Archived Information

Charter Schools and Students with Disabilities: Review of Existing Data - November 1998

Summary

The charter school movement provides opportunities for site-based management, instructional innovations, and specialized services to specific populations. How well charter school operators will use these opportunities to meet the needs of students with disabilities is an issue that researchers are just beginning to address. The early data reported here set the stage for more thorough investigations and provide an indication of what more extensive or rigorous research may show. Overall, the information we have described in this paper is extremely limited in scope, and some data are of dubious quality. As noted previously, we did not review research methods in depth and cannot substantiate the validity of reported findings. The summary of findings presented below should be read with consideration of those caveats.

In contrast to concern expressed by disability advocates that charter schools may exclude students with disabilities, students with disabilities are not greatly under-enrolled in charter schools. In fact, rather than excluding students with disabilities, many charter schools specifically target these students.
Parents of students with disabilities enroll their children in charter schools and other schools of choice because they believe those schools are more effective at meeting individual student needs, keeping parents informed, and providing mainstreaming options, and because they are dissatisfied with the bureaucracy of regular public schools and the stigma attached to special education.
Although the impact of students with special needs is cited as a barrier to the fiscal viability of charter schools, no evidence has been reported to date suggesting that special education costs caused fiscal instability in a school. Nonetheless, funding of special education services is a critical issue to charter school operators, and a number of factors may be barriers to access to funds, including the reporting of enrollment and eligibility data, the time and costs of applying for funding, a lack of clear communication between some charter schools and their LEAs, and the philosophical differences between IDEA and school missions.
Charter schools vary tremendously in terms of key school characteristics, including instructional approach. Schools with a single, specialized curriculum or instructional approach may have problems serving some students with disabilities.
Students with disabilities attending charter schools are entitled to the same due process protection as those attending other public schools, and parent complaints are beginning to occur.
Districts and states may not be holding charter schools rigorously accountable for academic outcomes promised in charters.
Relatively few charter school operators have received training as education administrators. This lack of experience and knowledge may present particular problems for special education because relatively few charter school operators are conversant with the requirements of IDEA or other federal disability law.
The lack of clear communication and accountability channels between some charter schools and their school districts may be contributing to insufficient technical expertise of charter school operators because districts typically act as conduits between schools and state and federal agencies.

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[Coordination with LEAs and SEAs]

[References]