The Josiah Bartlett Center’s recent post by Drew Cline rightfully points out that reduced increases in school budgets are being called cuts, which is misleading.
At the same time, Cline reports that increases in spending that come from Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) are actually savings, which is similarly misleading.
In an emailed article I received on March 14, 2025 (which I can’t find on the Bartlett site), he talked about state-level savings in per-student costs. However, the numbers didn’t make sense to me, so I asked him about them.
Our email exchange went like this:
Jody: I’m all for school choice, but can you explain this statement from this post?
“… pegs state-level savings for students who switch from public school to an EFA at $2,611. The savings for local school districts is much larger, at an estimated $16,949.”
I assume that means per pupil. But school budgets don’t go down when a few students leave. So where’s the savings? What am I missing?
Drew: That’s the variable cost per student. A district won’t necessarily cut exactly that much if just one student leaves, but that’s the amount a district could save per student.
Jody: Thanks, Drew. But districts don’t think like that. No district would cut that much because the cost for running a school doesn’t change when one or a few students leave, whether for an EFA or when they move to another town. Why suggest that they actually save that money? That’s what I don’t understand.
Drew: <crickets>
The cost per student is not a variable cost. It is a calculated number (total budget divided by the number of students) , and not the actual cost of anything. It is a per student share of the total cost.
It may be easier to think about this way. Let’s say that a family — 2 parents, 4 kids — has a mortgage payment of $3,000 per month. We could say that each person’s share is $500. When one of the kids moves out, the parents offer to pay $200 to help him out. Using Cline’s logic, under this new arrangement, the mortgage goes down to $2,500 per month and that the family is saving $300 per month. Does that make sense to anyone?
On the other hand, when that kid leaves, the family’s food bill goes down. That is a variable cost.
Cline said that a district “could” save $16,949 per student. Students move in and out of districts all the time, and district budgets have only gone up. School budgets do not change when students leave unless the school fires a teacher or decreases its transportation costs or something similar.
I’m all for school choice, but I want people to be honest about the costs. Cline isn’t the only one referring to variable costs or EFA savings in this way. The Republican leadership are all doing it. Is it that they don’t understand how the funding works? I’m sure that’s true for some, but not all. And especially not Drew Cline.
You can’t have it both ways, Drew. Please be honest about the costs of the EFAs. If you’re going to criticize people for doing something, don’t do it yourself.
