全球智库信息集成服务系统

All students deserve the right to attend high-quality public schools that prepare them for success. In cities and towns across the United States, public education is provided through a combination of traditional school districts and charter schools. Charter schools are autonomous public schools of choice, which are granted the opportunity to operate by entities referred to as authorizers—including state departments of education, local school districts, independent charter boards, and institutions of higher education—as outlined in state charter school statutes. Traditional local school districts operate public schools in a geographic area recognized by the state. While advocates and policymakers have passionately debated whether traditional versus chartered public schools best provide this preparation, both governance models can thrive and contribute to students’ success. Rather than seeing charter schools as adversaries, district schools should act on the original vision of many charter pioneers and explore opportunities to collaborate with charter schools, thereby joining forces to drive and accelerate initiatives that can lead to better student outcomes for all kids.¹ In the best-case scenario, such collaborative efforts will enable districts and charter schools to share thought leadership, resources, and responsibilities.² Given the urgency of the need to improve public education, policymakers and education leaders simply do not have the luxury of drawing artificial lines between districts and charter schools.

While the relationship between districts and charter schools admittedly remains contentious in some locales, the two governance models are nevertheless collaborating effectively in communities across the country—much to the benefit of students. The Center on Reinventing Public Education has studied district and charter collaboration extensively and found that effective collaboration generally focuses on “shared resources, shared responsibility, shared effort to build trust and collegiality, and shared work to ensure equal access to high-quality schools for all students in the city.”³ In Boston, for instance, the traditional district, charter schools, and Catholic schools formed a compact in 2011 to “bring district, charter and Catholic school educators together in order to provide equitable access to high-performing schools and excellent instruction to all students.”⁴ In St. Louis, the district provides the nonprofit Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, charter schools with free rent in surplus buildings, and in return, KIPP provides district leaders with access to the charter management organization’s, or CMO’s, successful leadership development program.⁵

The need to collaborate is particularly pressing in the area of special education. Approximately 6.5 million students—13 percent of students ages 3–21—receive special education and related services in public schools every year.⁶ Approximately 90 percent of those identified have high-incidence disabilities, such as specific learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, other health impairments, autism, intellectual disabilities, and emotional disturbance.⁷ However, these specialized programs provide services to students with a diverse range of disabilities, including low-incidence disabilities such as visual and hearing impairments. High-quality programs for students with disabilities provide differentiated services and supports in inclusive environments with a clear focus on successful student outcomes. Special education and related services could include offerings such as instruction from certified special education teachers, behavioral counseling, speech therapy, support from a paraprofessional, and access to assistive technology. These services can be extremely costly, as they often require significant technical expertise. Delivering effective special education services presents significant challenges for both traditional school districts and charter schools. Increased collaboration between districts and charter schools would allow educators to aggregate their efforts and expertise, thus improving access to high-quality special education and related services.

This report provides a brief overview of special education policies and outcomes and explores the potential of district and charter collaboration. There have been numerous examples of charter schools that have struggled to ensure equitable access for students with disabilities. The district and charter school collaboration efforts described in this report in Colorado’s Denver Public Schools, California’s Los Angeles Unified School District, and between Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy and Central Falls School District build opportunities to:

• Collaborate to better serve students with disabilities in charters
• Ensure access to innovative schools for students with disabilities
• Create cost-effective solutions for districts and charters

The examples highlight the opportunities—and challenges to overcome—for districts and charter schools to collaborate to improve the education of students with disabilities. The report concludes with actions that the federal government, states, charter authorizers, districts, and charter schools can take to facilitate collaboration that will benefit students with disabilities, no matter what type of public school they attend.

Since the authorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, in 1975, the national approach to not only ensuring access but also providing quality special education and related services has been a work in progress. According to key metrics, the nation’s schools are making gains in terms of students accessing the general education curriculum, modest improvements in key student achievement measures, and increases in graduation rates that slightly outpace overall improvements. (see Figures 1–3)

However, there remains much room for improvement. Public schools—both traditional and charter—are struggling to consistently provide a high-quality education to students with disabilities, as evidenced by special education students’ relatively low graduation rates and limited postgraduation opportunities, as well as the persistent achievement gap between general and special education students and the disproportionate share of students with disabilities in juvenile detention facilities.⁸ Recent data released by the U.S. Department of Education regarding states’ implementation of IDEA documented that fewer than half of the states nationwide are meeting federal performance targets for special education.⁹

High-quality instruction in the general education environment is the first and most critical element of ensuring that students with disabilities achieve at high levels, but many students with disabilities also need high-quality and highly individualized special education and related services, such as visual impairment teachers and audiologists. To address the challenge of developing and sustaining quality special education programs, states and districts across the country have developed structures—frequently referred to generically as education service centers or education services agencies—to pool expertise; share potentially high costs from low-incidence disabilities; target resources; and assist districts in educating students with a wide range of disabilities. Given the costs and documented shortages of qualified specialists, these structures can be critical to ensuring that districts can reliably access specialized personnel to provide their students with key services.¹⁰ For instance, Massachusetts districts partner to form special education collaboratives to aggregate resources, pool risk, and develop technical expertise that would be nearly impossible for individual districts—much less schools—to develop.¹¹ Similarly, in Colorado, districts join Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, in order to pool resources and access special education expertise.¹² In Michigan, intermediate school districts provide critical support to district special education programs by geographic region.¹³ Such partnerships allow schools, especially in small districts, to plan and budget for potentially variable costs and develop and sustain the capacity required to provide a full continuum of quality services and placements to students with a diverse array of disabilities, as required by the IDEA.

Collaborative relationships between district and charter schools have significant promise, but their potential hinges on both districts and charters recognizing that collaboration can support their mutual interests in order to overcome inherent challenges. As the charter sector grows—and, in some locations, makes up a significant, if not majority, representation of public school enrollment—charter school administrators and state policymakers must identify strategies to build and sustain charters’ capacity to serve students with disabilities. Meanwhile, these administrators and policymakers must maintain the autonomy central to the charter construct and avoid bureaucratic structures that can undermine many efforts to create effective learning environments.

The federal and state laws and associated regulations that guide how educators teach students with disabilities, ranging from mild learning disabilities to significant cognitive or physical impairments, grew out of the civil rights movement. While students with disabilities had historically been largely segregated from their peers and provided with little if any educational opportunities, the equal protection clause of Brown v. Board of Education provided the foundation for key federal laws that frame special education practice in U.S. public schools today: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Education of all Handicapped Children Act of 1975—which evolved into IDEA—and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.¹⁴

Students identified as having one of 13 disabilities are eligible for special education and related services identified under the federal IDEA.¹⁵ Public schools are required to provide students with disabilities with a free appropriate public education, or FAPE, in the least restrictive environment, or LRE, appropriate for their needs and to provide parents with explicit rights to ensure that states and districts comply with the statute.¹⁶ In practice, students eligible for special education are provided accommodations and modifications that enable them to access the general education curriculum and make academic progress.¹⁷ While the special education and related services that students with disabilities receive under IDEA are a key component of improving outcomes for these students, these individualized services are still only a part of what must be a broader approach to serving students with disabilities—and all students. Students with disabilities need high-quality, effective instruction in inclusive settings, and they should have access to differentiated services and supports as soon as a need is identified.

Shoring up high-quality instruction for all kids, including students with disabilities, is critical, as 95 percent of the students eligible to receive special education are enrolled in traditional district schools and spend significant time in the general education classroom. While there is significant variation between states, on average, 63 percent of school-age students with disabilities spend 80 percent or more of their day in the general education classroom, and another 19 percent spend at least 40 percent of their school day in the general education classroom.¹⁸

Providing highly individualized supports to students in compliance with federal and state regulations is one of the most complex areas of education. Special education policies and structures—designed to enable students with disabilities to access the general education curriculum alongside their peers—vary across states and districts; are regulated by federal and state laws; and are supported by federal, state, and local revenues. In addition, as described above, students with disabilities are supported and protected by various laws and programs, which, unfortunately, are not always easily aligned. For example, while a student with disabilities is afforded all of the protections under IDEA, schools must also afford them the supports and opportunities required by the Every Student Succeeds Act. The body of laws and related regulations are nuanced and can be daunting to new charter school operators, many of whom may have limited experience navigating the complex web of administrative requirements that shape so much of special education in public schools.¹⁹

Special education challenges

Twenty-five years into the charter sector, there is ample documentation that charter schools have struggled, to varying degrees, to ensure equitable access for students with a diverse range of disabilities and to amass and sustain the capacity to provide high-quality services.²⁰ The factors contributing to the challenge are myriad and have even included reports of some charters discouraging students with disabilities from enrolling.²¹ First, while funding is a perennial challenge for all public schools, charter schools’ small size, prohibition from raising revenues through taxes that are potentially available to traditional districts, and general inability to realize economies of scale critical to providing a full continuum of special education services is problematic.²² Second, charter authorizers have historically not devoted adequate attention to clearly articulating roles and responsibilities associated with educating students with disabilities or developing metrics to track their success.²³ Finally, states, districts, and charter authorizers have struggled to retrofit regulatory structures developed before charter schools were created and in states where charter schools operate as part of a local district, in order to operationalize how they share responsibility for provision of special education within these structures.²⁴

Due process and legal actions

Parents’ ability to file a grievance when they are concerned that a school is not fulfilling its obligations to provide FAPE is a key avenue to protecting their children’s rights. During the 2012-13 school year, parents or advocates submitted 16,980 due process complaints related to compliance with IDEA. The majority of these complaints—11,164 representing 65.8 percent—were resolved without a hearing. Yet the complaints provide insight into how often parents and schools—traditional districts and charters alike—clash regarding special education.²⁵ Charter schools have been the focus of due process complaints as well as complaints submitted to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, and the Department of Justice’s Office for Civil Rights. While there is no national repository for individual parent due process complaints, public reporting of complaints submitted to the respective offices for civil rights provide insight into how some of the challenges are translating to formal grievances and the collective understanding of how relevant laws are being applied to autonomous charter schools. Since October 2013, the Department of Education’s OCR has issued 71 letters stemming from complaints against charter schools.

Special Education in the Charter Sector

Concerns regarding special education in the charter sector

Currently, 43 states and the District of Columbia have charter school laws, and there are approximately 6,800 charter schools operating across the country that serve an estimated 2.9 million students.³⁴ While the charter school model has undoubtedly captured the imagination of policymakers, parents, and school leaders, the schools and policies have also generated criticism and critiques. Since the inception of the charter sector in 1991, critics and scholars have questioned the extent to which charter schools welcome and provide adequate services to students with disabilities.³⁵ Research has documented that while many charter schools have struggled to amass the requisite expertise to effectively service students with disabilities, there are ample examples of charter schools creating successful special education programs. For instance, CHIME Institute in California has developed a national reputation for creating a dynamic and wholly inclusive environment for students with significant disabilities.³⁶ Another example comes from Massachusetts’ UP Education Network and its methodical approach to moving students from self-contained to inclusive classrooms as part of its focused school turnaround work, which has demonstrated notable improvements in outcomes for students with disabilities.³⁷

Concerns regarding special education in the charter sector range from broad questions about schools generally limiting access to narrower concerns about access for students with more significant disabilities. Other common areas of concern include the quality of programs for students with special needs and practices, such as discipline, that might have a disproportionate impact on students w