Charter schools have long been criticized for enrolling lower percentages of students with special needs than traditional public schools. However, recent evidence suggests that this gap is narrowing. And a new study from the Institute of Education Sciences examines such changes in Louisiana.
Patrick Wolf, of the University of Arkansas, and Shannon Lasserre-Cortez, from the American Institutes for Research, use data from the Louisiana Department of Education to determine gaps in special education enrollment—defined as the percentage of students who have individualized education plans—in charters and traditional public schools from 2010–14. They look at the four educational regions of Louisiana that have three or more charter schools: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Jefferson and five nearby parishes, and Ouachita and five surrounding parishes. They examine overall enrollment differences and differences based on school level and disability category.
Wolf and Lasserre-Cortez find that, overall, the gap in special education enrollment between charter and district schools narrowed steadily from 2.5 percentage in 2010 points to 0.5 percentage points in 2014, but also that the results were more mixed when broken down by region. The gaps in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans regions both dropped between 2010 and 2014, from 2.8 to 1.2 percentage points and 5.8 to 2.9 percentage points, respectively. Yet it held steady at 3.0 percentage points in the more suburban Jefferson region, and widened by 5.3 percentage points in the predominantly rural Ouachita region.
School-level data tell a different story. The special education enrollment gap in elementary grades narrowed but remained moderately wide at 2.3 percentage points in 2014. But the middle school gap disappeared, and the high school gap actually reversed from 0.4 percentage points in 2010 to -1.7 percentage points in 2014.
By disability category, Wolf and Lasserre-Cortez find that traditional public schools continued to serve higher proportions of students with severe and low-incidence disabilities, but also that gaps for high-incidence disabilities—emotional disturbance, specific learning disability, speech/language impairment, and other health impairments—largely disappeared, with charter schools enrolling higher proportions of students with emotional disturbance than their district counterparts.
These results are, however, limited by the study’s timeframe and location. New Orleans’s disproportionately high charter enrollment rates skew statewide findings. The analysis omits as much as 35 percent of Louisiana’s charter populations because sparse charter offerings in much of the state made charter-district comparisons infeasible. And the rates may be significantly different today than in 2014 due in part to funding changes in 2015 that gave New Orleans’s charter schools more money to serve students with severe disabilities. These caveats necessitate further research if we’re to have a complete and current understanding of these enrollments trends and how policies affect them.
Nevertheless, Wolf and Lasserre-Cortez’s study contributes to a growing body of evidence that many charter schools are working to serve special needs students at similar rates as nearby traditional public schools, particularly in urban areas.
SOURCE: Patrick J. Wolf and Shannon Lasserre-Cortez, “Special education enrollment and classification in Louisiana charter schools and traditional schools,” Institute of Education Sciences. (January 2018).
