A new policy brief from the National Alliance for Public Charter schools takes up the contentious issue of “backfilling”—the practice of enrolling new students when existing ones leave. Should charter schools be engaged in backfilling? If so, when do they enroll those students? At prescribed entry points? At will? Or never?
The paper highlights a range of existing approaches to backfilling taken by states, authorizers, and charter operators. Massachusetts passed legislation requiring all charters in the state to fill any vacancy up to February 15 except seats in the second half of a school’s grade span. For example, if a Bay State K–5 charter school has a vacancy in grades K–2 before February 15, they are compelled to fill it; if a seat goes empty in grades 3–5, it’s at the school’s discretion. Washington, D.C. is playing with a new funding model that creates strong financial incentives to backfill. “The goal is to allow for multiple membership counts at all public schools so schools can be compensated for the students currently enrolled, as opposed to those who never showed up or who left mid-year,” the report notes. At the authorizer level, Indiana’s Public Charter School Board requires charters to use enrollment practices similar to traditional public schools, “which is interpreted as requiring schools to fill any vacancies that become available.” When the decision devolves to charters themselves, practices are mixed. RePublic Schools in Tennessee and Mississippi backfill from their waitlists; Washington, D.C.’s LAMB enrolls kids only at the pre-K level, reasoning that it takes every year of instruction to meet the school’s goal of graduating eighth graders fluent in both Spanish and English. “This approach results in their kindergarten classes being significantly larger than their eighth-grade graduating classes,” the brief notes.
Given the lack of consensus among charter operator, NAPCS’s report avoids choosing sides, laying out arguments both for and against backfilling. On the one hand, charter schools are public schools that should, by definition, provide open enrollment as a moral imperative. Less persuasive is the argument that if a school does not fill vacant seats, “it becomes more difficult to definitively say that a school’s proficiency data is an accurate reflection of its performance.” (Sure, but is a school’s responsibility to serve its existing students as well as possible? Or to provide a dataset?) One of the strongest anti-backfilling argument is that charters are simply different from traditional public schools. Enrolling students fluidly impedes their ability to establish and maintain a coherent school culture.
“If we require charter public schools to backfill,” the authors note, “we lose the balance of autonomy and accountability that the public charter school model is predicated on and invite regulatory creep into other areas as well.” Just so.
Rather than overtly favoring or prescribing one approach or another, the paper offers organizations and states “options for future work on backfilling” (although collectively, these “options” tilt heavily in favor of backfilling). These recommendations include charters “leading the conversation” by gathering data on enrollment trends and backfilling policies at the school, authorizer, and state levels. Charter supporters might also push for greater transparency, including mandating that authorizers publish their portfolios’ enrollment data at certain points in time. “Posting this data could create public pressure for charter schools to backfill,” the report notes. Another suggestion is creating financial incentives to backfill through, for example, “real-time” funding for students. At present, a student can be counted—and a charter school compensated—on a state’s official enrollment count day, even if that student leaves the school the next day. Finally, the report also candidly notes that philanthropic support for charters has tended to depress backfilling by making up for public dollars lost when seats go unfilled. “By pulling together its philanthropic base and having a conversation about enrollment and backfilling, a state’s charter school movement could highlight particular enrollment trends and encourage funders to consider this data when selecting which models to fund.”
SOURCE: “Backfilling in Charter Public Schools,” National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (May 2016).
