I posted previously about Bruce Baker’s study of charter schools in New York City and Houston.
It is such a clear and concise analysis of which students enroll in charters and how much charters spend, I am posting it again here.
Charters in these two cities do not enroll the same proportion of students with disabilities and students who are English language learners as public schools.
Charters in these cities tend to spend more per pupil, in some cases, significantly more than public schools.
This information is drawn from public sources. Why charter advocates continue to insist that charters enroll the same students as public schools is one of the public policy mysteries of our day.
Baker’s study shows how charters routinely skim the easiest to educate students, spend more, and then claim success.
A new study will be published tomorrow showing the same phenomena for charters in the state of Texas.
Obviously this is not true of every charter.
But it seems to be typical.
At what point do charter advocates stop denying what has been documented again and again?
At what point do states begin to require charters to take a fair share of all children, not just those who produce the highest test scores?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree Diane, there should be a level playing field in both directions. Our dropout recovery serves the most at-risk in the state and receive less funding than all charters in Texas and have to do more with less, but gladly.
A really big issue which I’ve been able to explore only in a few contexts is the breakout of children with disabilities served by charters versus those left behind in public districts. There are cases where it looks like charters are serving comparable total rates of children with disabilities. But, when classification data are available, it almost invariably turns out that the charter schools are serving only (or mostly) those with speech impairment or mild specific learning disabilities. I provide one example here:
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/the-commonwealth-triple-screw-special-education-funding-charter-school-payments-in-pennsylvania/
Where the PA special education funding formula for charters actually encourages taking on low severity special education students, because charters receive the average special education spending rate of the host district for each special education student. In other words, the fiscal incentive in PA is to set up a charter specifically geared toward mild learning disabilities and speech impairment.
I also show this effect in New Jersey here:
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/effects-of-charter-enrollment-on-newark-district-enrollment/
At what point do states begin to require district magnet schools to take a fair share of all children, not just those who pass the admissions test and meet other requirements?
I have asked about the differences between charter and magnet schools, but there seems to be little interest here in that discussion.
I’m interested to see what happens here in Nashville. We have two schools (Cameron Middle School and Brick Church Middle School) that are being converted to charters, one grade at a time, by a local charter operator, LEAD. The rules are, though, that students are still zoned to these schools, though they can opt-out if they so desire. From what I’ve seen on enrollment, these schools (Cameron is in its 2nd year, Brick Church in its 1st) have much higher ELL and Exceptional Ed populations than other local charters, on par (not surprisingly) with district public schools.
Typically when charters have the same enrollments, they get the same results as public schools.
Good idea to wait and see what happens ten years from now.
Hope to be there to watch with you.
I hope I am off in my economic projections. I think they will make a mad rush for profits, create a bubble due to a lack of regulation, and leave our schools in the same shape as the housing market. The parallels are there. What happens when they are broke and gone? Hopefully some real teachers with real experience will be there to rebuild the system. I wish I were younger, I see a real opportunity, but the crash must come first.
They will not stop denying it, and they will continue to get promotion and protection from both silent support from fundraising and legislative action groups, and open PR/policy forwarded by elected officials. Truth is moot or arbitrary to them, and once light is shed on one false narrative (see “cake walk”, “shock and awe”, “shared sacrifice”, “lavish salaries…) they scurry for the shadows to gnaw away at another spot.
Right now the narrative is that public schools are the burden fueling the poverty cycle, as opposed to the truth-that the poverty cycle burdens families and students, hampering academic success. The genius of the jokers driving the reform agenda is they have turned the struggling classes upon each other, fully intending to further dis-empower them all economically, and politically. Siphoning of the easiest to educate; protecting their own in gated communities and private schools others will never see; cementing a caste system that will entitle some to the education and knowledge they can afford, relegating the rest to street vendor markets or tech-support phone banks.
Thanks for re-posting Baker’s data and for news on Texas. Very impt to keep this issue in public eye, that charters cream easier-to-educate students from pub schls and then their advocates deny this is going on…big lies are part of the big corporate campaign to seize assets and budgets from the public sector.
Two clarifications: 1) It is not correct to say that “charters” in Houston spend more than the district. KIPP Upper does, but Bruce Baker’s own data show most other charters spending about the same or less. 2) Baker’s chart also highlights that most Houston charters are serving way more poor kids than the Houston public schools are.
Related satirical piece: NYC Charter School Accepts First High Needs Student @ http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2012/08/first-high-needs-student-accepted-at.html
Conversely can it be said that a certain portion of the student body benefits from not being forced into a learning environment that is necessarily encumbered with servicing slower students? What about the needs of the high achieving student?