The vast majority of charter schools transform the lives of the kids they serve at a fraction of the cost of traditional public schools. Among those voicing concern was Hillary Clinton at a SC event over the weekend. These schools and the more than 6,000 others serving more than 2.8 million children nationwide have demonstrated to America that not only can poor children learn, they can outperform rich kids in tony suburbs if they are given the right tools and attention. It’s much more tenuous to argue that “most” charter schools deliberately push out kids who are hard to teach, although, as the NY Times recently reported, a branch of the wildly high-achieving Success Academy charter school chain kept a list of students who had “got to go”. The vast majority of charter schools serve children who live in poverty, or close to poverty. Last year, children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches due to low family income comprised 70 percent of the charter school student population, compared to 44 percent in conventional public schools.
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But Clinton’s remarks – which were in response to a charter-friendly question that noted black parents are heavily in favor of such schools – signaled whose side she was on in the contentious Democratic Party education debate.
Three years ago, only New Orleans – where Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the traditional public school system, and where more than nine in 10 children now attend charters – had a greater percentage of students in charter schools than D.C. Charter schools don’t have admissions officers saying, “This student looks like they’ll be hard”, before giving them the rejection stamp.
I encourage Mrs. Clinton to visit a charter school this week, and next, and the week after that. The hot conservative education idea at the time was school vouchers – giving students public money to attend private schools.
But the two national teachers unions – the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers – were first to endorse her latest presidential run. “She called out that many charters don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids or don’t keep those with academic or behavioral issues”. They also discipline their students far more frequently, and both critics and a few supporters argue this partly explains why they’re more successful. Charter schools expelled 0.55 percent of students with disabilities and traditional schools 0.46 percent.
But as enrollment in the District’s traditional school system has grown in the past several years, the city’s charter school market share in the city has stayed relatively flat.
The higher suspension and expulsion rates don’t count students who leave voluntarily.
Studies of high-performing charter schools are able to account for demographic issues and nonetheless show a charter advantage. There’s also no difference between public and charter schools in the portion of students learning English as a second language. And the vast majority of charter schools not only have to fight to educate children, they have to fight the daily attacks from bureaucrats and special interests who place paychecks and adult jobs over the futures of disadvantaged kids.
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Los Angeles enrolled more than 150,000 students in charter schools in 2014-15 compared to 139,200 in 2013-14 – the highest for any school district in the country. That doesn’t mean that test scores are high only because low-achieving students are pushed out.
