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Bowing to pressure from both internal and outside groups, the state has abruptly reversed a policy that banned charter schools from giving admissions preference to students who are not fluent in English.

On December 23, two days after I wrote about the New York State Education Department’s policy, state education officials informed the city’s Department of Education about the change in plan. The new policy, which will allow charter schools that want to focus on English Language Learners to give them preference in their admission lotteries, will directly and immediately affect one school: Inwood Academy for Leadership.

Initially, Inwood Academy’s principal Christina Hykes applied for a charter that would set aside 50 percent of the school’s seats for ELL students, creating two separate lotteries. But state officials told Hykes that only students “at risk of academic failure” could be singled out and given admissions preference. ELL students were not among these, officials said. (more…)

A charter school that hoped to focus on students who don’t speak English is changing tactics after being told by the state that it cannot give admissions preference to the students it wants to attract.

Though New York City’s charter schools admit relatively few English Language Learners in comparison to district schools, Inwood Academy for Leadership intended to be the exception. When Principal Christina Hykes applied for a charter, she envisioned a school where half the students were English Language Learners and half were general education students, making Inwood Academy the first charter school in the city to propose such a model.

Hykes planned to achieve this balance by giving admissions preference to ELL students living in Inwood, something Department of Education officials agreed she could do. State law encourages charters to focus on students “at risk of academic failure,” and students with little English seemed like prime candidates. They routinely have lower scores on the state tests than their English-speaking peers and are less likely to graduate high school.

But officials at the State Education Department disagreed with the city’s reading of the law, telling the DOE and Hykes that ELL students don’t fall in the “at risk” category. As a result, Inwood Academy’s application would have to lose all the language giving ELLs enrollment preference if it wanted to get a charter. (more…)