported the original version that “simply removed the cap,” but in his very next breath criticized the notion of allowing “unlimited numbers of charters.”

Glazier said Republicans still had failed to fulfill four requests from Democrats:

• Not implementing a weighted enrollment lottery, giving at-risk students an advantage at getting into a charter school.

• Not capping the number of charter schools allowed to open in urban areas.

• Allowing virtual or online charter schools, which he saw as under-regulated.

• Allowing charter schools to have a share of state lottery money and county capital funds.

“If we vote for this bill, we sign the death warrant for the traditional public schools of North Carolina,” Glazier said.

Charges of racism

Several other complaints by Democrats centered around the claim that charter schools fail to serve poor and black students.

Rep. William Wainwright, D-Craven, said charter schools in North Carolina have increased segregation and have widened the black/white test-score gap. Allowing “these segregated schools to proliferate without regards to where they may be needed will take this state back 50 years,” he said.

“This bill, as it is written, is a return to Jim Crow,” Wainwright said. “It is a return to separate but equal.”

Stam called the argument “unreal.” He told Wainwright about a January charter school rally he attended at which leading civil rights pioneers called charter schools the “civil rights crusade of this decade.”

“Although you think this is a retreat to Jim Crow, the people who suffered under Jim Crow disagree with you,” Stam said to Wainwright.

Stam also told House Democrats that if they planned to vote against the bill they take the issue up with President Obama.

“President Obama has said state limits on the number of charters schools aren’t good for our children, our economy or our country,” Stam said.

The bill is expected to pass a final vote in the House on Monday night. It will then go back to the Senate for concurrence and then to the Perdue’s office. Perdue has not said whether she will veto the bill, but House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, D-Orange, predicts there’s a “high likelihood” she might.

Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.