Should charter schools be required to educate an identical proportion of special needs students as public schools? Should charters be required to follow the same rules governing special needs students as public schools?

Last month the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights released a memo that said yes to these questions. Education Next reached out to three education experts – Robin Lake, Gary Miron and Pedro Noguera – to get their take on the issue.

Lake

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothel, says charters should not “counsel out” special needs students by recommending they attend other schools, but she opposes new regulations or enrollment quotas.

Lake recognizes that some charter schools specialize in special education while others focus on different academic pursuits. As a result, some charters serve only special needs students and others serve none at all. The same is true for public schools, she says, and that means a quota system would result in forcing kids out of schools that may work well for them just to achieve a proportional balance.

Lake says cities should focus on resources, not quotas. She concludes:

“Cities need to stop talking about what’s the ‘fair share’ through the lens of a charter or a district, consider instead what students need, and leverage the right combination of resources to meet that need.” (more…)