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

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/education/in-charter-schools-fewer-with-disabilities.html?src=recg


"Some parents choose public schools that have more established programs for students with disabilities, while some charter schools do not have the resources or teaching staff to support individual students’ needs. But in some cases, the report said, school administrators tacitly discriminate by discouraging students with disabilities from enrolling. "

This was absolutely done at DD's former charter. Not only that, students were encouraged to leave the school when LDs were discovered. This contributes to the school's excellent test scores, which IMO are not as much about the school's quality as about cream-skimming (they also are careful about who they admit--it is a lottery, but there is also an application, and they do a lottery from those who meet the desired qualifications on the app; legal where I live). My DD does not have LDs, but I find this situation unacceptable.

I moved to an affluent suburb with good test scores so that my children will have smart, high-achieving classmates. Charters may be bending the law, but it does not bother me that their parents are trying to accomplish what we did. If admission to schools must be based on residence or a lottery, should we do away with public exam schools like Stuyvesant or Boston Latin?

I think vastly too much money is being spent on special ed. Here is a recent story on over-the-top spending.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/e...w-york-city-have-doubled-in-6-years.html
Cost of Prekindergarten Special Education Is Soaring
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: June 5, 2012
New York Times

New York City is paying private contractors more than $1 billion this year to operate a little-known special education program for 3- and 4-year-olds, nearly double the amount it paid six years ago.

The program serves 25,000 children with physical, learning, developmental and other disabilities. While the number of children in the program has risen slowly in recent years, annual costs have soared to about $40,000 per child, according to an analysis of city education spending by The New York Times.

...

City officials said some of the growth in spending stemmed from more awareness of autism: some special-ed pre-K students, for example, are receiving behavior-modification therapy as many as 35 hours a week, driving their costs as high as $200,000 a year. But the officials acknowledged that autism services accounted for only part of the increase.

Ah, but these school are above-board about what they are. Charters who skim the cream, tacitly discourage kids with LDs or kick them out, then boast about their amazing success rate are not being above-board at all. What's more, they may be contributing to the decline of public education in other ways.

I actually am not necessarily anti-charter--but boy, this kind of thing really gets me steamed.

As to whether "too much" is being spent on special ed--what is the right amount? I can't claim to know, but shall we go back to warehousing these kids in insitutions or deeming them uneducable? I dare say not.

"Some contractors have billed the program for jewelry, expensive clothing, vacations to Mexico and spa trips to the Canyon Ranch resort, The Times found in a review of a decade’s worth of education, financial and court records. Others have hired relatives at inflated salaries or for no-show jobs, or funneled public money into expensive rents paid by their preschools to entities they control personally. "


Well, duh--obviously, this is no good. Corruption is no good wherever it is. But if we're talking about investing in proven early intervention for kids with disabilities--look, early intervention is where it's at, in so many ways. If you want these children to succeed later on, to graduate from high school and hold productive jobs and not become a drain on the system, yada yada, as I'm sure you do, you need to reach them young.

One thing which I have seen and heard about from other parents (repeatedly and from vastly differing sources) is that there is actually a fairly subversive method of 'encouraging' special ed students to 'go away.'

One of the hallmarks of this strategy is the one that shrugs and says "Well, what can we do?? This is what we do here... maybe {school} isn't a good fit for {child}..."

rather than, (as federal law MANDATES, by the way) either;

a) determining the interventions necessary to allow the child educational benefit from the program,

or, under section 504, the less stringent of the two laws,

b) determining and then implementing accommodations so that the disabled student has the same access to the educational program as unaffected peers, regardless of inconvenience or expense.

In the case of both, what I've seen is a sense of "here's the menu, and what you need isn't on it. Go to another restaurant if you don't like it." That assumes that you can even GET your child properly classified to start with... and even if you can and you can get the district/school to agree to particular services, good luck getting them moving on actually implementing anything. I know of a profoundly DEAF child who waited for SIX WEEKS to get an aide and a classroom ASL interpreter was another three weeks coming.

In the case of A, there is foot-dragging about implementation. Because that's where the loopholes are, see. The rest is specified under law.

In the case of B, there is foot dragging all through the process, and often parents are told that what the child needs is "not reasonable," evidently with the (mistaken) understanding that this means that while it might be what the child NEEDS, it certainly can't happen. (This is wrong, by the way, and the Office of Civil Rights has said so in no uncertain terms-- but most parents don't know that.)

Call me cynical, but I see far, far fewer parents milking the system for special ed services than I do those who give up and choose to leave because they know that their child needs help NOW, not in 18 months or four years.

Charters are very, very, very guilty of point B. The other thing that I've seen with my own two eyes is that EMO's that act as private contractors with LEA's will occasionally give with one hand what the law obligates them to do.... but take away with the other, so as to preserve their own bottom line. So sure, your child might qualify for OT... ohhhhhh, but the only TIME available is when {elective} is being offered. Guess you have to choose which you want your child to have. Heheheh.

Hmm. The Times article said that New York spends 6% of its budget on one pre-K program for students with disabilities. That's over a billion dollars a year and $40,000 per child. In my opinion, this is way too much money --- especially when other schools in New York can't even make basic repairs and teachers are being laid off, not to mention what parents go through to get their gifted kids into one of the very few slots in the public gifted programs.

Worse, the contractors who run the city programs were stealing some of this money and using it to buy jewelry and take fancy vacations. This is what happens when you provide too much money and too little oversight (happens too often in public school systems).

Unfortunately, if someone says, "Maybe we're spending too much on these programs," people react viscerally. It's as though suggesting that special ed spending is too lavish is really a ploy to send disabled kids to a damp, unheated, dungeon of a boarding "school" where everyone eats gruel and sleeps on bedbug-ridden straw mattresses. Maybe you weren't trying to say just that, but it kind of sounded that way.

I'm curious as to why people are so willing to sacrifice an appropriate education and/or good environment for other kids so that special ed kids can have a billion-dollar program. I'm not saying that disabled pre-K kids don't need something extra. They do. But a billion dollars? Why do we bend over backwards to do as much as possible for them while basically ignoring everyone who's above average? Why do only special ed preschoolers deserve an appropriate education In NYC?

As for the OP, I can see Bostonian's point. I also see your point about a need to be honest. I also think it's possible that the situation is more complicated than charter schools just not "wanting" disabled students. Maybe they didn't know they were disabled and when they found out, they realized that they didn't have the resources to help a kid appropriately. If a school doesn't have a system in place for a disabled student, setting one up would be very expensive and would probably require that the school remove other programs that would benefit dozens or more kids. This seems like a waste of money when the public schools already have these systems in place. Not to mention a duplication of effort.

"I moved to an affluent suburb with good test scores so that my children will have smart, high-achieving classmates. Charters may be bending the law, but it does not bother me that their parents are trying to accomplish what we did."

I am really bothered by the premise that disabled children are by default not "smart, high-achieving classmates." So MANY disbled childen and adults are BRILLIANT people that in which you should be honored to be in the company! I mean seriously. I could list many prominent briliant people who are (or were if they have passsed) "disabled" in some way. These children have much rto contribute and share, they are not undesirables to be avoided.

Val, I agree with you. I think that two things are grossly, maybe even profoundly, wrong with the system as it is;

a) a very low bar as to what constitutes "educational benefit" for a child. Does this include completely bogus things that have NO proven benefit in anything resembling an unbiased study? Often, it does. So spending $$$$ on things which have no real proven benefit is certainly wrong. Those dollars are not unlimited, and what we spend here has to come from somewhere.

b) gifted ed is special ed. I wish that the Feds would step in, here, and define it that way for once and for all. Just as with special ed students with lower-than-average ability (or specific challenges), their educational needs are not met by "average" educational offerings. Those gifted students have many more things in common with SpEd than with the middle two-thirds of the distribution; we can sometimes (but not always) meet those needs in a regular classroom with interventions/differentiation, the students need something different from their unaffected classmates, and they are an "at risk" population if their needs go unmet. Call it what it is and mandate it. Special Education. That would really cut down on the number of parents looking to spout lofty-sounding labels to all of THEIR friends, too, and therefore fewer bright-but-not-gifted kids would be shoved/coached into GT programs.

That's my opinion, though.

Lol, you almost quoted the principal of a local charter/option school. I looked at the school for kindergarten for my oldest. It's very close to my house and has some of the highest test scores in the state. When I approached the principal and mentioned that there was a good chance that my kids were gifted and that at least one might have 2e issues, she actively discouraged us from considering the school. She said that they wanted average kids that they could push to become high achieving. They only offered "whole class" instruction and that there were no options to "change the menu." She then said something about them only serving Italian and we probably wanted Chinese.

Unfortunately, I also have heard that our traditional public school which has high test scores also pushes kids out. They use the excuse that they don't have special programs for what the kid needs and recommend that people go to a different school in the area that specializes in "those kind of kids."

You also just quoted DD's former school here. (This was not said to us but to other parents--multiple other parents.)

Okay, I find this kind of creepy. Seriously. Is this a known strategy that is discussed among educators?

Well, sort of discussed. As in, in private meetings and conversations, administrators get told by special ed experts and lawyers "You can't say THAT..." and then they keep fishing until they find a nicer (more legal) way of saying the same thing.

It becomes part of the default lexicon within the field of education administration, and one of the standard euphemisms.

I'm a native speaker, having had a public educator for a parent, so I'm not fooled into thinking that it doesn't mean what it actually means, which is "you're a pain in the rump... don't, um... go away MAD... but do go away."

The difference is that saying the euphemism skirts breaking the law, wherease saying what it MEANS overtly breaks it.

Maybe it's not an excuse; maybe it's just an honest description of the situation.

Our school system is a huge mess in many ways, and this is one of them. I expect that testing mania is influencing this problem. Schools under threat of losing funding would understandably react to the threat. So it's likely that reforming the testing mania would alleviate this problem.

Even so, IMO it seems financially wasteful to implement programs for a range of disabilities in every school. In a perfect world, everyone would get an appropriate education at the closest public school. But the world isn't perfect and I honestly don't think it's reasonable to expect every school to set up an expensive program that benefits a few students, especially if it comes at the expense of other students.

Remember that special ed spending in this country is huge. Look at the last graph on this page to see how federal grants for special ed have climbed in the last 15 years. The Wikipedia says that special ed funding in the US was over 21% of the total education budget 12 years ago. Given the trend in the graph I mentioned, it's reasonable to expect that special ed spending as a proportion of the total has gone up since then. At the time, special ed expenditures per student were roughly twice the expenditures on other students. And as HowlerKarma pointed out, how do we know that the interventions being used are useful? As someone who has reviewed education grant applications, I can attest to the validity of her question.

Same could be said of gifted programs, of course. (I suppose not all are expensive, and skipping is not expensive, though also not right for many kids.)

Exactly. I actually question the value of gifted programs, having read here and elsewhere that so many of them are not much more than a few hours a week of doing stuff that doesn't truly address the needs of gifted kids. When I was a kid, all the money for the gifted students actually went to special ed.

Mixing math classes and reading classes by ability rather than age would be very cheap. When I was a kid, this practice was the norm at my school.

The issue is that if a charter school receives federal/state funds, they can't really discriminate against children. They can't refuse to take disabled kids. What if they then said, we won't take kids with learning disabilities, or kids who don't speak English well, or kids who are African-American... etc. It becomes a slippery slope. If the tax payers are paying for the school, they do not have the right to discriminate against some kids and refuse them entry into the school.
Children with disabilities are protected by federal laws. They are entitled to receive a public education that places them in the least restrictive environment where they can learn.

Ok, but look at the Basis charter schools of Arizona. Their high school curriculum page https://www.basisschools.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92&Itemid=103 says

"BASIS Upper School offers an accelerated liberal arts curriculum that is among the most sound and rigorous in the country; a curriculum that asks students to work hard to reach their academic potential; and that offers the assurance of comprehensive benchmarking and expert teaching. It is a curriculum that holds students accountable for their own success; that fills in them a deep reservoir of knowledge; and challenges them to think creatively about that knowledge. It is a curriculum that arouses the confidence to engage intelligently with the world around them.

The curriculum for grades 9 through 11 is centered on the College Board's Advanced Placement program in all core subjects. Students must take at least six AP exams and eight AP courses throughout their high school tenure, with these exams counting as Final exams in the course and comprising part of a Board Examination system. All BASIS graduates complete an AP course in each of the core disciplines: English, math, science, and social science."

Pass six AP exams to graduate from high school!

In a recent thread I have cited a study showing that PSAT scores predict AP scores. In other threads I have argued that the SAT (and thus the PSAT) is largely an IQ test. Scores on AP tests, SATs, and IQ tests all show similar patterns. Students and parents look at graduation requirements and avoid the school if they think it is too demanding.

The Basis charter in Scottsdale, AZ http://www.publicschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/118950 is 0% American Indian, 33% Asian, 3% Hispanic, 1% Black, and 64% White. Arizona is 9% American Indian, 2% Asian, 27% Hispanic, 6% Black, and 41% White.

Kids who are LD or ELL are likely under-represented also.

If charter schools are free to set their own academic standards, this can result in a very different demographic mix than the surrounding area, without any explicit discrimination.

Remember, though, that the idea behind services and accommodations for kids with LD's and physical impairments is NOT to 'reduce expectations' but to evaluate what the student's potential peer group should be, if the disability didn't limit the student's ability to perform or access a particular program, and to then figure out a way to REMOVE the barrier so that the student reaches that level of actual performance.

Those are distinct methods of accommodating a student with a disability; the old way of thinking had us reducing expectations, and the new way has us 'removing barriers' and keeping appropriately lofty expectations.

I'd argue, however, that there are probably some accommodations which are questionable in this sense, since they will NEVER be applied in the "real world," and they would likely prove helpful to "unaffected peers" as well (for example, extended time on the SAT has been shown to raise scores-- ALL students' scores, not just those with documented disability). So those things may or may not be the true equivalent of a wheelchair ramp or braille materials. On the other hand, those accommodations (like extra time on assessments) are not expensive, either, and they do allow students to learn and demonstrate understanding in a way that shows marked improvement over not having those accommodations.

Along those same lines, while I realize perfectly well that the "real world" argument is a bit specious here (remember, my DD has accommodations for school that aren't "real world" reflective), there is another angle to consider... reality doesn't really care in particular what a person's accommodations 'need' to be. That is, if you have impairment X, then career options A, B, and C are simply off the table. Pretending that this isn't so is kind of wrong in some sense, becuase there ARE people who, with no accommodations whatsoever, are well-suited to A, B, and C. Making someone LOOK as though they are in that group via accommodations is... um... unfair to everyone? And I get how painful it is to face those things. Believe me, I do. My kid cannot serve in the armed forces. Period. She's DQ'ed automatically, which is kind of unfair. But that is life.

There is also an ethically sticky portion to this entire mess, which is this: should students whose intellectual disabilities are profound be allowed "educational benefit" at any cost, even if that benefit is minimal and the costs are crippling? I'd argue "perhaps not" in a system where dollars are a scarce resource. I know that it sounds cruel, and it makes me sad because it isn't what I'd like to say... but the majority of children deserve to have desks and textbooks even if that means that a child with the cognitive ability of a 2 year old doesn't recieve one-to-one tutoring at life skills and skilled nursing care for eight hours a day on the school district's dime.


I also agree that with administrators (necessarily) focused on meeting AYP, there is a truly insidious incentive for schools to shuffle marginal, questionable, and failing students elsewhere-- using whatever means necessary. This is partly the same phenomenon which drives a reluctance to challenge HG+ kids, too, by the way. Because our kids are a guaranteed test score within the group of their chronological peers. Why risk that?

It's all rather icky, honestly.

Charter schools do accept public funds and do discriminate - at least that's what happened to us in NYC. My DS got accepted by lottery into a local public charter school. This local public charter school in NYC accepts public money to fund said school.

The local public charter school took a look at my son's IEP and then ripped up my son's acceptance in front of me. The principal told me that she could not accept my son on the basis of him needing ot and pt services. She said they didn't have any ot/pt resources and that I would have to send my son to the public school. Well, we moved back to MA instead.

Here in MA, I discovered my son is eg/pg; no longer needs ot/pt; and cannot be accommodated in a private gifted school due to being eg/pg. In NYC, my son took the G & T test, but he didn't qualify for the G & T program. Oh, yea, he had an IEP then and the G & T discriminated against him there.

Public schools have to accept ALL students regardless of abilities or disabilities. Charter schools apparently can accept public funds and then choose NOT to accept particular students. Ditto for G & T programs. I'd happily join a class action lawsuit if I could. Where's the ACLU?

Yes, it really is.

I knew a student who had a certain disability. Her counselor encouraged her to take a class that required abilities she just didn't have. She did poorly, and no accommodation could have compensated for her problems. Every day was a reminder of what she could never do. It was a sad and difficult situation for everyone in the class, including me.

To me, when the counselor encouraged her to take that class, he was far more cruel than he would have been if he'd just said, "Well, I'm not sure this one will be the best choice for you. What about x, y, or z?" There was other stuff she could have done just fine, but the philosophy that "everyone deserves a chance" prevailed and made a difficult situation worse for her.

ETA: Not saying she was 2E or had a disability that could be accommodated. She was really just plain disabled. This anecdote is somewhat OT and more a response to the "icky situation" statement.

I sympathize with the frustrations people have mentioned here. Personally, I think addressing them properly would require a huge shift in thinking among our schools --- in particular, a move away from high-stakes industrialized testing and a focus on real education over test prep.

My point was simply that there are federal rules in place that prevent schools which receive public funds from (supposedly) discriminating against disabled students.
Should huge sums of public money be spent to publically educate, say, a profoundly disabled autistic student who is non-verbal and confined to a wheelchair? That is a broad discussion not really relevant here.
My son is hearing-impaired and has an IEP. He gets minimal services due to that. He is highly gifted and, so far, has gotten nothing special for that. Still, I don't begrudge kids who are really disabled from receiving federal/state funds.

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

Yep. There is very little in that (admittedly somewhat biased) piece which is technically untrue.

I'm not sure that the overall effect is fully truthful, because the author has (IMO having spent the past 6y looking at the gears and being part of the machine) done just as much cherry-picking as those that she's spearing.

But yes, I think that more careful scrutiny of some practices in this particular genre of charter school is in order. Long overdue, in point of fact.

When your marketing and lobbying expenses exceed your budget for professional development for your teachers... uhhhhhh... yeah. Something not right about that.

A list of textbooks used at the Basis school in Tuscon is at https://www.basisschools.org/phocadownload/2011tucson%20book%20list.pdf . They look suitable for gifted children, not the general population. In 12 grade there is

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

Cat On a Hot Tin Roof by Tennesee Williams

Death of a Salesman by Henry Miller

Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

Fundamentals of Differential Equations and
Boundary Value Problems, Volume 1

Gravity, by James Hartle

Introduction to Electrodynamics

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

Principles of Quantum Mechanics

Rent by Jonathan Larson

South Pacific by Rogers and Hammerstein

Top Dog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

West Side Story by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard
Berstein

That doesn't seem that out of line with fairly average AP offerings, though.

(I say that as a parent who has just seen the AP Literature list for next year.)

HowlerKarma-

The charter movement was originally intended as a way to free up public schools from some of the requirements that kept it from experimenting with new educational styles. By allowing a school to hire, as an example, an accomplished artist or a professional research scientist, rather than someone with a BA and a credential, schools could tinker with some changes and be free from some Ed.Code rules. They could try an adapted Montessori model, or Waldorf, or focus on group projects or IB, what have you. It was designed as an experimentation model to find successful other ways that could then be applied to traditional schools. It was never intended to be an us vs. them or an either or model.

For example, I spent two years as a teacher trainer at a technical high school that was specifically designed to take kids coming out of juvenile hall or probation and to give them a career. They were not kids who were going to college (for the most part) or kids who had big hopes and dreams. Our entire goal was to give them a GED and skills that paid better than selling drugs. Our Construction Management program was run by a guy with 40 years in the industry and he had his own company, hiring most of the graduates out as an apprentice.

It worked and it worked well. In the 4 years the school was in existence, every single kid passed the CAHSEE (exit exam in CA) or got their GED and not one of them returned to juvenile hall in the time we tracked them. In a tragic turn of events for these kids, the district shut us down because our AYP was not satisfactory. Moving a bunch of kids from far below basic to basic and giving them jobs, does not help AYP. You need kids in proficient and advanced to do that.

I don't think that experimentation, creativity and student focus is coming out of most for-profit, nationally run charters. It defeats the entire purpose of boots on the ground local control. If the principal has no budgetary control, the teachers report to someone in another state and there are 15+ schools in the network it is just a large, bureaucratic school district.

That's not to say it doesn't work for some kids. I have heard great things about Connections for being flexible with gifted kids, compacting and accelerating students as necessary. (Not so much with k12). But they also seem to have local hands-on people that are more in touch with the kids, in addition to the upper levels of bureaucracy. I don't know if it's a sustainable financial model in the long run. I got offered a job with k12 and just about died laughing when they offered me $23,000 to work full-time in California, with several years of experience and three credentials under my belt.

The often left out dialogue of the charter debate is that the schools are often non-union. This gives the teachers' unions fodder to fight against new charters, even if the school is helping kids, doing well and serving the population better than their current employers. Some charters pay horribly (example above!) while others pay the same or better than their neighboring school districts. My long-time employer pays 6% less than the district. However, when you add in the union dues that we don't pay, the matching 403B account my employer provides and the $500 gift card for class supplies at the beginning of the year, it comes out pretty close. In good years, my school has also paid for conferences, teacher training, units beyond your credential at the university level and stipends for mentoring new teachers.

Charters are like gifted kids- if you've seen one, you've seen ONE. And that's the intention.

This is absolutely the case at my daughter's charter school. The entrance requirements are already pretty high, FSIQ 130+ to even be considered for the lottery. They have a sibling policy, but the sib has to also have minimum scores to get a spot.

My DS is 2E . His processing speed was so low that he missed the FSIQ. His GAI was much higher than the minimum, and he had previously diagnosed LDs that would clearly effect the low subtests, but they still refused to consider him. The tester, a 2E specialist, said she thought he was HG and an intelligent reading of the subtests supported that. But according to this school, if you have fine motor problems so severe that you can barely hold a pencil and as a result, you can't make marks in boxes at a high rate of speed, then you are not gifted enough for their precious program, Sigh.

They did eventually reconsider and offered him a spot, but with the same hemming and hawing that I am hearing from others in this thread..... Well we don't offer OT..... He might not be a good fit for our program, he might struggle..... and my personal favorite, Don't you think you should leave the spot for a child who could really benefit from our program? A person well know on the internet for writing about giftedness (but has zero experience with 2E as best I can figure) is on their BOD and called me at one point. Told me I should just homeschool DS. I am thinking, but I don't WANT to homeschool. I want to send my gifted son to the same school his gifted older sister attends, but I can't because, first, you would not let me and then second, you scared me into thinking the experience would scar the child for life.

So after homeschooling for a year, I sent DS to ANOTHER charter school. This one seems to specialize in quirky kids. When I stopped by to tour the school, I was basically told, yes, quirky is what we do. Bring it on! And they have done a great job. He has an IEP for OT and gets a little bit of one on one tutoring for fluency issues. They use MAP scores for academic placement so he has a two year grade skip for math, close to that for reading and does spelling with the kids a year younger (well not anymore, he is at grade level now. But that is where he started the year.). His achievement scores were all stellar this year, comparable to his sister's, and exactly what you would expect from an HG kid.

So just in my personal experience, I have found radically different attitudes toward LDs from the two charters my family has been involved with. With my daughter's school, they just don't want to bother with 2E kids. Test scores are not even an issue because of the IQ requirement. But they have extensive enrichment programming and my sense is that they want to keep the focus and the money there. The waiting list is long, so they are never hurting for students. So why bother with serving 2E or high poverty students, for that matter? Other than the fact that it is probably not legal, but whatever....

My son's school welcomes all children and attempts to meet them where they are. I think it is hilarious that the school with the mediocre tests scores and no official gifted program is actually better at ability grouping than the school that is supposed to focus on kids with unique and intense learning needs, but that is probably discussion for another thread.

This must vary by area. There are a LOT of charters in my city. I know a LOT of kids in them. None of these kids would have gone to privates or "other districts" otherwise. Zip. I know hmm, I guess two families who use private school. It isn't the done thing in my circle.

There are 100+ students who are supposed to be enrolled in our zoned elementary school of 350ish kids (which is bad, bad, bad) who are not going there, including my own child. This does NOT include kids who are in private schools or in another district (unheard of here--our district is very big and to go to the next one over would never be an option--very rural). No, all these kids are in charters or magnets or their parents have somehow finagled a zoning exemption (rare). They are the kids of parents who have decided to fight for their kids' education. They would probably make a big difference to that school if they went to it.

While I know for sure that we are not "siphoning" anything from anyone...

after all, we'd otherwise be homeschooling--

most of my DD's classmates are NOT from homeschooling backgrounds. Most of them are from public schools in their own districts.

So yeah-- they constitute a loss of $$ for their home district. We're the seeming exception there, in that our enrollment results in a small amount going to our district that used to simply stay as a windfall at the state level.

In that sense, cyber-charters are GOOD for districts if they can enroll previously homeschooled children. But they can be very, very bad for districts which are already struggling (rural ones especially, but also inner city schools that need every "good, rule-following" kid they can GET).

NCMom2, in nearly every state in the country, charter schools are prohibited from discriminating based on ability, academic or athletic etc. there are some schools that have special provisions but they are few and far between and require special legislation to do so. The Davidson Academy, for example, is one that has authorization for ability requirements. However, pilot schools, magnet schools and other school within a school models have completely different state and federal regulations. Here is a definition from NY http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/about.html

Ultramarine, I do realize this varies in different areas. However, statistically, in CA where I live, charter school students were leaving predominantly poor performing schools and are leaving anyway, either through demanded parent choice, moving, private school or charters. In addition, the charters in CA that are dependent are required to pay the district a portion of the ADA for students that they have lost. Charter schools get less money per pupil because of this. Also, it is often left out of the discussion that one less, or ten less, kids are not only a loss of funds but a loss of responsibility. The traditional school no longer needs to buy books, pay a teacher or an aide or an administration portion, for that kid.

It has been my overwhelming observation over many areas and years in charter politics that parents don't opt out of successful schools. They leave failing ones, either because it is failing the individual child or the group as a whole. If Traditional schoolsacross the board were doing a better job, parents wouldn't feel the need to seek alternatives. This is equally applicable for students with LDs or 2e issues. People don't fix what isn't broken.

NCMom the school you reference must have a special exemption, is working outside the law or these are old state rules because this is pretty clear that they can't have a preference for IQ nor can they even ask IEP status before the lottery.

http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/docs/charterschools/faq/enrollment-lottery.pdf

Yes, special exemption. My understanding, the school got the charter early on. Once people figured out that it involved IQ testing, heads exploded. I think there was a court case. The resolution was that the school remains, but there will never be another one like it in NC.

They don't ask about IEP status, but it is pretty clear from DS's scatter that he has LDs. I was also asking for them to use his GAI, not the FSIQ, which is the norm, for entrance due to his LD status.