Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, a frequent charter school critic, published an even-handed column in this morning's paper. He congratulated local charters for their performance in recent A-F grades, but questioned why they don't serve as many disadvantaged students as district-run schools.
Charters, which are publicly funded but privately run, have a much higher proportion of middle-class and non-minority students than traditional schools on the Suncoast.
The percentage of students attending traditional schools in Pasco County who receive free or reduced lunches, a predictor of low test scores, is 58.2. For the charters, it's 36.2 percent.
In other words, that ratio is exactly the opposite of what should be happening.
He's right. Studies have found that in other states, charter schools frequently serve more disadvantaged students than other public schools, in part because they tend to concentrate in academically struggling urban areas. In Florida, on average, the opposite is true.
The reasons for this are complicated. It may be worth noting that 80,000 of the state's most disadvantaged children enroll in private schools with tax credit scholarships (Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog, helps administer the program.) In states that don't have their own version of the nation's largest private school choice program, many children in similar circumstances may opt for charter schools instead. (more…)
If all parents had their choice of schools, schools would grow less segregated over time, and people would abandon low-performing in favor of higher-performing ones.
That's the implication of a new study of parent preferences in the nation's capital, where 22,000 students entered lotteries for more than 200 public schools — nearly half of them charters.
Steven Glazerman and Dallas Dotter of Mathematica Policy Research looked at parent preferences in Washington, D.C.'s new unified enrollment system for public schools, which allows parents to rank their favored schools, and assigns students to their highest-ranked school with available space.
Parents tended to prefer schools that were close to home, with high test scores, and where their students would not be racially isolated. In a predominantly African-American urban school system, parents seemed to wannt some measure of diversity in the student body.
From the study's abstract:
The results confirm previously reported findings that commuting distance, school demographics, and academic indicators play important roles in school choice, and that there is considerable heterogeneity of preferences. Simulations suggest segregation by race and income would be reduced and enrollment in high-performing schools increased if policymakers were to expand school choice by relaxing school capacity constraints in individual campuses. The simulations also suggest that closing the lowest-performing schools could further reduce segregation and increase enrollment in high-performing schools.
The research builds on several earlier studies of school choice preferences in choice-heavy cities that, crucially, allow parents to sign up for both charter and district-run public schools through a single, unified enrollment system. Such systems are becoming more common, but have yet to be made available in Florida school districts. (more…)
