Politicians and charter lobbyists recite the claim that thousands of students are wait-listed for charter schools. They say we must open more charters at once to satisfy the demand for charter seats. The seats, we are told, are “high performing” seats, as if a seat had some magic to transfer to whoever might sit in it.
A blogger called Public School Mama describes her experience with the charter school “wait list” in Boston.
She really needed to put her son into kindergarten. She applied to a local charter school. She applied to the neighborhood public school. The charter school never called. The neighborhood public school told her that her son was accepted. She was happy with the public school. She liked the teachers. No complaints.
Years later, she got a call from the charter school informing her that her child had been accepted. She realized that all those years, his name had never been removed from the wait list. And she understood that the “wait list” was a political chimera.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s the same story everywhere. There are a lot of duplications and old names on these lists. In some schools, they just take anyone who applies. But they don’t tell the parents that.
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“. . . that all those years, his name had never been removed from the wait list.”
Aw, come on, it was only a little human error or computer glitch. No farm no howl!
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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This is pretty funny. The sitting Governor of Indiana went to a for-profit charter school convention and promised them more Indiana schools.
But they want more:
“Yet national charter school companies have said they are unlikely to expand to Indiana because other states offer more financial support.”
“I promise we are going to work our hearts out with members of the general assembly of both parties to make sure Indiana remains a state committed to educational achievement and excellence including expanding opportunities for charter schools — so help me God,” Pence said.
Now all these idiot governors will offer them more money for the privilege of having Charter Schools USA run formerly public schools. Maybe the national charter management companies can dupe these clowns into an inter-state bidding war.
Just embarrassing.
http://indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact/2015/07/28/pence-promises-expand-opportunities-charter-schools/
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Which is why Cami Anderson, in her quest to get those “much desired’ charter schools filled, implemented One Newark to syphon students to them, and thus state there was a strong desire by parents to get their kids in — even when those kids were now being shipped across town when the parents’ first choice was the neighborhood public school up the block.
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If you want charter schools to backfill, where do you expect the kids to come from?
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Doesn’t matter since they choose their public school and stay there. Take them off the trumped up charter list which is merely a marketing ploy and a lie. Surely Tim you will get on this immediately. Families choose their traditional neighborhood school all the time. Deal with it. And get back to work Tim. Eva needs you to get her a latte.
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Some families choose their traditional district school only because there is no room at the charter (that they voluntarily applied to of their own volition). Some families would happily accept an opening at the charter a year or more down the road. If Massachusetts law permits children to remain on a waiting list for their cohort for multiple years (New York’s does not), there is absolutely nothing remarkable or damning about this parent’s anecdote.
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What you have a very difficult time grappling with is that many parents are very happy with their neighborhood school and are not considering charters at all. Many have left charters when their children were deemed to be “not a good fit”. Broaden your horizons Timothy.
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Can you point to where I’ve argued – whether in this thread or in any other comment – that there aren’t many parents who are happy with their neighborhood school?
I think my horizons are fairly broad. In New York City alone there are many thousands of parents who will do anything in their power to avoid sending their children to their zoned neighborhood school—some of them have the means to pull it off, some don’t. There are many thousands of parents who are okay with their child’s traditional district school, but think that it could be a lot better than it is, and that it’s not a lack of money or resources that’s holding it back (I fall into this camp). There are thousands of parents who will fight like cornered wolverines if zoning changes threaten to introduce at-risk children into their child’s non-integrated classroom. There are thousands of parents who have left a charter for a district school, or for another charter. And there are thousands of parents who don’t fall into any of these camps.
Quibbling about the details of wait lists is closing the stable door after the horse has left the barn. There is a substantial, sustained demand for charter schools, especially in cities that contain areas of concentrated hypersegregation. You’ll know that there isn’t a demand for charters at precisely the minute they begin to close because students aren’t choosing them.
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Tim, pretend you are a charter operator who really, really wants to help the at-risk kids who only have failing public schools. Where do you choose to open your charter schools? 1. In Districts with lots of high poverty and failing public schools where you have thousands of students on the wait list who desperately want a spot? 2. In Districts with lots of affluent college educated parents where your earlier schools have empty seats and very few students who live in the district and get priority get turned down? If you choose number 2 because you say “there are poor kids in that wealthy district, too”, do you choose to give priority in the lottery to those at-risk kids or do you choose to drop priority in the lottery for those at-risk kids? If you answer is: “we choose to drop priority for at-risk kids because middle class and affluent kids need better schools, too”, then you don’t really care about at-risk kids, now, do you? And the thousands or tens of thousands of students on the wait lists for your very well-funded schools who are poor and can’t afford to live in the very expensive housing in the districts where you open new schools are NOT being served. And that, Timothy, is called hypocrisy. Wait lists are meaningless if you don’t open schools where the students on your wait lists will have a chance to attend!
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Tim, I’m the parent from the article. I have no problem with the fact that the school put me on a wait list. At the time of the lottery, I didn’t know if I had a kindergarten seat or not.
My entire issue is politicizing the wait lists. MA politicians will scream that the wait lists are proof that we need more charters. We (MA parents) are told that the wait lists are proof that people are desperate to get out of BPS. This is false. The wait lists are just families who considered a school. You would have to contact each family to find out what their opinion is on the charter cap.
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How does a multi-year wait list work, anyway? Do they not have a new lottery after K and keep pulling names from that original list?
The politicians should not be claiming that every single name on a wait list represents a child who would be willing to fill a seat at a charter school. However, a lot of the families on the lists would be willing if given the chance, and once the lists get to an appreciable size, the “yield” is likely high enough that it isn’t unreasonable to point to the lists as evidence that a community might want more charters.
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Hey Tim,
I’m having a hard time with the “reply” mechanism so I hope you see this.
This is what I know “now.” BPS purges their wait lists every January. So if you don’t get into the school that you want you need to reapply the next year.
But the charter school did it differently. They kept our names on that list for years, and grew their wait list every September with a new “batch” of names. I assume that new people trying to get into a grade higher than kindergarten would be placed at the end of the list. But I don’t know. That is why I feel there is an argument that these wait lists are inflated. People don’t hang out for years and years trying to get into a school. Families move on.
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Tim, If they really want to be in a charter school, why can’t they reapply every year?
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One of the chief criticisms of charter schools is that their lotteries and application processes are complicated and serve to screen out at-risk children. Yes, maintaining multi-year wait lists means that families who may have had no intention of attending are kept on the books, but so too are families who want seats and who might’ve forgotten to apply for the lottery a second (or third or fourth) time.
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Don’t forget, too, that parents willing to consider a charter school often apply to more than one charter. The “waiting lists” reflect the demand of seats at multiple schools for just one child. If I apply to Charters A,B,C,D and E for my kid, that’s listed as 5 seats, but it’s really only one.
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“their lotteries and application processes are complicated and serve to screen out at-risk children. ” So you are saying that charters do exactly what we here claim. They find ways to keep out difficult/expensive to teach children. I thought they were suppposed to help the most needy? If charters supporters believe in segregation, they should be honest and just say so.
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I said that it was a criticism. Whether or not it is a valid one probably varies. It is hard to imagine that there are many parents where I live who aren’t aware of what charter schools are, or that a separate step is required to apply to them.
I entered one of my children in the lottery for 4 Success Academy schools this year to test out how onerous or easy the experience is. It took me 3 minutes, and I can tell you the child’s exact spot on each wait list. The only criticism I have is that their web app doesn’t work on mobile devices.
Even if there is some fudging and double- or triple-counting (or more), there is obviously a considerable unmet demand for charter schools in hypersegregated cities with concentrated numbers of at-risk children.
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Are these real children or hypothetical children….hmm…there’s one more way to boost the much hyped “waiting list”.
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I have all-too-real children who attend a variety of Title I NYC DOE traditional district schools. Where do your kids go to school, Linda? The same district where you teach, I trust!
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Yes of course they did Tim. Many charters are closing throughout our nation. Pay attention.
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And this is a district where the vast majority of students are defined as being at risk, and there is a charter school presence?
If so, I applaud you! Your choice is unusual. Teachers in New York City, Boston, Chicago, etc. often make a different choice.
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Tim-
“Even if there is some fudging and double- or triple-counting (or more), there is obviously a considerable unmet demand for charter schools in hypersegregated cities with concentrated numbers of at-risk children.”
The demand for charters is manufactured by hype that the charters are better, then the demand is exacerbated by defunding the public school system and redirecting those funds to a not-quite-parallel system, which neither takes nor keeps all comers. The least easy to educate kids are increasingly concentrated in the regular schools, which makes those schools more challenging still.
“If so, I applaud you! Your choice is unusual. Teachers in New York City, Boston, Chicago, etc. often make a different choice.”
I taught in Boston for 36 years, my husband for 32. When it came time, we sent our 3 kids to public schools in Boston. Just as in Public School Mama’s account, school assignment was by lottery for BPS, and certainly there were no special processes for teachers. But we chose public schools because of our knowledge of our colleagues’ preparation and capabilities. Did we have some duds? Of course. If you ask my kids (all now college grads), they will tell you how valuable an experience it was to be in such a diverse environment – linguistically, sociologically, and racially. I don’t think there are many places in our society other than the public schools were there is an opportunity for such interaction and charters are contributing to the re-segregation of our schools.
About half of the membership of the Boston Teachers Union lives in Boston and many, many of them send their kids to BPS. In the last round of collective bargaining the members of the negotiation team for the BTU had among them 21 children and grandchildren who were current students or graduates of BPS. On management’s side? Zero.
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I work at a charter always going on about how its wait list is as large as its enrollment. One year, we were three students short, and the director called a staff meeting to let us know times would be tough as a result. I asked why we couldn’t just pull three kids from our 850-person wait list, and the nonsense answer I got is when I figured out it was a lie.
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It’s a scam. We have commercials all the time for the supposed wait lists and then we hear of students, mostly athletes, being poached from their traditional high schools and slots are made available just for them.
So how did they jump the trumped up “waiting list”?
What happened to the thousands of children waiting and waiting and waiting?
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In Chicago, there are 12,637 empty seats in charters, up by 1,131 from the previous year. In spite of this, Rahm and the cronies at CPS want more charters here. The “market” has spoken and been ignored by the privatizers. http://ilraiseyourhand.org/content/behind-ryh-numbers-charter-spaces-2015
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