Reply #5: "Charters "cherry pick" the best students from traditional schools; [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

kick out students who do poorly; and serve far fewer special education students and non-English speakers than traditional schools. Such practices could give charters a boost in standardized test scores, the primary gauge by which schools are judged.

There is at least anecdotal evidence to support all three claims, although there is hard data only to back up the third -- that charters enroll fewer disabled and limited-English students."



According to the Office of the Independent Monitor report, students with special needs made up 11.2 percent of LAUSD's population in the 2008-2009 school year while they made up 7 percent of the population at charter schools.

The report also found that students with severe disabilities only make up 1 percent of the total enrollment at charter schools - within LAUSD they make up 3 percent - and the largest number of those students can be found at dependent charter schools, which are still managed by LAUSD.

For example Birmingham High School in Van Nuys had a program for deaf students for several years but after it converted to a charter school, special education teachers and aides were not rehired for that program, Howell said.

"Although families were not told to enroll at another school, they felt compelled to leave their current school in order to receive services," Howell said.

"This required the district to open new classes at Taft High School and provide transportation for these students."

Howell also said that at Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles, the population of students with disabilities rose from 11 percent to 20 percent when Locke High School was converted to a charter...

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14134651


When I use the term “apartheid” school I am discussing schools that are within one percent of the kind of absolute segregation that South Africa’s apartheid laws and those of the seventeen states with de jure segregation produced. Prof. Douglass Massey and other leading demographers have used the term to describe much less extreme segregation. These schools are not the product of a law but they are just as isolated from the rest of the society and there are an astonishing number of them among charter schools.

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:R_upPt7JvPcJ:education.nationaljournal.com/2010/02/are-charter-schools-a-civil-ri.php+los+angeles+charter+schools+percent+special+ed&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us