New Orleans, where more than 70 percent of public schools will be independently chartered after this school year, has been placed on a pedestal as a shining model by education reformers. The new documentary Waiting for “Superman”, which hopes to serve as a call to arms for education reform, devotes a page of its Web site to touting New Orleans’s new citywide school-choice system...
But is this supposed revolution really helping the most-disadvantaged students in New Orleans, those with special needs such as physical, behavioral, or mental disabilities? In July, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a legal complaint against the Louisiana Department of Education alleging that schools have been turning away parents with disabled children and shirking their responsibilities to ensure that the special-needs students they do serve actually benefit from academic instruction. The complaint asserts that New Orleans schools are in violation of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), particularly in terms of excessive punishment of children with emotional and behavioral problems.
...overall, almost a third of the city’s 4,500 special-needs students have been suspended by the Recovery School District, the entity created by the state to take over failing New Orleans schools. Specific RSD schools such as Sojourner Truth Academy and New Orleans College Prep Charter Academy have suspended more than half their disabled student populations—53.8 and 52.2 percent, respectively, according to the Louisiana Department of Education’s special education Performance Profile. They are not anomalies, either. At least four other RSD charters suspend their special-needs students at three to four times the rate that their general-education students are suspended. The statewide average for suspensions of students with disabilities was 16.4 percent in the 2008-09 school year; RFD suspended 26.8 percent of its students with disabilities that year...
The data further suggest that when not suspended, disabled students aren’t getting the education they deserve, either because teachers aren’t working the IEPs or because they’re not identifying children who may suffer from learning disabilities...
Which raises the question: does the much-touted academic progress of New Orleans’s post-Katrina charters come in part because special-needs students are being weeded out? Certainly, charters appear to be enrolling fewer than their fair share of special-needs kids. The average school in New Orleans includes a disabled-student population of about 9 percent. Overall, 7.8 percent of charter-school students are disabled. That’s not significantly lower than the city average, but when you look at which individual schools have the lowest percentages of disabled students, almost all of them are charters...
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/06/new-orleans-accused-of-failing-disabled-students.html
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