For the fourth consecutive year, the growth of charter schools—publicly funded and privately managed schools that educate nearly 3.2 million students across the country—has slowed. Between 2017 and 2018, charter schools grew nationally by 1 percent, an all-time low for the sector.
Charter industry leaders are debating the exact reasons behind the slowdown. Some say it’s rooted in school districts’ financial woes, which make leaders less inclined to open new schools that could strain budgets further. Others blame shifting political winds—fiercer backlash from charter opponents and less robust support from Democratic officials. But there’s one factor nearly everyone in the charter universe agrees on: Accessing and affording sites for these schools is a huge barrier. Many charters, denied access to public facilities, rent their buildings, opening the door to rent disputes and self-dealing scandals. Finding adequate spaces to open new schools, or to expand to bigger buildings if the charter operator wants to increase its student enrollment, remains an elusive and expensive challenge for charter leaders in virtually every state.
To help slake the movement’s thirst for new facilities, charter supporters have been eyeing a new pot of money with growing interest—Opportunity Zones.
These are low-income, high-poverty regions of the country that, thanks to a provision of the 2017 Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, have been tapped to receive new investments. The Investing in Opportunity Act gives major tax breaks to those willing to direct resources into economically struggling urban and rural communities. Just who should count as “economically struggling,” and whether this kind of program is likely to boost such communities or just steer investment toward places that are already on the upswing, has been a hot topic in urban economic development circles since the program was first announced.
Many experts who have studied similar kinds of place-based tax breaks, from the Enterprise Zones of the Reagan administration to the Empowerment Zones of the Clinton years, argue that they boast a poor track record of actually improving the low-income areas they’re supposed to help. In some cases, researchers have found, the tax schemes actually hurt cities overall, distributing large portions of the tax benefit to industry professionals as transaction costs. “These policies almost inevitably result in tax giveaways for investment that would have occurred anyway,” concluded Timothy Weaver, an urban policy and politics professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, in a recent CityLab post.
Throwing charter schools into this mix is unlikely to settle any of these arguments.
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