There are no grand revelations, but this new report about New York’s robust charter sector from the city’s Independent Budget Office offers useful data on a range of hotly debated topics, including student demographics, attrition, and “backfilling” seats left by departing students.
For starters, it’s good to be reminded just how small that sector is, in spite of its rapid growth. Gotham boasts some of the nation’s highest-profile and most closely watched charters, including Success Academy, KIPP, and Achievement First, but only seventy-two thousand of the city’s 1.1 million school-aged children attend a charter school. And those major players are a fraction of the New York’s charter school scene, which is almost evenly split between network-run schools and independents. Some New York City neighborhoods are particularly charter-rich (Harlem, for instance, enrolls 37 percent of its students in charters as of 2013–2014), but charters remain relatively rare in the boroughs of Queens and Staten Island. The sector also serves an overwhelmingly black and Hispanic population. Charter students are more likely to be poor than traditional Department of Education (DOE) schools, though charters serve smaller concentrations of English language learners and special education students.
Another fascinating bit of data: The controversial practice of co-locating charters in DOE space is definitely contributing to overcrowding—in charter schools. Nearly 45 percent of charters have utilization rates over 100 percent, versus only 13 percent of DOE schools in co-located buildings.
The report is most noteworthy for filling a data vacuum in the contentious debate over “backfilling.” A report earlier this year called for New York’s charters to reduce long waiting lists by enrolling new students every fall when slots become available. “Some schools clearly choose not to fill the seats made available through student attrition,” the IBO notes, but “many fill all of their available seats or even add additional students to their cohort.” Backfilling declines after third grade, but even then, 80 percent of fourth- and fifth-grade charter school seats are filled. “To the extent you think backfilling is a problem, the data shows it's well on its way to being solved,” observed James Merriman, the head of the New York City Charter School Center. A notable exception is Success Academy, which largely eschewed backfilling in its upper grades until recently—and posts test scores that leave the rest of the city’s schools in the dust.
The IBO report won’t settle the noisy debates between charter boosters and critics in New York City—nothing short of an asteroid strike could accomplish that—but it’s a fascinating trove of data.
SOURCE: Raymond Domanico, “School Indicators for New York City Charter Schools 2013–2014 School Year,” New York City Independent Budget Office (July 2015).
