Aug 29, 2022 2 min read

A twist of irony

In his Aug. 24 opinion piece, Thomas D. Longenecker, Commonwealth Charter Academy president and CEO, made some very good points about the ongoing tug of war between public and charter schools, with student welfare hanging in the balance. However, I couldn’t help but notice the irony in the article’s basic premise as to question why school districts are putting up such a fight against charter school funding when it is only{/em} 3%. He contends that there seems to be quite a bit of mud-slinging and factual distortions on the part of school districts as they try to justify their existence. Well Mr. Longenecker, isn’t that what you{/em} are doing?

I strongly object to the blanket premise that the district’s cyber charter school expense is only 3%. Why? For the simple reason is that this cannot be representative as a uniform expense for all districts. This a gross misrepresentation and oversimplification of the facts. To be fair and accurate, I would like to see a comparison between two extremely different school districts. Let’s consider a very low performing district that is struggling to achieve minimum state academic competency. Compare that to a high performing school district that has everything going for it, from funding to gene pool. How could both school districts have the same proportion of charter school student expense? High performing schools would proportionately retain more students than low performing ones, where parents would be looking for better learning situations for their children. To compound the problem, most low performing school districts also struggle with maintaining a healthy tax base.

Mark Twain said once, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Isn’t that the case here?

Sally Brown-Pawlosky

Hickory