LOS ANGELES – The California Policy Center is debunking the union myth that charter schools are to blame for perpetual money problems in public school districts.

The Center’s David Schwartzman penned a recent editorial to highlight exactly why the often repeated claim that charter schools are negatively impacting traditional public schools is bogus, and expose what’s really driving the financial crisis.

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Essentially Schwartzman illustrates that its runaway spending, dictated through teachers union contracts, that’s the real issue, as the cost of educating students in districts like Los Angeles continue to rise even as student enrollment declines.

Schwartzman wrote:

The Los Angeles Unified School District is hemorrhaging cash, and the teachers union wants you to believe the problem is charter schools. The real problem is closer to home: district officials and teachers union leaders who systematically raid the coffers with no regard for the consequences.

LAUSD’s new $7.6 billion budget, issued in June for the coming fiscal year, adds $700 million in new spending. Most of that new spending will fund expenses outside the classroom as the district struggles to pay for increased benefits. …

LAUSD continues to spend more even as the district has lost over 100,000 students since 2006 – a drop of more than 20%. Despite the exodus, union leaders have pressed the district to add teachers and administrators. The district has seen a 22% increase in administrative staff over the last five years. Those teachers and administrators earn relatively generous salaries and benefits despite the abysmal performance of LAUSD schools overall. That generosity has produced unfunded pension liabilities of roughly $13 billion – about 1.5 times the district’s annual operating budget. Its operating budget runs a deficit of $333 million and rising, projected to exceed half a billion annually by 2019-­2020.

The Center also pointed to numerous seriously overbudget projects that have drained district coffers in recent years, including a $73 million ethnic studies program that was originally estimated to cost $4 million, as well as a new $200 million computer system that was budgeted to cost $27 million.

“That miscalculation,” Schwartzman wrote of the computer system, “was so severe that it required a temporary districtwide hiring freeze.”

The United Teachers Los Angeles union is also raking it in.

Last year, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Ramon Cortines convinced the school board to set aside $1 billion for union health care costs ahead of the annual budget, and board members happily complied while simultaneously rejecting an opposing board member’s request to figure out what that obligation might cost over the next decade, according to the Center.

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Schwartzman also highlighted a very, very generous 10.63 percent pay raise for UTLA members that added $278.6 million to the district’s budget deficit.

“In the same agreement, the school board agreed to hire 139 additional teachers and allowed teachers to collect 14.3 percent of their annual salary in back pay over the next two years,” he wrote.

Schwartzman concluded:

Despite this assortment of imprudent financial decisions by the union ­controlled school board, United Teachers Los Angeles, the LAUSD teachers union, blames charter schools for the district’s problems. As part of their propaganda effort, the union funded a study claiming charter schools have cost LAUSD $591 million in lost revenue due to declining enrollment. Many district officials and charter school leaders disagree, pointing to numbers that suggest charter schools actually bring LAUSD money.

The truth, then, is that charters are not the problem. The problem is that LAUSD schools are consistently among the worst in the United States – and that residents pay a premium for those miserable results. Instead of solving its financial problems, Los Angeles Unified makes them worse with every new budget. LAUSD requires serious financial reforms to maintain fiscal solvency, and these reforms must start with reining in unions, not attacking charters, the only part of Los Angeles Unified that is successful.

Schwartzman’s observations, of course, are also playing out in large union-dominated metropolitan school district across the country that have failed students for decades. While union officials and their sponsored representatives in schools point to charter schools that are providing a better education for less, they continue to force traditional public schools to pay for their members plastic surgery, legal bills, pension payments, and other union perks that have nothing to do with educating students.