Carolina’s daughter was in 1st grade when her teachers made an upsetting discovery: she could neither read nor write.
The little girl had spent much of her kindergarten year in and out of the hospital, ill with what doctors finally diagnosed as a neurological disorder. She was promoted to the 1st grade, but after missing 35 days of kindergarten, she was hopelessly behind. Her teachers gave her mother two choices: the 6-year-old could repeat a grade, or a parent could accompany her to school to help her along.
Though she lacked any formal training to do so, Carolina agreed to join her daughter each day at the George F. Kelly Elementary School in Chelsea, a working-class city north of Boston.
“I stopped working,” said Carolina, a mother of five who was born in Guatemala, whose surname is being withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. For three months, Carolina attended school from 8 to 11 a.m. “I learned how to teach her.”
For the next few years, Carolina’s daughter remained at the neighborhood school, where she was eventually diagnosed with several learning disabilities and qualified for tutoring and extra support. But as she approached middle school, doctors urged Carolina to consider sending her daughter to a specialized school for students with disabilities. There, the girl would be one of two or three students per class.
Instead, Carolina enrolled her daughter at nearby Excel Academy East Boston, a charter middle school that takes an inclusive approach to teaching special-education students.
“I wanted her to associate with other children,” she said.
There’s considerable public debate about charter schools and students with specialized needs, focused mainly on the extent to which charters enroll students who are classified to receive special-education services. A new study by Elizabeth Setren of Tufts University shows that critics, who often charge that charters do not serve as many special-education students as traditional public schools do, may not be asking the right questions (for more, see “A Charter Boost for Special-Ed Students and English Learners”). A school’s overall environment, not just access to specialized services, appears to be an important component to all students’ success.
Looking across the city of Boston, Setren compared the classifications and academic performance of charter-school students who were considered special-education students or English language learners at the time of their application with their peers in traditional public schools. Boston charters achieve better outcomes for those students than traditional public schools do, even though charter enrollment at least doubles the likelihood that students lose their classification and, as a result, access to specialized services. The types of educational approaches charters use—like data-driven instruction, more instructional time, and intensive tutoring—appear to benefit students with specialized needs just as they benefit their non-classified peers.
Presuming competence for special-ed students
Just after 7 a.m. on a cool morning in September, students clad in uniforms of khaki and navy blue began arriving at Excel Academy East Boston, forming an orderly line outside the building’s glass solarium. As the students in grades 5‒8 waited for the doors to open at 7:30, a fleet of yellow school buses arrived, carrying more of their classmates. The sound of airplanes taking off and landing could be heard from nearby Logan International Airport.
East Boston, known locally as Eastie, is a predominantly low-income immigrant neighborhood that sits between the airport and Boston Harbor. Some 53 percent of residents are Latino, according to Census Bureau data, and only about 69 percent of residents over the age of 25 have a high school diploma. It is also a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and a magnet for real-estate developers drawn to water views.
The school, which opened in 2013, has 241 students—a fraction of the 1,374 enrolled across Excel Academy Charter School’s network of four schools, whose mission is to prepare students for success in high school and college. Excel Academy schools are focused on high academic expectations, rigorous instruction, comprehensive family and student support, and consistent classroom and school rules. Across the network, 79 percent of students are Latino and 19 percent are classified to receive special-education services. Many are from low-income families where English is not the primary language spoken at home, and the vast majority meet or exceed standards on statewide reading and math tests. In 2014, for example, 100 percent of the network’s 8th-grade students scored “proficient” or “advanced” on that year’s statewide test in reading.
E. B. Solomont is a Boston-based writer.