Charters Exclude the Most Challenging Students, part 2
By Sharon Higgins and Caroline Grannan, public school parents
Charter advocates’ usual response to this explanation is to deny that there is such a thing as families that are less motivated and stable. They claim that "all parents care enough." All we can say is that those people need to get out more.
And what about the question of whether charter schools actively pick and choose their students? Charter schools are supposed to admit everyone and choose by lottery if they have more applications than seats. However, does anyone believe that there are regulators somehow watching over the entire enrollment process, from receipt of the applications to the implementation of a lottery, if any?
If a charter school chooses to conduct itself this way, it is free as a bird to "not have space" for applicants who appear undesirable for whatever reason. It's amply documented that charter schools all over the country, overall, dramatically underserve special education students, for example.
Charter advocates will counter that traditional public schools can manage to not enroll or to "counsel out" a challenging student too. Sure, but that student is still the responsibility of the public school district, and will land in another school run by a colleague of the administrator who managed to deny/remove the student. If a charter school contrives to not enroll or get rid of a challenging student, it never has to set eyes on or give a thought to that student again.
San Francisco’s most successful charter school, a high school, requires a 9-page enrollment application -- including transcripts; teacher recommendations; an essay; and signed commitments to behavior, academic effort, volunteering and so forth by the student and parent. Then the administrators claim to put all the applicants in a "blind lottery." It strikes us as exceptionally naive to believe those applicants aren't being screened.
But even parents who give the school the benefit of the doubt in trusting that it runs a “blind lottery” agree that the application process serves to weed out those who are not highly motivated.
An interesting book, “Hard Lessons” by Jonathan Schorr, a former journalist who has since gone to work in the charter-school world, follows the founding and first year of an Oakland, Calif., charter school, the Ernestine C. Reems Academy of Technology and Arts. The book is pro-charter in tone, but it still portrays the school deliberately rejecting special-education students.
And yet, despite the advantages of serving a student population that is predisposed to be higher-functioning, charter schools overall do not show higher achievement than traditional public schools. So why do they win such acclaim, including from the Oval Office? It’s a mystery that we’ll explore in later posts.
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.
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