Which groups are over- or under-represented in regular DC public schools and the DC charter schools?
I’ve been taking a careful look at where various groups of students in Washington DC are enrolled, using various official DCPS and OSSE documents, to see which groups are under- or over-represented in my city’s regular public schools and charter schools.
Here is the bottom line:
Black students are over-represented in the charter schools, but every other single group I calculated (special education students, English-language learners, students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, Hispanic students, students deemed officially At Risk, white or Asian students, multiracial students and even students who got ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ on the DC-CAS) are over-represented in the regular DC public schools.
I will present my results below in the form of circle graphs, and I made it so that the area of each circle is proportional to the total number of students in each group. I also showed where the division line between the public school population and the charter school population would be if the subgroup’s population was split evenly among the two school systems. If you want to take a closer look at any of the graph, merely click on it.
All Publicly-Funded DC Students
First, the overall student population. As you can see, the regular DC public schools enrolled 57.2% of all publicly-funded students last year, while the charter schools enrolled 42.8%, and the total population was 76,659 students.
African-American students
Next, let’s look at where Black (African-American) students are enrolled. You may be surprised to find that they are over-represented in the DC charter schools, and under-represented in the regular DC public schools. They are the ONLY group to be divided in that manner.The dotted circle represents the entire population of publicly-funded students; last year, Black students represented 71.6% of that entire enrollment, or 54.894 students. Only 52.7% of those (Black) students were enrolled in the regular DC public schools, which is a smaller percentage than the Which groups are over- or under-represented in regular DC public schools and the DC charter schools? | GFBrandenburg's Blog:
