Afton Partners

Hite and Monson are projecting that charter enrollment will grow by 10,000 students over the next five years. To help offset that cost, Hite said, the District is planning to close three more District schools per year, starting in 2018. As students move to charters, the District must gradually downsize, he said, to mitigate so-called stranded costs.

A new analysis of reading and math test score data from across the country confirms just how much socioeconomic conditions matter. Children in the school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts.

The goal of the funding system is simple: Give schools like Oak Ridge more money and more control over how to spend that money. In exchange, school leaders have to demonstrate their spending decisions are getting more at-risk students learning.

The new plan is a compromise that “ensures that dollars follow students according to their needs in an equitable way,” Lewis wrote March 26 to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. It lowers the amount that Orleans Parish schools get for regular and gifted students, and increases the amount for students who have disabilities, are learning English or are far behind their grade level.

The Grand Rapids School Board on Monday approved a joint fundraising agreement with the Public Museum to raise $4.8 million for renovations to the new Museum School. The Museum School opened this year with 60 sixth-graders. The program will add a grade each year until 12th grade.

How did it come to this? Among the many culprits, real or perceived, are recalcitrant unions, inept administrators, feckless politicians and self-interested bankers. But, in the end, the simple answer is this: too much debt. The budget math is sobering. Since 2007, actual district spending has soared by more than a third, even as enrollment has fallen 4 percent.

By the end of the school year, in late June, the Chicago school district will have just $24 million in cash—enough to support two days of operations. Without a fresh infusion, next year’s budget will include devastating cuts of thousands of positions. It has already started preparing principals for the possibility that their budgets could be cut by more than 20 percent without state aid. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all: The slow-moving debacle, decades in the making, was also foreseeable to some extent, observers say.

The walkout was yet another troubling episode for a long-beleaguered school district that is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and behind on payments to its retirement system. It was also another reminder of how the destiny of schools is guided by shifting demographics, the growing charter-school sector and poor economics, though Detroit is an extreme example.

Charter schools receive more cash per pupil because they don’t receive some services from the central office that traditional schools do. More than a dozen charter schools are suing the district for failing to follow the state-mandated funding formula that could provide more money.