Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional NYT article: lack of disabled students at charters

Every time this subject comes up here I feel like I'm the lone dissenter and charter school defender. I find it stereotypical and unfounded to say a blanket "charter schools kick out disabled students". While some charter schools do, many traditional public schools have the same set of problems and chase away disabled students. There are a multitude of reasons why the graduation rate is what it is in public high schools, and it's not all charter schools' fault.

I have been a school administrator and a teacher in a CA charter school for the past 12 years, off and on. We have a public lottery each year, an open application process and parents are asked on the application to list any special services including IEPs, 504s and gifted ed. Just by having this on the application, people panic and don't mark the right box to withhhold information because they believe it will impact the lottery. It does NOT. Anyone who has worked in CA schools knows that it takes forever and a week to get a cumulative file from a school, and even longer to get the IEP. Allowing us to order these before summer means that the child will be better served in the fall.

In addition, SOME students will not be served well in a charter and it is not the best educational environment. For example, in our charter, students are expected, starting in 6th grade, to transition between 7 teachers, 5 days a week. They have 1-2 hours of homework, and additional performance rehearsal time (art school.) A student who has been in a self-contained special education program for low-functioning autistic students anda full-time aide, will likely not be able to keep up, regardless of the accomodations. Yet I've seen parents blatantly lie, refuse to list this information and not have an open conversation because they want their child to go to the school so badly. It's a safe school in a bad neighborhood, who can blame them?

The school also has a GPA requirement. I have seen teachers and administrators bend over backwards for kids, private tutoring for free, giving tons of chances and working with students who really want to be there. But if a kid/family, isn't willing to put in the effort, it is not the right place. I've had these kids too- those that didn't want to go to the school but whose parents chose safety over student desire. These kids WILL fail out, learning disabled or not.

One more point of clarification that I feel is necessary. In CA, the reputation is that charter schools kick out bad kids right before the standardized testing in late spring. While it is possible to kick a kid out then, it certainly doesn't matter for testing. To prevent this exact issue, students' scores are reported with the school they were enrolled in the FALL. The date depends on the school's start date. You can kick a kid out in May but if he was there in October, you still get his scores in your AYP.

I guess I just am not sure what I think about charters like the one you describe, CAmom (and my kid went to one a little like that). It's particularly an issue because they DO often locate in areas where there is a paucity of options. Indeed, who can blame parents for doing whatever they can to get their kids in, LD or not?

I guess, well, if you're going to do it that way, then...it ought to be out there in black and white. We are High Expectations Charter School. Dyslexics and ADHD need not apply. Our high scores are at least in part a result of cherry-picking, so please do not base your political grandstanding on our apparent success.

I mean, my child goes to a gifted magnet, so in fact it does not really behoove me to look down on schools that are selective. Glass houses, stones, etc. (In fact, how does that work? Why can magnet schools take public funds while specifically not taking all comers, and what WOULD happen if my child was found to have an LD, I wonder? I assume she would be accommodated, but I also know that children have left the program in the past because they were unable to keep up.)

In liberal MA, lots of towns with "good schools" keep their house prices high by mandating large lot sizes and setting aside land for "open space". This largely keeps out the poor and even the middle class as the average home price approaches $1 mil. The teachers' unions and administrators point to high test scores to show what a good job they are doing and ask for more money. Isn't that grandstanding?

Why pick on charter schools when the main alternative, neighborhood public schools, effectively select based on parents' income?

Yes, it is, and I don't like this either. I attended schools in a very wealthy area and had some rotten teachers. The teachers may be better now; I have no idea. But it always bothered me to see the equation drawn...oh, look at our great test scores! Must be the teachers and the school system. (Couldn't possibly be the wealthy and privileged population of parents who are highly invested in their kids' education.)

To answer your question, though, I pick on charter schools because I do have concerns about them continuing to siphon money and the best students and parents away from public schools. I participated in this, mind you. I don't fault parents for making the best possible choice for their kids. You do what you have to do. Your child is not a political pawn. But the broader system is concerning.

I also find the notion that charters siphon the best students away to be a false argument. These are students that would have been in private school or enrolled in district transfers to another district. They aren't a loss to a poor performing district that never had them in the first place. Our local elementary school is bottom of the barrel, close to being taken over by the state, riddled with gang violence and falling apart. Yet they have increased enrollment from when the first charter opened, 18 years ago in our district.

In addition, many charters enroll students from out of their neighborhood zone, therefore bringing money INTO the district that wasn't there before. It is commonplace in California for student living in the boundary to get first priority in the lottery, but if there aren't enough students to fill the spots, then lottery spots go to students in the bordering/surrounding counties. At my charter in particular, students drive from as far as an hour away to have access.

Now if we want to talk about funneling money, you have to look at how charter schools that are independent (local control) vs. dependent (run by the district)and traditional schools are funded. Independent charters have direct, local control over the day to day budget. The Principal can say "I don't want to buy this brand of paper because ___ is cheaper this month" and order up a few cases. In a dependent school, the district makes mass purchasing for all the schools in the area and determines who gets what. This loss of control makes it nearly impossible for Principals to directly address financial issues at his/her school. If school A has plenty of paper from donation but needs pens, it is a maze of patchwork deals to get the pens swapped out.

One thing charter schools tend to do better at nationally, is organizing their parents into volunteer groups. I don't believe this is charter specific- but that it says that parents who seek out educational options for their children are generally more involved parents. Those parents become a volunteer labor force that the traditional public schools, overall, have yet to harness effectively. My charter ask parents for 30 hours (per family) of volunteer hours a year and teachers are asked regularly for work people can do at home, on the weekends or online. With 30,000+ volunteer hours, a lot of wall decorations get cut, field trips chaperoned, landscapes weeded, group projects get finished and money is fundraised.

There are good and bad charter schools, and good and bad public schools. Our California public school has an API score of 930 out of 1000, which puts it in the top 10% of schools in California. It is a fairly wealthy school, although 30% of the kids are on the free lunch program also.
We have huge volunteerism. The joke is that for parent-teacher night, 3 generations of the family show up. 30% of our school is Asian.
Volunteerism is a huge factor, I think, in any school's success, charter or public. Public schools on average outperform charter schools, but there are exceptions. Many charter schools are disorganized and poorly run, and are not better than the public schools they left.
Students whose parents enter them in a lottery to go into a charter school (but don't get picked) outperform kids who didn't apply, even though they are stlll at the same public school. Why? Likely because parents who are trying to find (what they perceive to be) a better school for their child do other things in their home like getting them to bed on time, encouraging reading, etc.

CAmom, I'm interested in your take on the rise of virtual charter schools-- that is, the giants K12 and Connections.

In most ways, those fit neither the 'local' control nor the district or state-level one, budgetarily speaking.

The LEA tends to contract for (or simply turn over) all the cash for operations, and the national organization provides "services" which it considers adequate and sufficient.

My own experience has been that this model, when run by a for-profit EMO nationally, leads to cost cutting that hurts students, and that corporate interests tend to muzzle dissent from parents, students, teachers, and even local administrators.

There's a reason that I refer to Baltimore as "our corporate overlords." Educators like Steve Guttentag may have at one time been running the show, but no more. It's cheaper to have all electronic (clunky PDF) textbooks... and when you can make a 'deal' for 5K of those, the costs get even lower. Nevermind that some kids hate them, or that they are developmentally inappropriate for many children (AMA/AAP recommendations for screen time in children)... the important thing is that since you can go IN-HOUSE (now that Pearson bought Connections, what a bonus for their bottom line, no matter whether or not the Pearson text is the BEST... it's often the 'cheapest' and that is what matters most, right?) you can cut a LOT of costs there.

There are a lot of things like that.

It is also the case that the school has a tendency to stonewall with students who are struggling. Grade inflation seems to be the first thing that gets tried, but if that is impossible or if parents/students refuse to cooperate with it, demanding actual improvements in learning... well, then suddenly you don't get return phone calls.

I see this not as a failure of the idea of this model, but in implementation, yes, abject failure for most students. Because corporate doesn't want to SPEND what it actually costs to do this RIGHT. Yes, for special education students, this is an even more serious problem, since those students are even further from the mythical "average" student needs, which is pretty much all anyone gets with one of these schools. I'm very familiar with "but this IS our option for gifted students," and having a DD in the SpEd side allows me a window into THAT, as well-- the amount of special assistance available to those kids isn't much, honestly, and it, too, is mostly a kind of 'one-size-fits-most' approach.

Parents that object to this state of affairs can just go away, basically.

I agree; my eldest son tried a charter when his private school closed. Our local public schools would be a terrible fit for my kids. The charter we tried (and will abandon in favor of homeschooling this fall) was so-so at best and the math department was, well, poor.

We've probably all heard about the studies showing that charters are no better and no worse than public schools. IMO, charter schools may be an education fad, with many people assuming they must be better because they're new and not the public schools. At my son's charter, I saw a lot of the same flawed thinking that plagues the public schools: everyone is capable of becoming president, there's no such thing as a "mathy mind," anyone can study anything they want and do well, etc.

But I also think that the problem driving it all is a failed philosophy. The industrial metrics we use to measure schools have huge flaws. We assume that everyone can perform at age-grade level, yet this isn't true. But we have a law that says if kids don't perform at age-grade level, a school can lose funding, so schools toe the line.

We measure "learning" with simplistic multiple choice tests. And because of the law, we dumb the textbooks and tests down, and then pretend that people are learning geometry and passing meaningful tests. Then we wonder why our students perform poorly on harder international tests and why so many people drop out of college or end up in remedial classes.

I don't think this problem will go away until public education finally admits that abilities differ. Private schools do this all the time. Why can't public schools?

YES. Where is that 'like' button??

This article may interest you -- it echos some of your concerns.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/e...r-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html
Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools
By STEPHANIE SAUL
New York Times
December 12, 2011