Older sources:

https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/020515_charter...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education...

https://harvardpolitics.com/arizonas-experiment-with-charter...

https://www.12news.com/article/news/education/az-public-scho...

https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/it-costs-arizona-332m-to-pay...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...

I also have numerous acquaintances working in various capacities in schools (public, charter, and private) and have to say I regard all the things mentioned in the linked articles as severely under-reported. Retaliation against teachers and staff who try to get kids services at charters is a thing. Public school districts and counties having to foot evaluation costs for parochials is a thing. Refusing and avoiding evaluations for kids in charters so they can be kicked out for behavior and then the publics have to foot the evaluation costs is a thing.

I completely think if local districts (and/or families) had a spine or the right legal resources they could be suing charters who've not even tried to follow or service existing IEPs left and right when those kids are constantly enrolling in publics mid year (with those kids generally exhibiting broad spectrums declines against academic and IEP goals).

I’m baffled by this. My wife worked at a charter school and it was nothing like this. The teachers were constantly trying to get certain kids out of their classroom who were actively threatening staff and other students, and the administration would never do anything. The assumption being that losing a kid would hurt numbers and impact funding.

Your wife needed to know how to demand special ed evaluations most likely (or get the parents to), since that would create costs and cause action. What you're reporting is typical for a profit driven charter that doesn't have much pressure to show high academic performance and is driven by profit motive. Keeping the kids in the seats keeps money coming in. Probably didn't have much of a wait-list to give them more discretion with behavioral bouncing.

Don't state schools also get money per-child in the US? They do in the UK.

Funding varies by locality, but yes, the public schools get funding from the federal government, the state government, and the local government. Most local funding is provided by property taxes, which can vary by local housing valuations. Most state funding programs try to allocate funds to equalize the per student funding across the state to help correct the discrepancy by locality. Federal funds are usually grant related, but oftentimes those grants are need-based or targeted to higher needs groups (% on IEP).

Half of her kids had special education needs. You “demand special ed evaluations” and the result is, the kid comes back to your class with an IEP and congratulations, you now have to create an alternate version of each lesson plan.

The parent comment captures the education system’s attitude toward teachers perfectly. The problem is always due to a shortcoming of the teacher, and the solution is always the responsibility of the teacher.

TBH that sounds a lot more similar to the average public than most charters I've heard employees discuss.

Do you have pull out programs, self contained classrooms, etc.? How common is it to have manifestation hearings for the kids your wife thinks are risky in the classroom?

I’m realizing the term “charter school” is probably overloaded.

The charter school my wife taught at (in CA) had to prove itself to the district and fight for public dollars, hence the inability to lose any kids (and dollars).

The charter school I went to years ago sounds more like the kind you’re talking about. Basically a private school that received no public funding.

Huh, I've never heard of a charter model where the local district had any oversight.

To me a charter is just a school that is privately run, usually for either ideological or profit motives, or both, that parents can choose to send their kids to instead of a public school, and which gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child. In turn, the charter school is usually subject to different and less stringent oversight and standards than the public school.

Unlike publics, usually charters do not have to accept mid-term enrollment and parents have to figure out transportation. In demand charters can cap their enrollment and use a lottery for admissions.

Okay, I think that probably describes the charter school my wife taught at, though it was not run for ideological or profit motives, it was inner-city.

The key though is this point:

> gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child

So the charter is under the same pressure as the public school since compensation is directly tied to headcount, the top priority is keeping kids or you won’t survive. I’m not sure how the schools you’re mentioning are able to push kids out and not lose money. Maybe they’re just in affluent areas.

All that to say, I’m not a huge fan of charter schools but I doubt they’re the source of our problem.

In Arizona the charters I see the most of are places like: https://ahacottonwood.org/m/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=453368&t... Or https://enrollbasis.com/tucson-primary/

One side of the coin is basically softened McCarthyism as a school, which "encourages families to be actively involved in religious organizations of their choice" and [paraphrasing] "supports the national Motto of the United States: In God We Trust."

The other is taking advantage of the angst among professional and white collar parents and runs a curriculum several years ahead of grade level, and takes advantage of filled wait-lists to create high pressure and somewhat rigid environments where kids who don't perform at a high level in even one subject get held back a year and get pressured to leave.

I can't speak to the more "American Exceptionalism" oriented schools as much, despite relative ubiquity - I've heard of them refusing to service IEPs here and there.

But the BASIS style ones are constantly sending kids back to the public schools that are somewhat psychologicaly damaged despite performing at quite a high level. Typical policies are things like "After grade 9, students must maintain an average score of 3 or above on all AP Exams or the student may not receive full financial support for AP Exams beyond the six that are required for graduation." I have the impression that students go back to publics because of things like not wanting to repeat a year because of struggling with Mandarin and developing self esteem issues. I think they (BASIS) also have non required courses available that have extra fees associated and aren't actually included with the state funded enrollment.

Both angles are able to effectively select student populations that cost less to serve than the student population overall and avoid IEP kids and services for them.

Obviously there are others, but anecdotally, other types don't seem to have a lot of longevity.

Some of these articles are just generic bashing of school choice, and not relevant to the discussion about whether charter schools reject or push out more challenging students.

e.g. the last article is about Arizona's ESAs, which compete with charter schools.

I'd say the conservatives in AZ are transitioning AZ to ESAs over charters because it lets them fund religious education more easily and with less oversight, does away with the equal access fiction behind charters, and is a way to mess with budgets.

If this (charter schools pushing students out) is true it's terrible, and I agree it would be great if the threat of legal action could eliminate it.

Sadly, when the risk of enforcement is low, many administrators will ignore the law. (This applies to government-run orgs as well.)

Why is this a bad thing? Its possible I'm missing some nuance because I have not dealt with the US education system in a long time, but I think one fundamental problem with universal education is that one really bad student can easily ruin the education of dozens of others.

If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.

This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.

Exactly, ~10-15 years ago Denmark decided to start integrating "problem" children into the regular classroom and scores have dropped across the board. Currently private education enrolment has been massively on the rise since private schools are not forced to accept these kids, and/or they can more easily kick children out.

What's really sad is that now the parents are not only paying extremely high taxes to cover the standard school, but now also are having to shell out extra to make sure their child gets the eduction they deserve.

Why this is shocking is that Denmark (the whole nordics) has an extremely strong public education tradition which is being very quickly eroded. Just 20 years ago private education was seen as something for the elites (e.g. Royalty) but now it's becoming an expected expense.

Almost everyone is frustrated by this: teachers, parents, students, as well as their special needs counterparts. The only people winning are the politicians who get to morally grandstand.

As someone that spend most of school except for the last year in my hometown's low ranking one I cannot compreheend why you would integrate problematic kids like that.

I was doing my best, but with others' constant attention seeking behaviour (shouting, interrupting the teacher, and other more insane things) it was impossible for the teacher to teach and me to concentrate.

If it wasn't for my last year at a private school I wouldn't be where I am now.

I understand they want to create an environment where the kids may feel guilty or something else, but the problem isn't with who they're with in school, most likely. And by problem I mean the CORE problem. That is in most cases a deep issue at home.

In Ontario, Canada they completely got rid of special needs classes recently (so they aren't treated as second class or something), as well as gifted classes, and from two teachers and one child psychologist I talked to it's been a nightmare. Some classes will have 5+ disruptive students constantly yelling or fighting. And in the younger classes when a student has a "meltdown" they aren't allowed to send the kid to the principal, instead they clear the other kids out of the class to wander the halls, bring in the social worker lady (who is always on call), and wait until the problem kid calms down. They told me it was happening at least once a week in one classroom.

We're basically running social experiments on kids.

What would happen if there was no private option? I bet politicians would be rewarded for different policies

It's the fishnet problem.

There are problem kids, but the effect of concentrating them is much worse than the effect of distributing them, much like piling things on one section of net is more likely to break it than distributing them.

There is, in IMO, a ceiling to the percentage of behavior and academic IEP kids you can have in one classroom without it impacting regular kids substantially. (Though for very extreme kids it might just plain not be viable or safe at all.)

Historically reform schools have not been an effective model, but they were also often basically just a way to keep problem kids away from more normal ones and would have treated teen pregnancy the same as severe autism the same as emotional disorders.

You do see more and more self-contained rooms in publics for severe case kiddos that can't be in normal classrooms, which is a bit similar.

Which is to say one child really can ruin the experience of other children. But making it so that private schools and charters have means to keep down the ratio of destructive traumatizers, IEP time wasters, etc., compared to publics doesn't solve anything. It just artificially makes public schools seem worse, cost burdens them, and creates more social stratification.

You basically end up with a tiered system where most public schools have turned into bad reform schools that can't avoid underperforming. Meanwhile, it's not that charters are good, it's just that they've been able to take advantage of two layers of selection to filter out cost centers that decrease performance.

And in turn you are now damaging the prospects of any kid whose parents aren't interested in keeping them out of the public school compared to the other options.