This is a well-researched and nicely assessment of the issue, and I truly do appreciate Mr. Evangelista’s candor and analysis in his piece (and kudos to him and his team for their A this year).That said, I have a major beef with his description of the way the backfill argument is used by so-called ‘anti-reformers,’ or even rank amateurs like me who simply don’t buy into the charter agenda lock, stock, and barrel. Mentioning the failure to backfill is an absolutely valid and appropriate defense to charter braggadocio about how they educate the exact same kids, and it’s an especially salient counterpoint to charter complaints about space and equity–why in the world should any network or operator get more schools when as a matter of policy they don’t fill every seat in the schools they already do have? It would be difficult to force charters to educate ELLs, free-lunch-eligible, and special ed students in the same proportions as their home districts. It would be incredibly easy to prohibit them from not backfilling, and I hope this is something that’s looked at by the legislature. 

I’d like to note that the no-backfilling policy also advantages charters in that their “school environment” assessments will almost certainly be higher.  You may have your entering class with parents of varying satisfaction levels, but at upper grades you can assume higher levels of satisfaction because everyone is there “by choice,” communication is easier, they have no new kids/parents to integrate and establish lines of communication with, they have an established, stable  community and in many cases, much smaller class sizes comparatively.  There is a charter in my district that got great test scores, got an A on this year’s progress report, but lost fully a QUARTER of its class in between 5th and 6th grade, and went from 80 to 59 kids.  It’s seems quite bizarre not to incorporate an analysis of this in a school’s assessment.  

Of course, I think we should be comparing zoned schools in this way as well.  A zoned school that has a 95% stability rate has something different going on than a zoned school that has a 72% stability rate.  There may, in fact, be several different things going on, and those things may cut in opposite directions, but it seems like a huge cop-out not to at least try to understand what those things are.