Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The research base regarding the effects that charter schools have on the funding of traditional public schools is relatively small. Few empirical studies have attempted to analyze how public school funding is related to the growth of the charter school market. This study attempts to add to this thin research base and directly assesses how changes in the prevalence of charter schools in California school districts relate to the success of K-12 education ballot measures, particularly those that relate to the raising of revenue for public schools.  Charter schools as a school choice option could diminish citizens’ interest in school expenditures much in the same way that being a parent of a student in private school has this effect. Since parents with school aged children in traditional public schools are more likely to vote for higher expenditures, it is possible that as charter school enrollment increases that turnout and approval rates for increased funding are weakened. We hypothesize that local citizens’ investment in public education, as reflected by their support for local K-12 funding measures that include GO bonds as well as property taxes, is related to the extent to which the districts’ students are enrolled in traditional public schools.  On the other hand, districts with a higher prevalence of charter schools could have greater levels of parental engagement or higher levels of parental satisfaction, which could lead to a higher likelihood of passing ballot measures.  With this background information in mind, our main research questions include: (1) To what extent are changes in the number of charter schools in a district related to school funding measure success?  (2) To what extent is the proportion of students in charter schools related to measure success? (3) does this differ by the type of ballot measure or the foci of the ballot measures under consideration? This project uses data from the California Elections Data Archive (CEDA), the American Community Survey, and school and district characteristics data from the Common Core of Data and Private School Universe Survey. We use data from 2001-2012. Our descriptive results present interesting baseline characteristics of school funding measures. We found little evidence that for all measures, aggregated, that charter prevalence predicts measure success or support. When looking broadly at all education bond measures the evidence does not clearly show that charter schools are associated with a greater chance of passing education ballot measures, on the other hand the evidence does not clearly show that charter schools are significantly associated with not passing ballot measures.  Where we do find evidence is when looking at GO bond measures and property tax measures separately.  Then we find consistent evidence that charters increase GO bond success and decrease property tax success.  This may make sense as people see charter schools as being less closely linked to their home values than traditional neighborhood zoned schools, but they are also engaged in the school system and want to support the district public schools.