Closing the Gap: Charter School Special Education Statistics
Last week, the New York State Senate passed
a bill that would increase the number of charter schools in New York from
200 to 460. Included in the bill was a provision
that charter schools increase efforts to enroll students with learning
disabilities — an attempt to appease critics who claim that charters
significantly under-enroll students with disabilities.
Yet an examination of data provided to me by the city shows that while
charters enroll fewer students with disabilities, the gap is not as large as initially
reported by the state teachers union, known as NYSUT. According to the
Department of Education data, 13 percent of charter school students have
Individualized Education Plans, indicating that they have special needs,
compared to 15 percent at traditional public schools. NYSUT reported the
numbers as being 9.4 percent at charter schools and 16.4 percent at district
schools.
The discrepancy stems from problematic data NYSUT received from the state
education department (NYSED). According to NYSED, the number of students with
disabilities that a charter school reports enrolling often does not match up
with numbers reported by school districts.
As a result, NYSED does not consider their own data to be reliable.
As an alternative, I used a database known as CAPS, which is compiled by the
Committee on Special Education. CAPS
includes information about every student in the city who has an IEP, so it
provides a more accurate breakdown of the number of special education students
at each school.
I found that the percentage of charter schools enrolling students with
disabilities at comparable or greater rates of their traditional public school
counterparts increased by 5 percent, from a quarter of schools last year to
almost a third of schools this year. Meanwhile, charter high schools
actually enroll a larger percentage of students with IEPs than traditional
public high schools both within their geographical districts and citywide. Of
course, there are only a small number of charter high schools.
I also noticed that the 54 charter schools that are authorized by the DOE
enroll, on average, 4 percent more students with IEPs than the 37 charters that
are authorized by SUNY's Charter Schools Institute. (City-authorized charters
have special education populations of around 14 percent, versus 10 percent for
the SUNY schools.) The New York State Education Department authorized just
seven charter schools in 2009, which enrolled special education students at
about the same level as the city-authorized schools.
A full breakdown of the data is available at the end of this post. To see my
calculations as well as special education enrollment by school, you can check
out this spreadsheet.
Notes on Methodology:
1. The number of students in need of IEPs can fluctuate as the year progresses.
I used the end of the school year data, since the DOE classifies this as the
"high-water mark" for special education numbers.
2. To compare charter schools to traditional public schools, I looked at the
average IEP rates of traditional public schools in the same district as the
charter school, divided by year. So, for example, if a charter school enrolled
students in Kindergarten through fifth grade in District 5, I looked at
the average IEP rate of kindergartners through fifth-graders in traditional
public schools in that district. I did this because IEP rates vary
significantly with grade year, with lower rates in the early years (K-2), the
highest rates in middle school, and average rates in high school.
3. Since the number of students requiring special education services has increased dramatically over the past five years (see chart below), there has been a significant increase in the percentages of students who need services at both the charter and district schools. Thus, if you look at the data for two consecutive years, you will notice significant increase at both the charter and district level—this is not a data error.
4. Unfortunately, my data did not differentiate among the kinds of services
required by students with IEPs, so I cannot make any inferences about the level
of need among special education students at the two kinds of schools. Because
of this, I did not include data from District 75
schools, which tend to serve the most severely disabled students.
As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions in the comments section.
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Posted by: monster beats | September 07, 2011 at 01:15 AM