Originally published on National Journal Education Experts Blog
There are many reasons why charter schools serve fewer special education students than traditional public schools. Some are troubling. Some aren’t. But the key take-away from the recent General Accountability Office report on the subject is that we need to think about charter schools as part of a larger system of public education rather than merely as competitors to traditional public schools.
Some charter schools have helped students shed their special education labels through effective instruction and individualized attention. That’s a good thing.
But many charter schools lack the infrastructure to support a full range of special education services. Sensing this, families with special needs students frequently stick with traditional public school systems (even when programs aren’t very good). For the same reason (and in some instances because charters don’t want to be saddled with the often-lower test scores of such students), some charter schools discourage students with disabilities from applying or counsel them out once they’ve enrolled. In at least two places—Washington, DC, and Louisiana—charters have countered their limited individual resources and expertise and established cooperatives to provide special education services.
While charter schools are prohibited by state laws from turning students away (they must enroll students through lotteries if they’re oversubscribed), it’s hard to expect individual charter schools of a couple hundred students to have the special education resources of schools systems with thousands of students, a reality that argues for the consortia models in DC and Louisiana, and collaboration with traditional school systems. There’s no reason why charters shouldn’t contract with public school systems to serve special student populations, and some do.
Encouragingly, a small but growing number of collaborations are flowing in the opposite direction as well. In Connecticut, for example, New Haven school officials are working with the well-regarded Achievement First charter network on a leadership training program to place potential New Haven administrators in residency in Achievement First schools for half a school year. The Hartford school system has brought in Achievement First to run two of its schools using the charter network’s effective middle school model. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, once a major funder of charter school expansion, has launched a $20-million program to promote such partnerships in over a dozen cities through District-Charter Collaboration Compacts.
Since the charter school movement’s earliest days there has been talk of the publicly funded but independently operated schools eventually replacing traditional public school systems. It’s increasingly clear, two decades into the movement, that the charter sector lacks the capacity to do that. There are about 5,600 charter schools today, educating some two million students, about 4 percent of total public school enrollment. And while charter schools have a substantial presence in some urban centers (70-plus percent in New Orleans; 40 percent in DC), too many of them have been no better than the troubled traditional schools they’ve replaced. There are too many instances of fraud and financial abuse emanating from the charter sector. And, as the new GAO study suggests, they often lack the capacity to serve students with special needs.
As a result, the best way to leverage the excellence and innovation of the best charter schools and charter networks is through closer connections with traditional public school districts–a seemingly win-win proposition.