'Mystery Parents' Test Charters' Enrollment of Spec. Ed., ELL Students
Fielding phone calls from parents asking about enrollment is part of everyday business for schools, but for some charter schools, the person on the other end of the line may only be posing as a parent.
Modeled after “mystery” or “secret shopper” services used in retail, authorizers in the District of Columbia and Massachusetts are using a similar tactic to make sure the charter schools they oversee are not turning away students with more specialized needs, such as children with disabilities or who are still learning English.
This issue has long dogged the charter sector which nationally, some studies show, enrolls a lower percentage of students with disabilities compared to regular public schools. The discrepancy, some charter critics say, comes from the publicly funded but independently run schools turning away such students in order to improve test scores.
“We started this because there was huge a perception among the public that charters counseled out students with disabilities,” said Naomi R. DeVeaux, the deputy director for the District of Columbia’s public charter school board. “We wanted to know if this was true.”
How it Works
The board started its mystery caller program as a pilot in 2012 and then made it official board policy a year later. Staff members call every charter school in the city pretending to be a parent of a student with disabilities.
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If the school answers all the questions about the enrollment process correctly, it passes. If the school answers any question inappropriately—for example, if it tells the “parent” that the school across the street is better suited for students with disabilities—the charter board calls back again at a later date. If the school gives a wrong answer twice, it gets a warning. And if it fails to address the problem, its charter could be revoked.
Before calling schools, the charter board’s staff members are handed a scenario and loose script to follow, but are told to come up with a name, age, and current school for their fictional child to customize the script in order to sound more natural. They also use cellphones or a Google Voice account so that the charter board doesn’t pop up on the caller ID of the target school.
“It’s something any authorizer can do and it’s kind of fun,” Ms. DeVeaux said.
And that’s one of the appeals of the mystery-caller program: it’s not a huge resource drain. Calls to the 100 schools that the charter board oversees are split among five staff members. Aside from a cellphone, a script, and the callers themselves, the only other necessary tool is a spreadsheet.
Although the calls are made by a mystery “parent,” the program itself is no secret. The city’s charter schools know the board will be making the calls during the enrollment period in early January. Charter board officials say they’re not trying for “gotcha” moments, but rather teaching moments.
The first year the charter board initiated the program, 10 schools failed. The following year, the number fell to eight, and last year, it dropped further still to two. Those cases, board officials said, had more to do with the schools not understanding the new citywide enrollment system than with anything discriminatory.
For the 2013-14 school year, special education enrollment in the District of Columbia’s charter schools was 12 percent, compared to 14 percent in the city’s traditional public schools.
Growing the Program
The District of Columbia board has been contacted by authorizers from other states asking about the program, including Massachusetts, which started its own pilot version 'Mystery Parents' Test Charters' Enrollment of Spec. Ed., ELL Students - Education Week: