Charters Exclude the Most Challenging Students, part 1

By Sharon Higgins and Caroline Grannan, public school parents

President Obama admires charter schools and has called for opening more in the United States. Though we trust that he has students’ best interests at heart, we also believe he is badly misinformed.

Charter schools get overwhelmingly positive press and make a lot of claims about their success. But actually, numerous studies confirm that their achievement is indistinguishable from that of traditional public schools. Some are very successful, some are troubled and struggling, and the rest are somewhere in between – just like traditional public schools.

One of the boasts by their proponents is that charter schools enroll “the poorest of the poor.” But is that accurate? We’re urban public school parents (Caroline is in San Francisco and Sharon is in Oakland, Calif.) who see the insides of schools in our day-to-day lives, and we recognize why that claim is misleading.

The truth is that charter schools may enroll some very low-income students, but they do not enroll the very troubled, high-need, at-risk students who pose the greatest challenge to public education. (There are some specialty charter schools specifically for juvenile offenders or other defined groups; we are not referring to that type but to general education charter schools.)

Enrollment at all charter schools is, by law, entirely by request. No student is assigned to a charter school by default. That means "self-selection" occurs at all of them, inherently, by definition.

That is, parents who care about their kids' education enough to make the effort to learn about and request a school are the ones whose kids attend charter schools. Parents who don't have it together to pay attention, care, or take action to try to improve their kids' education do not choose charter schools. Thus their kids -- obviously likely to be the most challenged and challenging -- are left in the traditional public schools.

Parent #1: Even though she is low-income, she has a relatively stable income. She also has extended family and/or community support. She is lucky because she happens to not be prone to substance abuse or mental illness. Even though she has always been poor, she has had the good fortune to acquire enough information and inspiration in life to permit her to adopt parenting values more aligned with America's middle-class. This results in her regularly, and consciously, making her very best efforts at raising her children with an educationally-minded approach.

Parent #2: She is also low-income, but her week-to-week existence is very unstable, some years worse than others. She is highly stressed and perhaps has a degree of untreated mental illness (likely mild to severe depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder). She also has substance abuse problems, ranging from either mild or severe. Her family and/or community support is weak, or abusive, and her parenting takes second place to moment-to-moment survival. Her life has been highly socioeconomically restricted, so she has never known anyone who could have modeled any different parenting style for her. In terms of her children, she is not very educationally-minded, because she has never learned what that approach is all about.

Which parent is more likely to seek a charter school? Which parent will be more likely to "appropriately" respond to teachers and report card results? Which parent will be more likely to turn off the TV and remind her kids that homework needs to get done? Which parent will still be sleeping at 8 am, leaving it up to her children to get to school on time, if at all. Which parent will be moving from apartment to apartment with her children in tow, year after year?

The husband of one of the authors of this post works with the indigent people living in Alameda County, California, who have been charged with crimes. Every day he deals with parents who have been charged with drug possession, prostitution, and other crimes. These are the types of parents who aren't likely to be researching the best charter schools for their children, and filling out all the forms. These types of parents are not the majority in Oakland, but they are quite numerous nonetheless. Their children are enrolled in Oakland’s traditional public schools.

This is what charter school self-selection is all about.

(Next: Part 2: Typical Charter Advocate Responses)

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Sharon Higgins has been an active public school parent in Oakland, California, since 1993, and blogs at The Perimeter Primate. Caroline Grannan was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News for 12 years, and is now the education writer for the SF Examiner. She is a San Francisco public school parent, advocate, and volunteer and has followed education politics locally and nationwide.