A Better Way to Enroll Kids in Charter Schools: From Individual Applications to a Common Process

A new study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology research associate Elizabeth Setren shows that students learning English or with disabilities make more substantial academic gains when they attend charter schools instead of district counterparts. In fact, the charter-induced gains made by students with special needs are similar to the large gains achieved by general-education students.

Yet in New York City and many other urban areas, charter schools enroll significantly smaller proportions of students in these disadvantaged groups than do surrounding district schools. Such enrollment gaps are troubling, but successful reform efforts are now taking on this issue in cities across the country.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t to push charters to better retain disadvantaged students. Separate analyses by me and the city’s Independent Budget Office found that both students with disabilities and those learning English are significantly less likely to exit city charters than district schools.

Instead, getting more disadvantaged students into charters requires convincing more of them to apply in the first place. Why don’t they now?

Recent survey evidence from the Center for Reinventing Public Education hints at one potential culprit: Disadvantaged parents are more likely to find the current school-based lottery system for applying to charter schools to be difficult to manage.

As in most other cities, interested parents in New York City must apply separately to each charter school to which they might hope to send their child. Parents report difficulty managing the multiple applications and deadlines.

Gotham should follow the lead of several other cities and adopt a common-enrollment system for students to apply for admission to charter and district schools. Rather than applying separately to each charter, parents would submit to a central administration a single form on which they list, in order, their preferred schooling placement. An algorithm that takes these preferences into account conducts a fair lottery and makes enrollment offers.

This process should sound familiar to New Yorkers. It was originally developed to match students in New York City and Boston to district high schools. We should expand this already operating system to all grade levels and include charter schools in the process.

Since, according to the New York City Charter School Center, 95% of New York City’s charters are oversubscribed, adopting a common-enrollment system alone shouldn’t increase the number of kids attending charter schools. But recent evidence from Denver suggests that it might particularly help parents of disadvantaged students to apply to charter schools.

Denver moved from school-based lotteries to a common-enrollment system in 2012. As is common, the city coupled the change in the enrollment process with increased outreach and improved informational tools meant to help parents make the best choice for their children.

On a survey conducted by CRPE, Denver parents reported substantially less difficulty with the number of applications and managing deadlines under the common-enrollment system than with the previous school-based lottery system.

In a recent study for the Manhattan Institute, I show that this increased ease with the application process yielded real improvements in access. I compare enrollment trends in Denver’s charter and district elementary schools before and after adoption of the common enrollment system.

I find evidence that the policy change substantially increased the proportion of students entering charter school kindergartens-the grade at which the vast majority of students enter charter elementary schools-who are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch or speak English as a second language. (Students with disabilities did not fully participate in the enrollment system during the years I was able to study.) The effect was large enough to nearly eliminate the previously sizable gap in the proportion of English language learners entering charter and district schools and to cut the gap among those eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch in half.

Both their supporters and critics claim to want New York City’s charter schools to serve more of the city’s disadvantaged students. Expanding the city’s already operating common enrollment system offers an opportunity to do just that.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News