Bruce Baker has studied charter enrollments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Houston, and New York City.
Matthew DiCarlo observed that the GAO report actually understated the disparity in charter enrollments of students with disabilities, by comparing charters to the nation, instead of to the district where they are located. Urban districts have higher rates of students with disabilities than the national rate.
Bruce Baker notes that some charters inflate their numbers of special education students by taking only those with the mildest disabilities:
| 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: |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not inflating the numbers… but it is parsing the population.
It’s actually similar to what I find when comparing free vs. free or reduced price lunch. School officials (charter officials and others) know that the most likely reports and comparisons will be on the basis of free or reduced priced lunch… or special education as some aggregate group. So, if you want your school to look like it serves a representative population at a cursory level, all you’ve got to do is get the aggregate groups to look like they are in line. But, there’s a whole lot going on underneath. I tend to find substantial differences in % free lunch even when there are only subtle differences in % free or reduced. And, except in the case of special charter schools for high need disabilities, I find very large differences in which students with disabilities attend charters. Arguably, state school finance policies can play some role as they do in PA.
A school reformer in my area recently made free lunch available to the whole school in an effort to skew test scores so that it looks like poor kids have improved under his reign.
Just how was that managed?
I don’t agree with these statements used as across the board arguments. Our school was created to work side by side with the public school in our district to help at-risk students. Because we are open enrollment and it is our mission, our school is far above the state average for serving students with disabilities. So much so, the crazy bureaucracy rated us poorly for having TOO any special education students. This particular piece just goes beyond what I know for a fact to be false for some types of charter schools. I would love to see more discussion that compares apples to apples and breaks down charter school typology. While I am opposed to corporate privatization of public education, I know first hand that individual community charter schools that work with the LEA have provided an essential element to the public education.
Your school is an outlier. The charter chains are not working with LEAs. And they are not taking a fair share of students with disabilities. Don’t generalize from your own personal experience.
Do you see anyway those of us who are “outliers” can stay alive and continue to be a service to students while at the same time opposing privatization and charter chains?
I wish that all charters were like yours. Under the pressure to get higher and higher test scores, there is a disincentive to enroll students who will pull them down.
So we need to collate all those policies/regulations that make charter schools attractive to the piranhas. If we limit their food source, they will go looking for new feeding grounds. There must be enough fodder here for a blockbuster movie…book…Diane? Is there a Matt Damon movie in it?