Governor Gavin Newsom acted to tighten enrollment rules for charter schools, which have been credibly accused of excluding or pushing out students with disabilities and students who get low scores.
Three years ago, the ACLU of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates identified charter schools that advertised their exclusionary policies on their websites, but have since changed their websites. Their report found that more than one in five charters acknowledged keeping out certain classes of students.
EdSource summarized:
These practices, the report alleges, “violate the California Education Code, the California and U.S. Constitution, and state and federal civil rights laws.”
The report, titled, “Unequal Access: How Some California Charter Schools Illegally Restrict Enrollment,” says that according to the California Charter Schools Act of 1992, charter schools are required to “admit all pupils who wish to attend,” except for space limitations.
Newsom proposed a statute to ban such practices:
Newsom’s proposed statute would specify that charter schools cannot request or require parents to submit student records before enrolling. And it would require that charter schools post parental rights on their websites and make parents aware of them during enrollment and when students are expelled or leave during the year….The proposed statute implies there should be no allowances “for any reason” that might discourage any pupil from enrolling in a charter school.
A charter school advocate complained that district magnet schools for the arts or science or other specialties are not required to accept every applicant.
Many of those impose “selective (sometimes elite), complex and burdensome admissions requirements” that charter schools would not be allowed to adopt, said Eric Premack, executive director and founder of the Sacramento-based Charter Schools Development Center, which advises founders of charter schools. “It would be very interesting to see how districts would respond if the governor had proposed to subject districts to the same restrictions.”
The powerhouse California Charter School Association, the lobbying group, was noncommittal, not wanting to alienate the governor:
The California Charter Schools Association, which represents most of the state’s charter schools, has not commented on the specifics of Newsom’s proposal. In a statement last week on his education budget, it said, “We applaud Governor Newsom’s commitment to increasing funding for special education, and we share his vision in ensuring that all of California’s kids – especially our most vulnerable students – have access to public schools that meet their individual needs.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The state should also force charters to report their attrition rates. Schools with high attrition rates should not be able to operate in the state. Why should charters be able to dump expensive and hard to teach students on under funded public schools? They should have to solve their own problems, serve all students and stop making excuses for their unwillingness to do it.
this is surely a MUST
Exactly.
To wit, if a charter school has high rates of passing on state tests AND high attrition rates relative to other charters, then something really dirty is going on.
One has to be racist to believe white charter CEOs and their white cheerleading/oversight agencies when they ignore the complaints of non-white parents because of their racist assumptions that parents who aren’t white like them would of course pull their kids out of the top performing charter in the state and no need to ask why.
There is no way that a top performing charter that lost high numbers of middle class white kids would be ignored by white oversight agencies as “We don’t care because we know their white college-educated parents just didn’t want their kid to attend the highest performing school in the state because we know all those white parents prefer inferior academics for their children.”
Couldn’t agree more. Just had a case where there was a physical altercation in a middle school classroom between a teacher and a student. While this incident was clearly unfortunate, it turns out that the student had moved from our district middle school to a charter. Once there, the student was involved with a serious incident of vandalism. So what does the charter do? Kicks the student right back to our middle school. This happens frequently; every year our middle school picks up around 30 charter students who were cast aside. And then the charter gets bragging rights for being a “safer” school.
MA’s board of education has been in cahoots with the charter industry for some time. Three or four years ago, the definition of attrition was changed. It now indicates student who changed schools over the summer. If we want to discover what the rate of attrition is, the only tool we have is to compare cohorts, data which the state does not gather.
What charters would do instead is keep the hard to teach students, give them no services, and then dump them between school years. That’s what happened to my public school. We had a student who the charter reclassified as “resource,” by a charter school, who needed FAR more services than resource. Apparently, in his year at the charter school, he was allowed to just wander the building. When we got him back, it took us seven months to get him classified back where he needed to be. So this kid lost two years of education because of the charter. This story has WAY more horrifying details, but you get the idea.
“Many of those impose “selective (sometimes elite), complex and burdensome admissions requirements” that charter schools would not be allowed to adopt, said Eric Premack, executive director and founder of the Sacramento-based Charter Schools Development Center, which advises founders of charter schools. “It would be very interesting to see how districts would respond if the governor had proposed to subject districts to the same restrictions.”
The problem is charters don’t admit they are selective- which is misleading to the public and creates unfair comparisons with non-selective public schools.
If they want to be magnet schools why not just call themselves magnets and stop pretending they’re not selective?
Charters don’t call themselves “magnet” schools for political and marketing reasons- they find it politically beneficial to pretend they aren’t selective because they are compared with public schools that aren’t selective, which gives them an advantage.
If we compared magnet public schools to charter schools charters would lose this advantage, so the pretend they aren’t selective.
They could have styled themselves as “magnet charter schools” but they chose not to- not for educational reasons but for political reasons.
Good. Charters shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate in a darkened room. Magnets that are selective, and there are only a small few of them, admit students with processes made very clear to the public. All magnets in California are intended to aid integration, not discrimination. Even the gifted magnets that admit students with special gifts and talents are integrated because there are multiple ways to become a GATE student, not like charters using just grades and test scores which are inextricably linked to racial and economic bias. You can be GATE for artistic, dancing, or musical creativity, for example. There’s no racial or economic bias. And magnets don’t force students out. Charters are not compliant with the law. They’re not transparent and they’re not allowing students and parents many of their rights.
That said, it’s not like charters have huge waiting lists of students trying to get in. Most of them are under-enrolled, anyway.
Please understand that the ACLU/Public Advocates report was just the tip of the iceberg as the only information that was included in the study was whatever they found on the opening pages of the charter’s website. Many charters force parents to sign up for an online account(often via SchoolMint) as a first step. Only then can you access the application. Secondly, other charters include requirements in other places, such as in their parent handbook. Some like KIPP, have required a home visit prior to enrollment or a pre-enrollment interview. Others will not provide an application unless you show up for an open house held at the school. So, charters just get creative and find other ways to make it harder and harder for students to enroll. This assures that only the most dedicated of parents who have the time and skills to navigate these convoluted procedures wind up completing the process.
PRETENDING that it is an inclusive process, PRETENDING that it is a open enrollment school…
The argument about magnet schools can be dismissed easily. Children who are not selected for a magnet program are still guarateed a seat in the school district. They are not guaranteed a seat at a charter, because under school choice, it’s the school that chooses.