Friday, September 09, 2011

One Thing You Won't See in the Next Mayoral Academy Proposal

One major unforced error by Achievement First and RIMA in the AFMA proposal was laying out the whole 13 year, five school plan in a proposal for a five year, two school charter. The potential advantage of this would have been to give momentum to future expansions and generally make RIMA look awesome and powerful. The downside was to lay out the full cost of the full five school plan which, to be honest, is what freaked me out.

Side note: the new funding formula is to be phased in over seven years (if you're getting more money). Presumably we're already one year in, so basically the first five years of charter school expansion would be offset by increased overall state funding, but the cost of a full K-12 charter district would continue to grow for eight more years.

Next time around, everyone in the room will know they're talking about a five school K-12 plan, but we'll be forced to pretend otherwise.

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