In light of a Hillary Clinton’s charge that charter schools “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids,” as well as the lambasting of one of the nation’s highest-performing charter networks for its discipline practices, this report from the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools is especially timely. As it reveals, the worst of the recent allegations fall flat (at least when it comes to students with disabilities). Charter schools do have slightly lower percentages of students with disabilities compared to traditional public schools (we should note that the discrepancy is nothing like the gap that some charter opponents allege), but they also tend to provide more inclusive educational settings for those students. Suspension rates in the two sectors are roughly the same.
The study’s authors investigate whether anecdotes about charter schools failing to serve students with disabilities align with the actual data. They examine enrollment, service provision, and discipline statistics, made possible through a secondary analysis of data from the Department of Education’s biennial Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2011–12 school year (the most recent one for which data is available). Nationwide, students who receive special education support and services made up 10.4 percent of total enrollment in charter schools, compared to 12.6 percent in district schools. The authors note that “charter schools have room to improve,” especially in states with wide discrepancies (e.g., New Jersey and Oklahoma). (Ohio is not among them, with charter schools enrolling at least 3 percent more students with disabilities than traditional schools). But they caution that closing the gap shouldn’t necessarily be a “universal goal,” as some state funding systems provide incentives that result in districts over-identifying students with disabilities. Encouragingly, the enrollment gap has shrunk: A 2008–09 report from the Government Accountability Office found that students with disabilities constituted just 7.7 percent of charter enrollment (versus 11.3 percent in district schools).
Perhaps more importantly, charter schools tend to place students with disabilities in “high-inclusion settings” (defined by whether a student spent 80 percent or more of the day in regular education). Charter schools placed 84 percent of their students with disabilities in such settings, compared to traditional schools’ placement rate of 67 percent. Finally, there is no evidence that charter schools suspend students with disabilities more frequently. Neither charter schools nor traditional public schools expel students with disabilities at a high rate (0.55 percent for charters versus 0.46 percent for district schools), but charter rates are slightly higher—perhaps driven by the fact that they have slightly higher expulsion rates overall, including for students without disabilities.
The report concludes with a handful of policy recommendations, focused mainly on ensuring that data collection efforts continue, and that state education agencies and authorizers rigorously monitor enrollment practices and service provision among all schools. The CRDC dataset has “methodological limitations”—some schools had incomplete information as a result of the DOE concealing enrollment numbers to protect student privacy (which was more common among smaller schools, possibly skewing the data set). And the suspension and expulsion data was non-standardized and self-reported by schools. Still, over 80 percent of traditional schools and 60 percent of charter schools were captured overall, and the comparisons are useful. While the study lives up to its goal to provide “practitioners and researchers with a solid foundation” of data to inform discussions typically fueled by rhetoric, further study is warranted. Advocates should examine how well all schools are serving students with disabilities (beyond enrolling them and placing them in high-inclusion settings), explore cost-saving mechanisms for charter schools, and offer further case studies of specialized charter schools innovating to uniquely meet the needs of this vulnerable student group.
Source: Lauren Morando Rhim, Jesse Gumz, Kelly Henderson, “Key Trends in Special Education in Charter Schools: A Secondary Analysis of the Civil Rights Data Collection 2011-2012,” National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools (October 2015).
