Report: Special Education Kids Missing from Charter Schools
Why do California charters enroll far fewer students with disabilities than traditional schools?
A new special ed study released on Wednesday by United Teachers Los Angeles and the California Teachers Association confirms what many California parents, school district officials and advocates for disabled kids have long contended: that Golden State charter schools disproportionately enroll far fewer students with disabilities than what privatizers generally acknowledge. (Disclosure: CTA is a financial supporter of this website.) Using 2016-17 data from three California districts (L.A., San Diego and Oakland unifieds), State of Denial: California Charter Schools and Special Education Students found that a statistically benign gap between the overall special ed enrollments of charters and district schools more than doubled when researchers broke out the numbers for students with the most disabling and expensive-to-support conditions (those classified as “moderate/severe”). Instead of the 11 percent charter and 14.27 percent district in overall special ed enrollments, disaggregation revealed that between 23.7 and 28.9 percent of that population at district schools were classified moderate/severe versus between 12.9 and 16.25 percent for charters. The price of those disparities to the three districts? Between $64.52 million and a staggering $97.19 million.
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Some of the report’s bombshells caught even veteran ed researchers by surprise, co-author Grace Regullano told Learning Curves. “One was just how difficult it was to get the data. These are our most vulnerable students, and you would think that there would be more monitoring of this civil rights issue.” Another was the deep divide uncovered in Oakland, where overall district special ed enrollment was almost twice as much as in Oakland’s charters — 13.5 percent versus 7.6 percent. Which is why, of the seven recommendations offered in an accompanying policy brief, three are devoted to the proactive monitoring of access, accountability and transparency practices at the school-site, state and federal civil rights levels. “[The] enrollment differences raise serious questions about whether some charters are unlawfully either steering such children away, failing to identify students in need of special education, or pushing enrolled students with disabilities out, perhaps through harsh discipline,” observed Daniel J. Losen, the Center for Civil Rights Remedies director at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
Authors of what was on track to be California’s first-in-the-nation, statewide ethnic studies curriculum framework say they now fear for the integrity of model in the wake of a CONTINUE READING: Report: Special Education Kids Missing from Charter Schools | Capital & Main
