Charter schools have been criticized for ‘cream-skimming’ high-achieving students (Pic: Getty … [+]
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Of all the criticisms levelled at charter schools, perhaps the one with the most traction is that they ‘cream-skim’ the high-achieving, wealthier students.
But giving charter schools a financial incentive to enrol students from low income backgrounds can be an effective way of getting them to enrol more students from low income backgrounds.
Charter schools now account for roughly 6% of K-12 students in public education, but have lost little of their ability to provoke controversy since their introduction in the early 1990s.
One of the more sustained objections is that the autonomy they enjoy allows them to disproportionately enrol the most advantaged students, increasing segregation and leaving traditional public schools to cater for high-need students.
But the widespread introduction of weighted student funding policies has allowed researchers to examine the effects of financial incentives on charter school enrolment.
These policies typically involve additional funding attached to students who need special education services, are English language learners or are from low income families.
And evidence from California suggests that where student funding is weighted towards high-need students, charter schools gradually increased the enrolment of students from low-income backgrounds.
In 2013, California introduced a new weighted student funding policy for low income students or English language learners that amounted to a supplementary grant for schools worth approximately $1,300 per student.
This replaced a previous funding regime where schools were offered an additional $300 for each disadvantaged student.
The effects on enrolment were analyzed by Paul Bruno, assistant professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who this week presented the results in a working paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
He found that enrolment of low-income students gradually increased at charter schools that previously had a relatively low enrolment of low-income students compared with their school district.
After four years, the gap in enrolment of low income students between charter schools and traditional public schools had shrunk to practically zero.
However, where charter schools already had a relatively high enrolment of low-income students, the change was much more modest, and the difference in enrolment between charter schools and traditional schools was actually slightly larger in 2017 than it was four years earlier.
The fact the effect was concentrated in charter schools that previously enrolled low-income students at relatively low rates indicates that some ‘cream-skim’ high-achieving, wealthy students, Bruno suggested.
But it also provides evidence that this behavior can be mitigated by financial incentives, he added.
“If these state funding changes altered enrolment incentives only or mostly for charter schools, and not for families or traditional schools, then my results indicate that many charter schools are avoiding enrolling low-income students,” Bruno said.
“The primary implication for policy-makers is that charter schools appear to be sensitive to the cost of providing education. This matters for both the funding and the regulation of charter schools.”
He said policy-makers needed to ensure that the additional funding for high-need students was large enough to change the behavior of charter school operators, but not so large they create perverse incentives, such as discouraging schools to declassify students as English language learners.
It seems that for all the criticism levelled at charter schools, the carrot of financial incentives is more effective than a castigating stick.
