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left behind
May 20, 2009
Report: Many city charter schools lack hardest-to-educate kids
A frequent criticism of charter schools is that they succeed by “creaming” children. A new analysis by Insideschools finds that many city charter schools do have significantly fewer needy students than other public schools.
Vanessa Witenko, a former colleague of mine, analyzed data from city charter schools (although she had trouble obtaining some data) and found that most do not enroll homeless students, offer special programs for students still learning how to speak English, or provide special education services that are legally required for some children with special needs.
Here are a few key excerpts.
On why charter schools enroll just 111 of the city’s 51,000 homeless students:
“The application period is February and March and the lottery is held in April,” said [Jeff] Litt [of the Carl C. Icahn charter schools]. “A mother who comes [to the shelter] in June is too late, so their kids go to the neighborhood school.” Homeless families may have priorities other than seeking alternatives to their neighborhood schools, he said. “They have daily survival needs. I don’t know if they have the time to research who we are, what we are, how to get in.”
On some charter schools’ use of Collaborative Team Teaching classes, intended for some children with special needs, to educate children who are learning English:
“Special education and language acquisition services are completely two different things” said [Arlen] Benjamin-Gomez, [an attorney at Advocates for Children of New York, Insideschools' parent organization]. “Under state and federal law, you have to have, at minimum, an ESL or bilingual program. You cannot put them in a special education program to satisfy their ESL needs.”
And on how one school, Harlem’s Harriett Tubman Charter School, dealt with a troubled child:
“I started getting calls. They told me I had to come to school and sit with her in the classroom, because she was acting out,” said [Jamie] Evans, who at the time thought her daughter was just misbehaving, but now recognizes that her daughter has a disability. …
“The principal, she gave up on Christina. She said, ‘I wasn’t raised this way, and what’s going on in the household? We don’t tolerate this.’” recalls Evans. “She was just not trying to help me in no kind of way. She wouldn’t give me the time of day. I would call her. I would schedule meetings with her, but she wouldn’t show up.” After a few months in 1st grade, Evans removed Christina and enrolled her at their zoned school, PS 55, where she was evaluated and given an IEP that mandates that she be given twice weekly therapy sessions.
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May 20th, 2009 12:40 pm
This is not a good assertion because charters vary so widely. Some charters serve tons of Homeless and ACS involved Kids. One Elementary school, Mott Haven in the bronx serves mostly those students, Democracy Prep in Harlem has 5% homeless students and others in the ACS system, while Vanessa’s numbers show KIPP and AF as having no Homeless students, which I find hard to believe. There is a data problem here, as well as an overreaching problem of those who think that ELLs should be in bilingual programs only. Some ELLs need immersion, and one size definitely doesn’t fit all.
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May 20th, 2009 2:03 pm
There are many who would refuse to answer a question to whether or not they are homeless for many reasons. The data is likely incomplete. It’s the same with free lunch. There are individuals who do not want to contribute to statistics and opt not to fill out papers which would make them eligible for free lunch because they do not like the labeling of their kids.
Not sure that could be perfectly fixed. Perhaps one partial solution would be to provide school choice information to be readily available at shelters and supporting organizations. It’s hardly the fault of a charter school that they do not have kids enrolled that never applied. -
May 20th, 2009 2:39 pm
111 out of 51,000 is outrageous. De facto “creaming.”
What’s to prevent charters from reserving a few seats for kids from homeless shelters?
“June” is too late? Try telling that to roughly 300 families on various wait lists in D2.
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May 20th, 2009 6:58 pm
So Greg, only the homeless families that go to public schools are honest? That doesn’t make any sense. The free lunch statistics don’t come from some home survey either. The city/state has data on it, because all those lunches are paid for by state/federal money, and that money has to be accounted for. If you want to defend charter schools, okay, but I think you’re gonna have to come up with something better than that.
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May 21st, 2009 9:13 am
Charter schools are prevented by state law from reserving seats for students. If more students apply than the school has seats, enrollment is done by random lottery. In NYC the law requires preference be given to students in the CSD in which the school is located, and I believe schools can also give preference to siblings and at-risk students. I would assume homeless students could be given preference as at-risk students, but they would still have to enter the lottery to enroll.
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May 21st, 2009 11:02 am
Gideon,
Thanks.
One way to comply with all known constraints is to have the lottery later in the year, no? -
May 21st, 2009 1:29 pm
Charter schools do not deal with the same dilemmas that regular public schools deal with. Many charter schools require parents to sign a contract that states they will participate in X number of school events every year. I would love to see that happen in my school. (I am laughing hysterically right now.) The mother from the story claimed her daughter’s needs were neglected in her charter school because of the behavior problem she exhibited. If that happened in a regular public school it would be on the front page of the Post and Daily News. Charter schools are given a ton of leeway in how they deal with their children. It’s a shame that more articles like the one above aren’t available to the general public in their daily paper. OH WAIT…Bloomberg is a saint according to those papers, so why not shine a BRIGHT LIGHT on his pet projects. Remember, when politics gets involved with education, only the kids suffer.
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May 21st, 2009 3:33 pm
Please, enough with the deception and delusions. Charter schools are private schools capitalized jointly by taxpayer money and corporate/malanthropic venture capital. While a few charters may serve high needs students, the overwhelming majority don’t, which is intentional. The venture capitalists are test marketing a range of schools, and when they find out the most marketable ones, they will unleash them as franchises, complete with Initial Public Offerings or their equivalent.
In Harlem, Ground Zero in the hostile takeover of the public schools, the stats overwhelingly show that ELLs and Speceial Ed students are grossly under represented. In any world other than the Through the Looking Glass/ Newspeak world of corporate ed reform, this wouldn’t even be a debatable point any more, yet here we are, arguing whether the sky is blue.
Or is the sky whatever color Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, et. al. say it is?
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May 21st, 2009 3:46 pm
How about publishing the free & reduced eligible %, homeless %, special ed %, ELL % for each charter school along with their test scores? And, of course, compare those to the district averages. Wouldn’t that increase the transparency?
I found the insideschools report to be uncharacteristically slanted, with generalizations NOT backed up by any evident data. Where are these statistics that they uncovered? I may be missing something, but I didn’t see them attached to the report.
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May 23rd, 2009 2:28 pm
The “creaming” debate has been around for years, and before there were charter schools to complain about, the public schools were criticized as well. At this time, charters may only accept students through random lottery. Public schools, on the other hand, are allowed to use tests, interviews, and other hoops to weed out–cream–students whom they do not want to educate. Everyone has access to the special education statistics in New York City: simply go to the school site on the DOE website, go to “statistics,” and then pull up the special education information. You can find there, for instance, the following percentages of students with disabilities at these high schools: Stuyvesant (.2%), Bronx Science (.1%), Brooklyn Tech (.5%), Townsend Harris (.5%), Bard (.5%), Baruch College Campus HS (2.6%) and Beacon High School (5%). How many are arguing that these school should be now forced to go to a random lottery?
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June 1st, 2009 8:11 am
[...] (h/t to Gotham Schools) [...]
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