State, City Data Prove Charter Schools Serve Fewer High Needs Students
Ben Chapman in the NY Daily News:
Charter schools score higher than city-operated schools by many measures — but they serve a less challenging population, with fewer needy students, the latest state numbers show.
Publicly funded, privately run charter schools enroll less than half as many English-language learners and fewer kids with disabilities than district-run schools do.
Special-needs kids constituted 9.4% of the students in charter schools, compared with 14.1% in city-run schools, state data from the 2011-12 school year show. English-language learners were 5.8% if the enrollment in charter schools, compared with 15% in district schools.
The charters outperform traditional public schools on many standardized tests, but critics say they start off with advantages because of the gap in percentages of English-