Charter Schools and Students with Special Needs

In this Harvard Education Letter article, Sarah Carr analyzes a criticism often made of charter schools – that they don’t serve as many children with special needs as regular public schools. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that 8.2 percent of students in charter schools have disabilities versus 11.2 percent in regular public schools. (This is not always the case: in six states, charters enrolled a greater proportion of students with special needs, but in 30 states, the opposite was true.)

Why the widespread underrepresentation of children with disabilities in charter schools?

• Some districts steer children with disabilities away from charters because they’re not as well-equipped to handle diverse special needs. And indeed, small charter networks or stand-alone charters often lack the resources to provide specialized services. 

• Some charter schools don’t actively recruit children with special needs, and those students’ parents don’t go through the application process.

• Charter operators tend to be anti-bureaucratic. Carr quotes a 2011 North Carolina Law Review article by Robert Garda saying that special education laws and regulations “contrast starkly with the fundamental nature and culture of charter schools and pit regulation against autonomy, procedures against results, rigid bureaucracy against flexibility, and collective action against independence…” 

• Some charters discourage children with special needs from applying, refuse to admit them, or encourage those who enroll to go elsewhere. 

• Some charters are successful at educating students with disabilities in mainstream classes and those students are therefore not classified as having disabilities.

What is to be done? Some charter schools are increasing the proportion of children with special needs they serve by using two approaches:

• Forming special-needs cooperatives to pool resources and teacher training among schools; each school pays an annual membership fee (usually $1,500-2,500).
• Getting private and government grants for specialized programs for low-incidence students.

Another approach is mandates – for example, the New York State Education Department’s requirement in the summer of 2012 that charter schools serve roughly the same proportion of students with special needs as their district’s average. There’s also a push to tighten up the charter application process to ensure that new charters have good procedures in place and shut down schools that don’t measure up.

“Making Charter Schools More Inclusive” by Sarah Carr in Harvard Education Letter, January/February 2012 (Vol. 29, #1, p. 4-7), www.edletter.org 

From the Marshall Memo #466