Charters grapple with admission policies, question how public they should be

By Michael Alison Chandler October 31

At Achievement Prep, the test scores of low-income African American children rival those at wealthy neighborhood schools. Over at D.C. Prep, middle school graduates routinely go on to top high schools. And at Latin American Montessori Bilingual, the combination of instructional approaches is so attractive to parents that more than 800 names filled the school’s waiting list for pre-kindergarten classes last spring.

Such high-performing public charter schools in the District are in constant demand. But their policies of limiting new enrollment to certain grades and times of the year have been causing their class sizes to dwindle to less than half of their original size by the upper grades.

The enrollment cutoffs — which leave seats at some of the city’s most successful urban schools empty — put the charters in the middle of a debate that has divided advocates across the country.

Some argue that limiting student mobility is crucial to building the kind of routines and school culture that enable success and offer students the chance at a challenging, college-preparatory education. Others say it’s not fair for publicly funded schools to have a key advantage in bolstering academic performance that neighborhood schools don’t have: the ability to limit the number of underprepared transfer students they serve while focusing on more stable students who are better able to meet the schools’ higher expectations.

With 8,500 students on waiting lists for public charter schools in the District last spring, an increase of 18 percent from the previous year, many wonder whether it makes sense to limit the number of students who can access the highest-performing schools.

“At a time when we are pushing for more funding to launch new charter schools, and when so many people are on waiting lists, you want to make sure that charter schools are open to accepting all students that come to them,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, who encouraged charter schools this summer to “backfill,” or enroll students as seats become available.

By limiting enrollment, some advocates say, charter schools can offer poor students an opportunity many wealthier children take for granted: classrooms full of motivated students and few distractions.

“I see nothing wrong with charters functioning as a poor man’s private school. I see much that’s right about that,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. But he maintains that the schools should be more transparent about their competitive advantage. “What’s not right is to say, ‘We are just the same as any other public school,’ when you are not behaving the same way as a public school.”

The Harlem-based nonprofit group Democracy Builders estimated in a report this year that New York’s charter schools leave 2,500 seats empty in grades three through eight when students transfer out — a practice that appears to raise test scores in some schools.

[New York City charters leave thousands of seats unfilled despite exploding demand, study finds]

With charter schools becoming a larger part of the District’s public school system, enrolling 44 percent of all students, the city has begun discussing the role that the once-experimental start-ups should play now that they have matured. This fall, Jennifer Niles, deputy mayor for education, is convening a task force to look at how traditional and charter schools can work together to address citywide challenges, including how to limit the thousands of students who cycle in and out of public schools each year.

Student mobility, particularly during the school year, is associated with lower academic performance and increased risk of dropping out.

Charter schools have far more control over how and when they admit new students, choosing which grades will accept new enrollment and whether they will take students midyear. Most of the city’s neighborhood schools must admit students at any time.

Some traditional schools also put limits on enrollment, with similar goals of offering a more rigorous program or specialized curriculum. Four of the school district’s six selective high schools stop accepting new applicants after 10th or 11th grade. And the school system’s dual-language schools and programs admit students after first grade only if they can pass a Spanish proficiency test.

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