Peter Greene describes in this post how charter schools in Pennsylvania manage to game the system by making money from students with disabilities even while excluding many of them.
He writes:
In a new report, Education Voters of Pennsylvania looks at “how an outdated law wastes public money, encourages gaming the system, and limits school choice.” Fixing the Flaws looks at how Pennsylvania’s two separate funding systems have made students with special needs a tool for charter gaming of the system, even as some of them are shut out of the system entirely.
The two-headed system looks like this. Public schools receive special education funding based on the actual costs of services, while charter schools are funded with a one-size-fits-all system that pays the same amount for all students with special needs, no matter what those special needs might be….
Public schools receive state funding based on student tiers; charters get the same funding whether the student needs an hour of speech therapy a week or a separate classroom, teacher and aide.
This creates an obvious financial incentive for charter schools to cherry pick students who are considered special needs, but who need no costly adaptations or staffing to meet those needs, while at the same time incentivizing charters to avoid the more costly high needs students. Denial of those students does not require outright rejection of the students; charters can simply say, “You are welcome to enroll, but we do not provide any of the specialized programs that you want for your child.” Parents will simply walk away.
Examples of this technique are not hard to find in the state. Before they closed down in 2018, the Wonderland Charter School in State Collegel was caught over-identifying students with speech and language impairment, a low-cost Tier 1 need, by 1,000%….
Across the state, the report finds roughly 10% of public school enrollment is students with special needs; for charters, the percentage across the state is about half that.
The result is that taxpayers, through their local districts, are overpaying charters for the services provided. If a student with a language impairment moves to a charter, the funding doesn’t just follow her—it increases by thousands of dollars. A student who cost the taxpayers $15,000 to educate in a public school now costs taxpayers $27,000, though no more money is being actually spent on that student’s education.
The problem could easily be fixed, and Peter explains how.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pennsylvania’s charter schools have been draining the public coffers for years. The charter payout is overly generous. It was deliberately designed to offer overly generous payments. The most overly generous charter payouts are for cyber charters and special education. An additional problem is that the charter lobby is entrenched in the legislature. As long as the system gamers remain in the legislature, it is doubtful anything will change. Pennsylvanians should see who in the charter lobby is up for reelection and target them for removal. It is the best solution to the problem.
direct and specific knowledge, direct and specific targeting: the only way
As a volunteer member of LAUSD’s Special Education Community Advisory Committee for 16 years (10 serving in leadership positions), I had gone before the LAUSD Board with numbers, showing how (starting when they hadn’t hit 100 charters, yet) back in 2003 and every year after for seven years that charters were taking the “easy” kids. I showed how charters would “share” their state ID number when having several separate campus locations serving different grade levels, yet combining those campus disability numbers of all schools to give the appearance of both serving a larger percentage of children than they really did. I would show data of each charter’s “enrollment by disability type” and “services provided” to prove that that they were not taking the moderate/severely disabled or providing more intensive services outside of counseling , Resource Specialist and speech therapy. Most of the board at first didn’t really understand the data or what I was trying to say. I would persist every year, becoming known as “that special ed gadfly” who pestered them about the inequities. Finally, those seven years later, the special education director admitted to me; “We should be presenting those reports as the division.” Yeah! It would’ve been much easier for them to gather the data and compile it. I had to fight through departments, make calls that led to dead ends many times and figured out, from scratch how to create excel sheets to present data that compared local charter service to local regular public schools. When presented in that context, you could see the inequity. This is an old story with a new twist and a larger social media platform. I was alone in my fight with LAUSD.
You are correct about those classifications of special education. You can also see how the dubious Relay Graduate School of Education offers a path to a very thin special education certification with minimal experience in teaching/tutoring students. These graduates, including Teach for America, are favored by charter schools. https://relay.edu/teachers/special-education-certification/apply-special-education
Relay is a fake “graduate school of education,” created to train charter teachers by charter teachers.i have yet to see a campus, a library, or any research or publications from this testing program.
‘This creates an obvious financial incentive for charter schools to cherry pick students who are considered special needs…’
Who are the majority of kids who are considered special needs?
They are kids who have shut down/disengaged from learning to read due to confusion.
Who create the confusion?
They are the teachers who teach the wrong pronunciation of phonemes of consonants.
How do we prevent kids from shutting down?
Teach them the correct pronunciation of phonemes of consonants.
Get a copy of ‘Shut down kids’ available on Amazon or read the unsolicited books reviews on Amazon.