Charter Schools & Equity Issues Introduction

Poland (1996) defines charter schools as:

...public schools which operate through a contract with a sponsoring agency...this contract states the education plan, the teaching methods,, and curricular concepts to be employed...(p. 1)

In addition, Poland (1996) reports that the contract often also includes specifications of evaluation plans and outcome measures, the school's management plan, fiscal responsibilities and provisions for ancillary services. Poland further points out that charter schools have complete autonomy from all rules and regulations with the exceptions of state requirements regarding school safety, civil rights, and financial disclosure.

However, the National Education Association (NEA,2000) has recently raised a number of concerns regarding charter schools. Specifically, the NEA states that research indicates that there is a lack of diversity in the student bodies of many charter schools. In particular, it is noted that examination of enrollment data tends to show that charter schools' student bodies are predominately composed of those students are least costly to educate. In other words, they tend to

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nd improvement on students standardized tests. Thus, in general, in the schools examined by Nathan (1996), equity in terms of having a diverse student body tended to be present and the schools also seemed to be working toward increasing the academic achievement levels of its student bodies. On the other hand, not all qualitative studies indicate that the student bodies of charter schools are this diverse. In a descriptive study of charter schools in Arizona, McKinney (1996) claims that these schools are not serving the needs for children with disabilities. His observations indicated that only 3.7 percent of the approximately 7,000 students enrolled in publicly funded Arizona charter schools were being served as special education students at the time of the study, a figure well below the national average of 10 to 12 percent. Moreover, when asked why the figures for students with disabilities were so low, charter school principles cited the higher cost of educating these students. Fuller (1996) reported that rising enthusiasm over school choice modes such as charter schools have far outpaced careful and methodical scientific study of these effects. In an effort to obtain more scientific information, Fuller examined a large s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3039
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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