Excluding Special Education
Charter School shall not request or require submission of a student’s IEP, Section 504 Plan, or any other record or related information prior to admission, participation in any admissions or attendance lottery, or pre-enrollment event or process, or as a condition of admission or enrollment.”– GHCS Charter
504 and IEP documents are not required to enroll. However, providing these documents will assist GHCHS in providing a continuity of services.”– GHCS Enrollment Form
The headline event at the second meeting of Scott Schmerelson’s LAUSD Special Education Committee was a presentation on CTA’s State of Denial Report. This study provides empirical evidence of what has long been alleged by opponents of the privatization of public education – charter schools serve a lesser percentage of students with special education needs. This is especially true of children who have needs that require greater support and more expensive accommodations. An analysis of data for three of California’s largest school districts shows that “students with the highest needs were concentrated in district schools.”
The representatives of the California Charter School Association and several charter schools spoke before the committee to defend these publicly funded private schools. However, they did not refute the data uncovered by the research. Instead, like the bigot who defends against allegations of his racism by claiming to have a black friend, they cited individual cases where they had served a student with a disability. In one case they bragged about a wheelchair-bound student who walked across the stage “using two of our teachers as crutches” to receive her diploma as if not using her wheelchair was the largest accomplishment of the moment. Additionally, these representatives focused on college acceptance rates and academic achievements, while ignoring the needs of those with intellectual disabilities.
In my opportunity to provide public comment, I addressed the arguments made by the charter school industry along with how the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has been complicit in the segregation of children with disabilities:
To follow up on some of the previous speakers, when you put “college-ready” in the name of your school, aren’t you automatically saying that there is a certain population who does not belong here?
This problem with the under-enrollment of children with special education needs in CONTINUE READING: Excluding Special Education
