With advocates ranging from documentaries like Waiting for “Superman” to policymakers like Michelle Rhee, charter schools remain the hot topic in education policy. Supporters argue that the schools’ innovative teaching strategies, progressive teacher evaluation models, and superior administrative structures offer a panacea to inefficient public education. More broadly, scholars contend that anti-regulatory, anti-union approaches have allowed charters greater creativity and flexibility in both teaching and assessment, turbocharging their student outcomes.
Charters enjoy their successes, but the story is more complicated than that often portrayed. In particular, charters still struggle to manage their responsibilities to students with mental disabilities. While the government prohibits any public school from discriminating against any of its students, charters’ decentralized mode of operation complicates such implementation. As charter schools increasingly become part of the American educational mix, the federal government must monitor local educational agencies to ensure all students enjoy their full measure of rights.
Send in the Feds
Federal law prohibits any school receiving federal funding from engaging in ableism: namely, the practice of discrimination based on physical, mental or emotional disability. Nonetheless, charters’ decentralized governance has complicated the application of federal mandates. Professor Thomas Hehir of the Harvard Graduate School of Education told the HPR that the federal government has not held the charter sector to the same special education standards as traditional public schools. In particular, Hehir points to the fact that charters force interested parents to apply to their program, which he argues may discourage parents of children with special needs from signing up for charters in the first place. Even when schools operate with the best of intentions, disabled students do cost more to educate, while charters receive a flat fee per every student. Implementing a system based on increased per-pupil funding for special needs students would provide a valuable incentive for accessibility based reform, Hehir asserts.
The question of charters’ openness to all students has become increasingly contentious since 2009, when President Obama launched his Race to the Top initiative. The $4 billion initiative provided states with extra federal funding, so long as they institute certain reforms, most notably expanding their support of independent schools. Hehir comments, “Race to the Top has put a lot of money out there and tried to more aggressively change state policies in favor of charters. A lot of states responded to that.” States previously removed from the charter school trend, including Alabama, Kentucky, and Washington, jumped onto the bandwagon. Hehir maintains, “The role of the federal government as it relates to charter schools has been pretty squarely in the area of promotion. The mechanisms used so far have been primarily discretionary; in other words, they’ve had grant programs to fund states to do more charters.”
A Regulatory Issue
Whether or not Race to the Top converts American education to the benefit of charter schools, the federal government can still play a role in promoting educational materials more broadly. Dr. David Rose, a lecturer at the School of Education, maintains that funding for special education in charter schools should focus on tailoring student experiences. Currently, there exist numerous regulations intended to help students with special needs and alternative learning styles, most notably the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard. Rose praises the program, as it was “designed to make it easier and faster to obtain accessible instructional materials” for students with disabilities. Since the law’s implementation, the number of books, tapes, and texts available to special education teachers has increased tremendously, all at comparatively little cost.
Such successful regulations suggest that charter policy can be made more effective by adding considerations based a universal learning model, namely a method of education dedicated to addressing all students’ individual needs. “There’s been a fundamental shift to start to move away from this idea that the kids are broken,” says Rose, “to the notion that our schools are disabled.” Rose asserts that the universal learning model should apply for both charter schools and traditional public schools and that the government ought to take a holistic view of reform.
Nonetheless, calls for reform should also maintain perspective. Professor Martin West, deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, points out that students enroll in charter schools on an entirely voluntary basis, meaning that mandates that the percentage of students identified as having special needs be the same in charter schools and traditional public schools may not prove effective. West continues, “If we rush to regulation without a true understanding of the problem, we run the risk of over-regulating.” As such, West calls for an increased program of data collection to assess charters’ needs.
Reaching the Limit
Even good data may not solve the problem, however. West particularly points to students with learning disabilities, for whom part of the identification process is often based on standardized test scores. According to a report published by U.S. Charter Schools, the largest consortium of charter schools in the United States, “testing and labeling [students with disabilities] would not improve a student’s education in any way.”
Compounding the problem, charter schools nationally receive less funding per-pupil than traditional public schools, totaling about 80% of the national average level. While West believes “funding that students carry with them should reflect what we know about the cost of educating them,” regulation mandating so when charters are not currently being equally funded would be detrimental.
Some advocates claim the answer lies in special education-only charter schools. Yet the solution also raises potential ethical issues. “Are we willing to accept that as the optimal situation, despite the big two decade push toward mainstreaming [students with disabilities into general education classes]?” West questions. Schools such as Democracy Prep Harlem, the highest performing school in central Harlem, are designed to serve students with special needs and have been proven highly efficacious, yet their students are separated from the traditional schooling system.
New Way Forward
Despite arguments over charter schools’ role in educating special needs students, experts agree on one principle: there is no quick fix for the underrepresentation of special needs students in America’s charter schooling system. Nonetheless, policymakers deserve to make the effort, if a final solution appears substantially more difficult. In the words of President Obama, “We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools.” Given the pro-charter tide of the country, the issue of special education ought not to be left out. If the system cannot adapt and self-correct for institutionalized inequalities in accessibility, then Washington must address discrepancies in opportunities for students with special needs.
Jimmy Biblarz ‘14 is a Staff Writer. Terah Lyons ‘14 is a Contributing Writer.