I started my career as a teacher, then worked as a principal at a school I founded — then worked to copy that successful model as we opened three more schools. I now lead a network of charter schools called Explore Schools, all located in central Brooklyn.
In that community, only 59 percent of students graduate high school on time. That’s unacceptable, and we established our schools to change it.
Our network and schools, like all charter schools in the city, are nonprofit organizations. We educate public-school students, in public-school buildings, with public dollars.
I say this because, as of late, city officials and thought leaders compare our organization — and others like it — to corporations.
That’s always been a funny line of attack to me. Our staff and leaders certainly didn’t get into this with the goal of making money. We do what we do because there’s an educational crisis in this country, and we feel we must do everything humanly possible to provide families with better school options.
And we certainly don’t have some magical cash surplus that we sit on, thinking of ways to spend it. We put every dollar we get into our schools, our classrooms and our students. That’s our mission. It has never been about money, and it never will be. Not only are we nonprofits in the legal sense, but “nonprofit” describes the philosophy that undergirds our mission.
That’s why Explore’s four schools run almost exclusively on the public dollar. Any fund-raising we do supports new school-startup and central-support costs. Our schools run on tight margins, often with only two or three months of cash on hand.
That we work this way should disprove the myth the charter schools succeed because of supposed extra resources that regular public schools don’t get.
In fact, we run on this financial model in part because we want our model to be replicable in any type of school or district nationwide. We want to run great, free, public schools. That’s it.
That this is our motivation seems lost on those who propose that our schools should pay rent to co-locate in city buildings. They work to prove that we can “afford” it, as if this rent is some kind of tax or financial penalty.
What these critics ignore is how unfair this proposal is: It singles out our public-school kids, and their taxpaying parents, by taking precious dollars out of their classroom.
Without a doubt, a rent charge could have dire financial implications for our schools, but I’m more troubled by the feeling that our families are treated differently from other public-school parents and kids. It’s not right.
Students attending an Explore School are attending a public school — and, like the other 1.1 million public students in New York City, our students are entitled to have a roof over their head as they get the outstanding education they deserve.
We do the work we do not to increase our bottom line, but to help ensure that every child gets access to the education they deserve.
Great schools, charter or traditional, should be supported in this mission. That means helping a good school open a second school to serve more students. It means helping schools to share space when it is available. It also means holding us accountable for results and, if we’re failing our kids, shutting us down.
And yes, it means making sure public dollars are used in the classroom — not as a tax for political gain.
Morty Ballen is the CEO and founder of Explore Schools