School Information System: Do Charter Schools Serve Fewer Special Education Students?

June 23, 2012

Do Charter Schools Serve Fewer Special Education Students?

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides one of the first large-scale comparisons of special education enrollment between charter and regular public schools. The report's primary finding, which, predictably, received a fair amount of attention, is that roughly 11 percent of students enrolled in regular public schools were on special education plans in 2009-10, compared with just 8 percent of charter school students.

The GAO report's authors are very careful to note that their findings merely describe what you might call the "service gap" - i.e., the proportion of special education students served by charters versus regular public schools - but that they do not indicate the reasons for this disparity.

This is an important point, but I would take the warning a step further: The national- and state-level gaps themselves should be interpreted with the most extreme caution.