Public School Systems Beat Charters with Equitable Services Systemically Provided
While charter schools in a lot of places are known to use subtle, unnamed selective screens—there are far fewer English language learners, for example, and students with extremely serious disabilities enrolled in charter schools nationwide—only in New Orleans are there explicitly selective charter schools. The rules were bent for three already selective-admission magnet schools—Benjamin Franklin High School, Lusher Charter School, and Lake Forest Elementary School—in the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, when the charter experiment in New Orleans was launched. These three schools administer admissions tests and choose the students they will accept, and they are, like all the city’s other open-enrollment charter schools, without tuition. Writing for the Hechinger Report, Marta Jewson explains, “In a city where private-school tuition rivals college costs, gaining admission to these free public schools is like finding the golden ticket.” Not surprisingly, all three charter schools that can select high-scoring students post high aggregate test scores.
An earlier piece by the same author explains the OneApp process that has, after several years of working out the glitches, lately been coordinating admissions more smoothly for New Orleans’ 82 charter schools (apart from the three with selective admissions) that accept applications from families across the city: “The OneApp selection uses software that takes a number of factors into account when placing students, including their ranking of schools and preferences for siblings or if a student’s current school is closing. Of the 11,391 valid applications submiitted through OneApp, which assigns students to a majority of the city’s schools, 75 percent of students got one of their top three choices. On the flip side, 2,325 students were not matched to any school they wanted. About half of the unmatched students will apply again in a second round and the others will stay at their current school.”
Jewson reports that 54 percent of students using OneApp were admitted to the school that was their first choice while 20 percent of students were not accepted into any of the schools to which they applied. Students who are not accepted will remain in the school they currently attend, unless, like the student at Lagniappe Academy and Miller-McCoy Academy, their school is being closed for low performance. Such students are forced to request another choice.
New Orleans, with three explicitly selective charter schools, is an anomaly. But there remain Public School Systems Beat Charters with Equitable Services Systemically Provided | janresseger:
