That’s one of the issues with Phoenix area charter schools. They may say they offer the services, but other criteria to enter or stay in the school have resulted in them services far fewer special needs kids than public schools.
Add on top of that that that one of the larger charter chains has moved to a model where effectively all money is laundered through a private company which the school then outsourced _all_ of its expenses to, and you get a situation where it appears the owners are intentionally fleecing the taxpayer and their buddies in the state government are making sure it’s legal for them to do it. It seems like corruption, which would be bad enough in itself, but they’re doing it at the expense of an already underfunded public education system.
It was very common in my charter high school. For whatever reason they weren't concerned with the drop out rate, so they openly encouraged special needs kids to drop out.
They had previously encouraged them to go to the alternative school, but budget cuts shut that school down.
It may be illegal ina lot of places, but not everywhere. In many states charter schools are not obligated to fullfill the same legal requirements for special education, standardized testing, or English as a second language placement.
It is a bad thing if you want to have strong universal public education.
Public schools in the US are already strongly segregated by income and race since schools are typically a municipal government concern.
Charter schools add an additional layer of segregation. Now you have schools that can divert public funds, but don't have to meet the same standards, services and accessibility standards as public schools. They can play games with expulsions, special ed classifications and lottery admissions to get the student population they want.
Charters filter out students and and funds from the public school system to create another tier of schools, leaving the worst performers and students with the most special needs in public schools.
Meanwhile charter schools teaching positions are frequently non-union with lower pay and worse benefits than public schools, eliminating what traditionally was a stable rung on the middle class ladder.
Throw in the businesses that smell profit in schools with less public accountability - including real estate, outsourced operations and services - and you have serious regression in public education if you ask me.
> It is a bad thing if you want to have strong universal public education.
> Public schools in the US are already strongly segregated by income and race since schools are typically a municipal government concern.
Well, you are complaining at once about students studying outside their catchment (quality of school depends on willingness to travel), and students studying inside their catchment (quality of school depends on local tax revenues).
The truth is that every system has tradeoffs, not every flaw in each system is fatal, and there is real room to explore.
> Meanwhile charter schools teaching positions are frequently non-union with lower pay and worse benefits than public schools
From some perspectives that could be a good thing, because some places would rather be able to afford to have kids in school every weekday, than index the pension fund for a vote buy. Teachers should work in a market like other professionals. Very productive teachers can scale up, as is clear from success stories regularly seen, for example, in Korea.
This is extremely common. It is just not done explicitly to do that. Much like many other things that are common but not designed to exclude protected classes like ageism, sexism, and so forth in hiring funnels.
This is illegal in a lot of places, and I doubt it is common.