differences autonomy included “efficiency” outcomes better generate

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All charter schools in Milwaukee are non-religious and prohibited from discriminating or choosing their students. Because of the relative quality of charter schools, charters often cannot meet demand. In these situations, lotteries are held to determine admission. Most relevant for this analysis, the amount of per-pupil funding a school receives varies by school type. For the 2014-15 school year that is the subject of this analysis, non-instrumentality and independent charter schools received $8,075 for each student that they enrolled. Instrumentality charters, on the other hand, receive the same per-pupil funding as regular public schools. While determining that funding is more complex 11 , the number is far greater regardless of the calculation method chosen. We utilize the per pupil revenue limit for Milwaukee Public Schools provided by the Department of Public Instruction, $10,261. 12 This figure for public and instrumentality charters is $2,186 more than students in other charter schools receive. 13 These differences raise questions about whether all Milwaukee charters are really “charters” in the sense that founders of the charter movement intended. Charter schools have their origin in a 1974 paper by University of Massachusetts professor Ray Budde. 14 Budde’s original conception was somewhat different than modern understandings of school choice, focused on granting charters to teachers with unique ideas within existing public schools. But at its core, Budde’s motivation was a reduction of the power of school administrators to micro-manage and homogenize the process of education. Said Budde, “No one - not the superintendent or the principal or any central office supervisors - would stand between the school board and the teachers when it came to matters of instruction.” 15 Instrumentality charter schools in Milwaukee stand in sharp contrast to Budde’s vision. By employing MPS teachers, enjoying limited administrative flexibility and using the traditional curriculums, the power of these schools to be hotbeds of creativity and innovation is severely limited. Such divergence from traditional conceptions of charter schools has led them to be called “charters in name only” by some in the charter-school community. Therefore, given the national findings cited above, we hypothesize efficiency differences to exist between instrumentality charter schools and other charter schools. Because instrumentality charters function much like traditional public schools, it is likely that the increased efficiency found in existing Bang for the Buck 7
esearch on charter schools will not be realized. We test this hypothesis through an examination of the rate of return per tax dollar invested in each Milwaukee school type. II. Individual School Analysis on Efficiency a. Methodology The first step is to calculate an efficiency score for every school. In order to do this, we need an outcome measure that is utilized in every school and is comparable across schools. The 2014-15 administration of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) and the Badger Exam meets this criteria. The WKCE was the primary standardized test used for assessing Wisconsin students through the 2012-13 school year. For the year of our analysis, the WKCE began to be phased out in favor of the Badger Exam, which better aligned with new federal Common Core standards. For 2014- 2015, students took the WKCE for science and the Badger Exam for math. While these separate tests do not allow for comparability across academic subjects, they are reasonable for the comparisons within tests which we utilize here. Because the WKCE was taken in 4th, 8th, and 10th grade, we only use the 4th and 8th grade results from the Badger Exam to increase comparability as much as possible. 16 WKCE scores are reported by the Department of Public Instruction in four categories: “minimal performance,” “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced.” We create a four-point scale from these categories where ‘1’ is equivalent to “minimal performance” and ‘4’ is equivalent to “advanced.” These scores are then averaged across the students in the school who participated in the exam. Our main independent variables are several binary variables that take on a value of ‘1’ or ‘0’ for school type (instrumentality charter, non-instrumentality charter, and independent charter). Analysis #1 uses this information to create efficiency scores at the individual school level. This school-level efficiency score is the average of Badger Exam scores at the school divided by the level of funding that school receives, which is determined by school type. In order to ensure that we are making ‘apples to apples’ comparisons, in Analysis #2, we include a number of control variables that could plausibly offer alternative explanations for student performance. These variables that we control for include the grade level of the students (4th, 8th or 10th grade), the percentage of the students in the school who are non-white, the percentage of the student in the school receiving free or reduced lunch, and the percentage of the students in the school who are English language learners. Disabled students take a separate version of the WKCE and Badger Exam, and are excluded from these analyses. An efficiency score by school type is calculated through a two-step process in Analysis #2. First, our key variables highlighted above are regressed on the school’s average exam score in each grade level studied: (1) The coefficient estimates are interpreted as relative to the excluded baseline group, traditional public Bang for the Buck 8
Page 2 and 3: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Background: Not a
Page 4 and 5: 2. The most inefficient schools wit
Page 6 and 7: I. Introduction Although the public
Page 10 and 11: schools. These coefficient estimate
Page 12 and 13: These results are supportive of our
Page 14 and 15: Table 4. Effect of School Type and
Page 16 and 17: IV. Limitations A few limitations o
Page 18 and 19: Endnotes 1. New legislation has exp
Page 20 and 21: TENOR HS (Indp) 0.287191 IDEAL (Ins
Page 22 and 23: BUSINESS AND ECON ACAD OF MIL. (Non
Page 24 and 25: WHS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 0.167557
Page 26 and 27: VIEAU ELEMENTARY 0.24841 MIL. ACADE
Page 28: METCALF ELEMENTARY 0.192206 TOWSEND

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