State’s Charter School Funding Model is Killing Public Schools

The following public comment was submitted to the Massachustts Legislature Joint Committee on Education for their public hearing held on September 30, 2025, on a large number of bills, including a handful related to charter schools.

As you consider several bills that relate to charter schools in the Commonwealth, I hope that you will consider my testimony and that from other concerned residents. I am a resident of Amherst, with children in our local public schools, and have seen first hand the impact of the current charter school funding model on our local public schools. The current set up is gutting our local public schools and endangering our ability to provide even the most basic services. Our local public schools in Amherst lose a significant amount of students to two charter schools, neither of which serve a representative population of the surrounding communities. For example, in the Amherst and Amherst Pelham Regional School Districts, 24% and 28% of students, respectively, have disabilities, whereas in the two charter schools that attract our students, only 15% and 16% of students have disabilities. Our students are also disproportionately low-income, high-need and English Language Learners compared with our local charter schools.

Due to the disproportionate way in which students leave our schools for our neighboring charter schools, our costs per pupil have soared as we attempt to educate an increasingly high-need population with dwindling funds. Under the current funding model, we send high tuition payments to charter schools, reflecting the cost of educating students in our local public schools, even though these charter schools have costs that are much lower. Our competing charter schools are not educating the same high need population that our local public schools are, are paying much less in salaries and benefits to their non–union staff, and do not have the same legacy and fixed costs as our local public schools. We only need to look at the budget surplus generated annually by many charter schools to see evidence of this funding inequity.

When charter schools were established in the Commonwealth, one guiding premise was that as a student left a local public school, the school district could decrease its costs and thus it made theoretical sense to send that sum of money to the charter school. In reality, districts cannot reduce spending in lock step with the loss of enrollment. In Amherst and Amherst-Pelham, for every three students that leave our schools for charter schools, we send the equivalent of a teacher’s salary in tuition, but I think you can easily see that we can’t eliminate a teaching position for just the loss of three students, especially when they are spread across grades. And, even as enrollment declines, we still require administrators, and we still need to heat and maintain our buildings even if they are not as full as they once were. Similarly, our districts are paying many legacy costs such as the retiree benefits to a large retiree pool from when we had a larger enrollment, but are doing so out of funding for a smaller number of students. This means that our fixed costs take up an increasing portion of our limited funds every year, and the only place we can cut is in staff and programs. And as these structural problems in the funding formulas further drive up our per pupil costs, we send even more money to our competing charter schools.

In Western Massachusetts, we have a disproportionate number of charter seats per capita and our districts are suffering. Our municipalities simply cannot afford to continue to absorb the impact of this model, shouldering an ever- increasing responsibility for funding our schools, because the Commonwealth will not. Our local municipalities are pouring ever more resources into our local public schools even though we have little commercial tax base or ability to generate revenue sufficient to cover rising school costs. None of our municipalities are capable of fully mitigating the effects of this structural inequity set up by the Commonwealth. This is something that only the Commonwealth can address and I hope that you will do so. It is quite frankly shameful that Massachusetts, home to the very first public school in the nation, is allowing local public schools to die by not addressing the charter situation. We can’t wait. Our children are in these schools now losing programs and teachers every year. This spring, the vast majority of local school districts in the Commonwealth will see the agonizing budget discussions that have become an annual occurrence. The choices are impossible ones for school leadership to make. And we will watch as the charter schools that surround us end the year with budget surpluses instead of deficits, and expand their numbers, offer new services and programs, and entice away more of our students, further exacerbating the disparities and driving up our costs.

Local school leadership, municipalities and advocates for equitable education for all can’t fix this problem. The Massachusetts legislature must do that – it is beyond time.

Cathleen Mitchell is a resident of Amherst