Five years ago, Kevin Welner and Gary Miron explained why you should not believe claims about charter “wait lists.”
At the same time that they released this caution (2014), the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools [sic] put out a press release claiming that more than one million students were wait-listed to get into charter schools.
Five years later, the New York Times cited this press release by NAPCS to substantiate a statement that “hundreds of thousands” of students were on charter wait lists. On the other hand, Los Angeles school board member Scott Schmerelson posted on his Facebook page that more than 80% of the charter schools in LA had vacancies.
Welner and Miron gave nine reasons not to believe unverified claims about hundreds of thousands of students waiting to get into charter schools.
They posted this caution after the NAPCS [sic] claimed in 2013 that precisely 902,007 students were on wait lists for charter schools.
Here are nine reasons to be skeptical of the numbers offered by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Reason #1: Students Apply to Multiple Charter Schools
The NAPCS estimate is complicated by the fact (acknowledged by NAPCS in its 2013 announcement) that “families often apply to multiple charter schools….” Because of this practice, NAPCS downsizes its own topline number by over 400,000 students. That is, instead of the 920,007 waitlist students given as the 2013 topline number, NAPCS later adds: “at a minimum, more than 520,000 total individual students – many of whom are on multiple charter school waitlists … are on waitlists across the country.” In practice, many families may apply to one or more charter schools along with district-run schools or programs. Such students receive offers at a variety of schools (multiple charter and/or district options) but may choose a district school option. In short, a given charter school application may not reflect a student’s first choice.
Reason #2: The Waitlist Numbers Cannot Be Confirmed
Even the NAPCS 520,000 estimate is problematic. For most jurisdictions,2 it is derived from unaudited and unauditable numbers reported to NAPCS through a survey it administers annually. The survey apparently asks for the number of applications received, as well as the number of available seats. The waiting list numbers are then calculated as applications minus seats.
There is no state or federal indicator that is called “waitlist.” Instead, this is a statistic developed by NAPCS and others who hope to advance the argument that, “With such demand, it is up to our elected officials to remove the facilities and funding barriers that exist to ensure that every child has the option to attend a high-quality public charter school” (Nina Rees, NAPCS president and CEO).3
Open the link to read the other seven reasons.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is wonderful way to debunk the claims of charter promoters. Their claims of “precise” counts at the national level are patently absurd, as is the presumption that there is a steady state set of conditions in the number of applicants, “high quality seats,” results from lotteries, and so on. Marketing is the thingy.
yes — the foundation is nothing but sand: “Marketing is the thingy.”
Thanks for this article, Diane. Not amazing that Charter people have to LIE to stay in business. Liars and cheaters should NOT be teaching our young.
Did anyone happen to notice that the scholarship Trump offered to the young girl at the state of the union speech for her to have school choice was hysterical in that the young actually attends a charter school in PA. So it was not an offer to escape a “failing public school” was it now.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Yes, ed reformers are incredibly focused on “data” except for questionable “data” than can be used politically.
Have our nation’s leading ed reformers, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, corrected that whole “scholarship” nonsense they perpetrated on the public last week?
They deliberately omit the waitlists for popular or over-enrolled PUBLIC schools too.
It would pack a lot less political punch if they said “Chicago has waitlists for popular charter schools AND public schools” (true) so they just magically disappear the public schools.
When your only goal is reduce the number of public schools and increase the number of charter schools “data” goes out the window.
I don’t know how anyone in their right mind trusts Florida reporting of school stats.
Florida apparently undercounts drop outs:
https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-to-examine-whether-alternative-charter-schools-underreport-dropouts
Hmm. You’ll never hear DeVos or Bush mentioning that, yet they’re happy to cite favorable stats.
If the only thing you offer public schools or public school students is measurement, perhaps we could at least get somewhat accurate measurements?
Ed reform has two “ideas”, 1. choice, and 2. measurement
Public school students get only #2, and even that is suspect. Our kids get all the downside and no upside at all. For this we’re all supposed to hire these people and pay them.
The Florida state government cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Last year there were multiple advertisements stating that students in private schools perform much better than those in public school students. When I looked into the source, it was a position paper from a think tank, not a legitimate study.
In Florida, the private schools that get vouchers don’t take the state tests. How can their scores be better when they don’t take the tests, and when the voucher schools are allowed to hire high school dropouts as teachers?
“Though Trump said “tens of thousands of students remain on a waiting list” because Pennsylvania’s school choice efforts are so popular, the state “does not collect data related to how many students are on the waiting list” for the tax-credit program, which Wolf believes lacks adequate accountability, Smith said.”
Is one thing any of these people said in that speech true? They didn’t even contact Pennsylvania and ask- they just made a bunch of stuff up and ran with the lie, because the governor of Pennsylvania is one of their political enemies.
Does this stuff discredit the US Department of Education? Should anyone trust a single fact they pump out, since they seem to be wholly and utterly captured by this lobby?
Can public schools get a fair shake at the federal level, given the ideological bias against them?
Has there been even one story by an education reporter that interviewed the leader of the charter school that Trump just bashed as failing? How about the parents to ask them about how terrible their charter school is? Of course not, because those charter school CEOs are complicit and would rather allow their charter to be laughed at publicly as a miserable failure whose students are desperate to leave than to speak out. Because those charter CEOs get thrown a lot of bones by being complicit.
This is what happens in NYC. There clearly is an unspoken agreement by education reporters at Chalkbeat NY and the NY Times and other pro-charter media to hype certain charters as miracle workers achieving 99% passing rates but ONLY compare those charters to public schools and not the mediocre charters that are failing 20% or 30% or 40% of their students.
The charter chains in NYC that “fail” 20% or 30% or 40% of their kids while their CEOs reap in outrageously high salaries remain very quiet when education stenographers at the NYT hype one particularly charter network’s “99% success” even though what that false narrative is really implying is that their own charters are incompetent and/or corrupt and that’s the only reason they aren’t also getting 99% success.
It’s interesting to see how the charter network leaders in NYC debase themselves for the crumbs the billionaires throw them in return for remaining quiet while the results of charter network that is “far, far superior” to their own mediocre ones is being hyped.
Charter school leaders remind me of Lindsay Graham. They don’t care if something Trump says makes them look weak and dishonest as long as they still get the financial rewards of hitching themselves to the guy that will throw them some crumbs as a reward as long as they keep being the sycophants that they must be to “earn” those rewards.