A new report from the National Education Policy Center reviews the “wait lists” that charter advocacy groups regularly publicize and finds them to be vastly inflated.
Charter advocacy groups claim that nearly one million students are wait-listed for admission, but they acknowledge themselves that the actual number may be about 400,000. NEPC authors Kevin Welner and Gary Miron say that even this number is an overstatement. Many students apply to multiple charter schools and get double or triple counted. Sometimes, after the students have enrolled in a charter school or a public school, their name may remain on the “wait list” of other charters.
They enumerate other reasons to doubt the “wait list” claims. Essentially, the claims are marketing devices, intended to persuade legislators of a huge, unsatisfied demand for more privately managed schools, funded but not supervised or regulated by the public.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Marketing is right!
Creating a shortage. Waiting at Walmart for a shipment of a special toy at Christmas.
Also, time to select and select again the children with the highest scores, most select parents and waiting until all the charter schools’ requirements are met. Selection is everything.
One charter ‘interviews’ three year olds. Got that? Three year olds and their parents for the PrePreK program. More like picking out puppies from a litter…find the perkiest, cutest, active- but not too active, physically strong, alert…not the runt, ever!
I wonder what the realestate firms are doing these days? They lived by school test scores. Houses were sold according to scores. People buy homes according to schools. Now, with charters here today, gone tomorrow – how are they adjusting in their profession? Any feedback? Speaking of marketing.
At least in NYC, charter school admission is done by a random lottery from the pool of applicants.
So the first criteria that is screened for is 1) The type of parent that would apply.
The second criteria screened for with qualified admission magnet schools is the ability to take standardized tests. If you object to the soft screen of having parents that would apply, how much worse is the hard screen of a standardized test score?
Charter school lotteries are deceptive and misleading like the charter school movement itself. Phrases like “equal chance” or randomness” are usually associated with the term lottery, but it doesn’t work out that way.
You must apply to get your name in the hopper and these applications are always accessed online and usually offered in English only. I taught at a school that was >80% Hispanic and >90% FRL. Many of the parents were illiterate in Spanish (let alone English) and only 5% of our families had internet access. When those kids show up, we have to teach them. Charters have a built-in advantage. They can say they are open to all students, but they know the application process weeds out the most challenging students.
As far as those waiting lists… I heard if a charter chain with 15 schools receives one application, its counted 15 times. If two siblings apply, it counts 30 times, etc. I don’t know if anyone here can verify that tactic.
“Teaching economist”, I object to you polluting a truth-to-power site with your billionaire think-tank tripe we’ve been shoved down our throats since 1980.
Newsflash, people born after 1980 grew up with that nonsense. It no longer has that ‘bad boy’ element to it that it evoked from now defunct 20th Century liberals when you said “Laffer curve” and “optimal unemployment”.
You still have not answered my question if you are remunerated, directly or indirectly, by posting here.
Yet again nampa1 I will answer your question as I have every single time you have asked. I am not remunerated, directly or indirectly, for posting here. I am not remunerated, directly or indirectly, by anyone involved in K-12 education.
thanks for recycling this and other reports from NEPEC, one of the few sources of critical reviews of propaganda from groups determined to undermine public education.
Looks like the US Department of Ed endorses building more charter schools:
http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/oii/2014/05/csp-leadership-grantee-offers-the-tools-to-build-a-stronger-charter-sector/
Wouldn’t it be great if they occasionally promoted building a stronger “public sector” ?
Wasn’t that how ed reform was sold to the public? We were going to “improve public schools”? I don’t remember anything about a national plan to replace public schools with privately-run schools. Maybe we should have asked some follow-up questions, huh?
Well, politicians are BOUGHT and SOLD. It’s the way this country does elections…SIC.
As a former charter school principal we would get these requests all the time. The information is taken via email or survey from the principal. There isn’t a good way to track waiting lists or schools at capacity, as many like to claim large waiting lists to create more demand.
I worked in the front office of a charter school for two years. We marketed heavily in the neighborhood and would get hundreds of applications for a school that had anywhere from 30-40 seats available in Kindergarten and 0-2 seats per class available in grades 1 and up. I remember the crestfallen looks on parents’ faces when it was announced at the admissions lottery that there were no seats open in a class and that the lottery would determine the order of the waiting list.
I once recommended to the principal that we stop taking applications after a certain point. I had two reasons for suggesting this: 1) We were giving families false hope, as anyone other than the first five to ten on the waiting list had no realistic chance of getting in, and 2) We could make better use of the time and money being spent on processing applications for students we knew would never be accepted, and on marketing to more families when we were already at capacity. His response was that we needed to keep adding as many names as possible to the waiting list, so that we would have numbers to back up our organization’s efforts to demonstrate the need for more charter schools.
Thank you for sharing this. If you don’t mind, could you relate what cohort of students and parents wanted to attend your charter school and what they hoped to benefit from enrolling?
Charter law in most states does not allow schools to stop taking applications. Some schools have expanded to meet demand.
The “wait list” factor is definitely part of the lore.
I have heard it about South Carolina charters, Raleigh Charters, and now the ones coming into Asheville, NC.
There is a rally of parents tonight in Asheville (in a very conservative district, at that)—-mostly over all the testing.
Also, McCrory has come up with another raise idea for NC. I have to say, it actually felt like 1994 when I read the article in the paper about it (as in, the good old days when people trusted and supported teachers, whatever faults might have also been flying around), but it still has to pass our Twilight Zone General Assembly and I’m not really sure the details, but again, it seemed more like the old bipartisan we support teachers mindset. We’ll find out if that’s true.
The report is explicit that this number includes some students whose names are on more than 1 waiting list. How ironic that university faculty who say they believe in expanding opportunity are so down on people in the k-12 world who are trying to do exactly that.
Interesting article from St. Paul, Mn newspaper about number of students on waiting lsit for local district public schools:
http://www.twincities.com/News/ci_25710211/St-Paul:-District-must-cope-with
Teachers union wisely suggesting expansion of popular programs
It wouldn’t surprise me to see Charters using this method to inflate their wait lists http://180dayz.com/2016/03/wait-list-clones/