Last weekend, Hillary Clinton made remarks that perpetuated a false line of attack on charter public schools. At a town hall meeting in South Carolina, Secretary Clinton said that “most charter schools … don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.” Secretary Clinton has supported charter schools for two decades and she reiterated her support in the town hall. But it’s important to correct misinformation even among friends, so the National Alliance issued a statement correcting the record. The facts show that charter public schools do accept the hardest-to-teach kids – or, more precisely, the kids others have said are hardest-to-teach. Charter schools are open to all students. When demand for a charter school outstrips available space, enrollment is determined by lottery. There is no effort to limit enrollment to privileged students. Quite the opposite – charter public schools are found most often in neighborhoods that are home to the least-privileged students. Here are the demographics of charter public school enrollment, according to the latest-available figures:
Income status: Nationally, charter schools serve a higher-percentage of low-income students (57 percent) than district-run schools do (52 percent). In 37 percent of charter schools, at least 75 percent of students are in poverty, as compared to 23 percent of non-charters.
English language learners: According to the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), charters and non-charter public schools serve the same percentage of students classified as English language learners.
Special education needs: Based on the 2011-12 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), students who receive special education and related services made up 10.4 percent of total enrollment in charter schools, compared to 12.6 percent in traditional public schools. Furthermore, charter schools placed 84 percent of students with disabilities in more inclusive settings, meaning that they spent 80 percent or more of their time in a regular education classroom, compared to 67 percent of students with disabilities in traditional public schools. And in New York City, charter public schools do a better job than non-charter public schools of retaining students with disabilities. Specifically, 53 percent of charter school kindergartners with disabilities were still in the same schools 4 years later, compared with 49 percent of kindergartners in non-charter schools.
All of these statistics about charter school enrollment only matter if charter schools are serving students well – and they are. Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that low-income charter school students learn more in a single year than their non-charter school peers. The differences are especially pronounced in urban charter schools, where the average charter school student gains 40 additional days of learning in math and 28 additional days in reading compared to peers in non-charter public schools. This trend was confirmed by the 2015 NAEP TUDA (National Assessment of Educational Progress – Trial Urban District Assessment) scores for Los Angeles, which showed that proficiency rates among LA charter school students were triple those of non-charter school students. Seventy-five percent of Los Angeles charter school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and 85 percent are minority students. The bottom line is that charter public schools are helping underserved and special-needs students raise their achievement levels. They are proving that even the “hardest-to-teach” students can succeed. Every child can learn. Every student can be college ready. This is why, in a poll released two weeks ago from the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), two-thirds of black voters in Louisiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee expressed support for charter public schools. This matches the level of support for charter schools nationally, according to the 2015 PDK/Gallup poll. The biggest factor preventing charter public schools from serving more students is a lack of funding and support. There are more than 1 million names on charter school waitlists around the country. And charter public schools receive on average 71 cents for every dollar district schools receive. Providing equal funding for charter public schools and increasing investments in charter school creation and expansion would go a long way towards decreasing the waitlists for high-quality charter schools. We’re grateful for Secretary Clinton’s long-standing support for charter public schools and we don’t doubt her commitment to ensuring a bright future for every student. We do urge her to correct the record and dispel any misconceptions about the tremendous difference charter schools are making in the lives of our nation’s most vulnerable students.
