Two scholars demonstrated what we already knew: many charter schools are skimming and choosing the students they want while excluding the ones they don’t want, the ones likely to cost too much or pull down their test scores.
Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin Jr. tested the hypothesis.
Here is the abstract of their paper.
School choice may allow schools to “cream skim” students perceived as easier to educate. To test this, we sent emails from fictitious parents to 6,452 schools in 29 states and Washington, D.C. The fictitious parent asked whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to apply. Each email signaled a randomly assigned attribute of the child. We find that schools are less likely to respond to inquiries from students with poor behavior, low achievement, or a special need. Lower response rates to students with a potentially significant special need are driven by charter schools. Otherwise, these results hold for traditional public schools in areas of school choice and high-value added schools.
An excerpt from the study:
We find that, overall, traditional public schools’ response rates are similar to the response rates from charter schools across treatment messages. However, there is a different response rate to messages that signal a child has a significant special need. Traditional public schools exhibit no differential response rate to these messages, but charter schools are 7 percentage points less likely to respond to them than to the baseline message. This result is important because students with disabilities are twice as expensive to educate than the typical student without a disability (Moore et al., 1988; Chambers, 1998; Collins and Zirkel, 1992), and students with the severe disabilities can cost 8-to-14
times to educate compared to the typical non-disabled student (Griffith, 2008).
Here are commentaries.
Parents of students who are “harder to educate” may have a hard time getting schools to reply to their emails about how to apply.
Students with behavior problems, low achievement or special needs are sometimes not encouraged to apply to charter schools…
Charter schools and public schools of choice – those in school districts that allow students to choose from any number of schools instead of zoning them to just one – are less likely to encourage students with a history of poor behavior, low academic achievement or special needs to apply.
Charter schools, in particular, were less likely to encourage students with a potentially significant special need to apply.
That’s the latest research published Thursday by Peter Bergman, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Isaac McFarlin Jr., assistant professor at University of Florida’s College of Education.
The researchers sent emails from fictitious parents to nearly 6,500 schools in 29 states and the District of Columbia, asking whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to do so. Each email signaled either a disability status, poor behavior, high or low prior academic achievement, or no characteristic at all. The researchers also varied students’ implied race, household structure and gender.
“We find that schools respond less often to messages regarding students whom schools may perceive as more challenging to educate,” the researchers concluded.
The baseline response rate was 53 percent. But emails signaling a student with a potentially restrictive special need were 5 percentage points less likely to receive a response; emails signaling a behavior problem were 7 percentage points less likely to receive a response; and emails signaling prior low academic achievement were 2 percentage points less likely to receive a response.
Notably, emails indicating good grades and attendance were neither more nor less likely to receive a response.
In one sub-analysis, the researchers compared the responses of charter schools directly to the nearby traditional public schools. Overall, they found the response rates similar with one major exception: If an email signaled a child had a significant special need, charter schools were 7 percentage points less likely to respond while traditional public schools were not more or less likely to respond.
“This is one of the most striking findings of the study,” McFarlin said, “because it raises the question of whether high-performing charter schools are successful in part because they screen out the costliest-to-educate students from their applicant pools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Screening out students who are costly to educate is exactly what social impact finiancing does for preschool programs in Utah and in Chicago. Social Impact Bonds, also known as pay-for-sucess contracts, are hotty financal products promising investers 7% or more return, and one of the hucksters in a Nobel Laureate in Economics…Search for the Heckman Equation.
Economics 101 — to make the biggest profit, lower your costs. Nobel Laureate Economics who are greedy enough understand that unlike selling a widget, the cost of offering education (or medical care or various other services) depends on the child.
These are the same people who would be delighted to offer medical care to chosen (very healthy) 5 year olds while dumping the most seriously ill 5 year olds in the streets and announcing that no one should spend a penny more on those seriously ill children than is spent on the healthiest children because their success with the healthiest children proves that too much is spent on children who are ill. And then they’d deny they ever dumped any child because telling the truth is totally beyond their abilities when it interferes with their guiding principle — pure and unadulterated greed.
These immoral creatures of greed have no consciences. In that they resemble Donald Trump more than anyone else.
These people would rather see the poorest children with special needs disappear rather than teach them.
One reason charters have not proliferated in the most affluent suburbs is that these CEOs couldn’t get away with demonizing white middle class children as violent subhumans the way they do to the very poorest children when they want to dump them without acknowledging their own failures and of course, their own greed.
These people also think an E Intensive Care Unit is a great idea for post-op and very ill patients. I am not kidding. These are being lauded as “innovative,” ie cheaper. One nurse tends the ICU, and a doctor observes about one hundred sixty patients REMOTELY. If you are going into surgery, make sure your hospital does not do this, or change hospitals.
I assume that “These people” would never allow their own very ill children to be treated in such an intensive care unit.
Make sure the “right TAGS” are on the right person and the people doing the “so-called tending” can read.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Study finds publicly-funded (robbed public money from public schools), private sector “high-performing charter schools are successful in part because they screen out the costliest-to-educate students from their applicant pools.”
I do not see this as a problem. With school choice, different types of students will attend different schools. I have often advocated for increased funding and support for gifted/talented students. Gifted/talented students are more difficult to educate, and it will cost more to reach their fullest potential. This additional investment will pay off, when our brightest kids enter the work force.
Special-needs, and learning-disabled children require additional financial resources, and will incur additional costs to educate them and to assist them in reaching their fullest potential. This additional investment will pay off, when these children are able to enter the work force.
When there is a variety of different schools, the schools will be able to select the students to match their programs.
The problem with government/public schools, is that they are a “one size fits all” model. All students, learning-disabled, average, and gifted are assigned to the one location, and families do not get the option of transferring their children to an alternate learning program, that would more closely fit their needs.
A similar phenomenon occurs when there are AP or gifted/talented classes in a public school. The AP classes “choose” which students are admitted to the classes. Students who cannot cut the mustard, are not admitted. This is NOT a problem! The AP classes can concentrate on the students who have the potential to complete the classwork.
With separate schools, the school should be able to screen applicants, and only accept the applicants who have the “stuff” to complete the program.
You are wrong about public school AP classes, Charles, as you are making the wrong analogy.
So what if the public school does not allow a student into an AP class? Are you really making the outrageous suggestion that the public school simply dumps all kids who don’t take AP and are therefore no longer responsible for any financial cost of their education? Because if that is how you think US public education works, you obviously have public education confused with charters.
Just as you advocate, a charter school can offer all APs and simply dump the kids on the streets who can’t qualify to take them. Their responsibility to that kid ENDS as soon as he walks out the door. Just like private schools.
And although you seem to wish that public schools could simply dump all the 5 year olds who cost more than the “average” to teach, it doesn’t work that way.
This will surprise you, Charles, but public schools will actually pay $100,000 per student if that is the cost of teaching a severely handicapped child. It comes out of their budget.
But imagine how great it would be if public schools simply sent all the kids they didn’t want to teach to charter schools which are now financially obligated to teach those kids no matter how expensive their education would be.
You see, Charles, teaching advanced learners has NEVER been the problem with US education. Those kids are scoring higher than privately educated students on most standardized exams.
But it is so nice of charter folks to offer to take all the advanced learners out of public schools and do the “very difficult” job of educating them. Wow, what nice people — their ethics are just as wonderful as the Trump family! Always doing for themselves while pretending to help others as long as the ‘others’ they help make them rich.
” . . . teaching advanced learners has NEVER been the problem with US education.”
Shhhhhh. You are (un?)intentionally revealing the bait and switch tactic of the charter industry. The fact that advanced and even average students are quite successful in public schools (and beyond) was masked by CC tests designed to create hyper-failure rates. there is no program, no pedagogy, no super-teacher, no super-school that can offset the debilitating effects of generational poverty, family dysfunction, substance abuse, cognitive disabilities, or mental illness.
“there is no program, no pedagogy, no super-teacher, no super-school that can offset the debilitating effects of generational poverty, family dysfunction, substance abuse, cognitive disabilities, or mental illness.”
Since the charter folks promote the lie that they ARE that super school, they have to do anything it takes to lie about what is the bottom line in their educational philosophy and most vital necessity — their freedom to dump any child they want to dump with their responsibility for the dumped children ending as soon as they can convince the child to leave.
The incentives of charters are all wrong, since the better they are at getting rid of kids they don’t want to teach, the higher the test scores and the richer their CEOs become. Every CEO who excels at this becomes rich and the ones without a soul or ounce of morality do the best.
Thus it is no coincidence that the woman willing to work as hard as she can to insure that Betsy DeVos becomes Secretary of Education — even lying outright about how wonderful she has always been for every child in America — would also be the most adept practitioner of the dump the kid and demonize them and ruin their lives means of achieving top test scores with the disproportionately very small number of truly at-risk children whose results help her own personal greed be met.
How truly despicable do you have to be to fight with all your heart for Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education? It is certainly no surprise that Betsy DeVos’ biggest cheerleader is the very same one telling her racist supporters that the outrageously high suspension rates in some of her schools with virtually no white students is because the 5 year olds who win the lottery just happen to be violent (and the white folks on the SUNY Charter Institute board obviously believe any white CEO who tells them that lots of African-American 5 year olds are violent because of their natures and upbringing.) Ugly folks with ugly hearts and ugly souls. The SUNY Charter Institute board and the charters who choose to demonize some African-American children because they say it is fine to demonize some kids as long as you are nice to the kids whose test scores make you look good. Ugly folks with ugly hearts.