Charter Schools Continue to Neglect Special Needs Students
One of the most common and persistent criticisms made about charter schools over the last 30+ years is that they frequently shortchange special needs students. Every year numerous articles appear on this troubling topic and highlight the refusal of the charter school sector to overcome this nagging problem and put it behind them once and for all—even after multiple warnings from various authorities.
It is worth noting that special needs students are typically under-enrolled in non-profit and for-profit charter schools, mainly because they are deemed to be too high-needs and too expensive to enroll. Profit margins matter in both types of charter schools, which is why selective enrollment persists in the charter school sector.
A shocking recent example of a charter school grossly neglecting special needs students comes from Chicago, specifically the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy in Little Village on the Southwest Side of Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times states that, “Some [special needs] students [at the charter school] went three years without receiving mandated services, and others went their entire high school careers without a needed aide, a state investigation found.” Another news source reports, “State education officials are turning up the heat on Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy in Little Village, saying the charter high school repeatedly failed to fix special education violations and left more than 100 students without services they were legally owed.”
It bears repeating that such problems plague many charter schools across the country, not just one charter school here or there. It should also be recalled that all charter schools in the U.S. are deregulated and privately-operated, that is, they are run by unelected individuals and do not follow most of the laws, statutes, regulations, rules, and polices followed by traditional public schools. Charter schools also tend to have higher teacher turnover rates than traditional public schools, which undermines learning, continuity, stability, and collegiality. These and other conditions exacerbate problems in charter schools.
As a result of years of “repeated and unresolved” violations Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy will now be subject to intense oversight by Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Getting into more nitty gritty details, we learn that according to a letter sent by the state to Chicago Public Schools, “The state estimated that 100 of the roughly 500 students at Instituto last year missed between 12,000 and 80,000 minutes of instruction and services. The school also repeatedly failed to offer make-up services, even after the state compelled them…” Many violations remain unfixed.
Equally troubling, “CPS officials determined that nearly all 16 charter schools approved in the spring needed to improve their services for students with disabilities.” But there is more: CPS also informed the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy last April that their English Learner programs also “needs improvement.”
As noted above, the teacher turnover rate is very high in charter schools and often happens in a more volatile manner than it does in traditional public schools. This was the case at the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy from the very beginning. The main reason for such high teacher turnover rates in charter schools is typically broad dissatisfaction with many aspects of working conditions (e.g., no voice in important affairs, long hours, inadequate pay, and poor treatment by school administrators). It is thus no surprise that about 90% of charter schools in the U.S. are not unionized. Charter school teachers are treated instead as at-will employees, just like in many corporations—hired and fired at the whim of administrators with little, if any, due process.
Sadly with such problems like these at charter schools (school violations of required services and high teacher turnover rates) there is little recourse for parents. They either tolerate such problems that have a negative impact on students’ development for years, embark on extensive paperwork in a frustrating bureaucratic labyrinth and hope for a resolution in a timely manner, or return to their host traditional public school district where conditions are usually better.
None of these nagging harmful problems would exist if traditional public schools were fully funded and deregulated privately-operated charter schools had to secure their own funding instead of siphoning public money (billions of dollars a year) from constantly-demonized traditional public schools.
Today it can be seen that more charter schools equals more problems. The constant increase in greed in a continually failing economy will only incentive neoliberals and privatizers to strive to open more charter schools, no matter how many problems and failures these unaccountable contract schools produce. Neoliberal forces will always claim that what they are doing “is for the kids” but such disinformation is designed to fool the gullible and those who analyze nothing.
There is a never-ending need for the public to become conscious of endless problems in the charter school sector and to find ways to speak up on an individual and collective basis against all forms of privatization, not just school privatization. Combining action with analysis is critical. Starving traditional public schools of funds, setting them up for failure, and then trying to pressure or convince parents that charter schools will save the day has failed time and again. There is a reason why thousands of charter schools have failed, closed, and abandoned millions of parents over the past 33 years (see here, here, and here).
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