NN4DA Call for Award Nominations & Webinar on Special Education Research
This update includes two items:
- We are soliciting nominations for the NN4DA’s Annual Authorizer Awards. This is a great way to honor and celebrate your colleagues, while elevating the profession. Nominations are due September 13th, and will be announced at the NN4DA Annual meeting in October 21st in Houston.
- NN4DA is hosting a webinar on special education issues with the Center for Learner Equity on Friday, September 6, at noon, MDT. Read about the research informing this discussion, and my own analysis of how we have gotten to a situation in which access, services, and outcomes for students with disabilities in charter schools remains a weak point in the charter sector and in authorizing. At the root of the problem, I fear districts are being strategic about charter appeals. In many settings, district leaders and attorneys are reluctant to justify high-stakes decisions based on shortcomings related to special education for fear those arguments will undermine other justifications that are harder to challenge during appeals.
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NN4DA Call for Award Nominations & Webinar on Special Education Research
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Putting Students with Disabilities at the Center of Charter School Authorizing
NN4DA Webinar with Lauren Morando Rhim from the Center for Learner Equity; Friday, September 6, 2024; 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm MDT, register.
The Center for Learner Equity (CLE) recently released a major study summarizing two years of research exploring how charter schools serve students with disabilities and how charter authorizers have responded to shortcomings in this area. CLE’s Founder and Executive Director, Lauren Morando Rhim, summed up their findings in an interview with the 74’s Beth Hawkins as follows:
“The origin of the charter sector was to expand opportunities for kids from marginalized demographics… With kids of color and low-income kids, the charter sector has done that. But for kids with disabilities, it has not.” To her (Rhim), the most disappointing aspect of the research is that it did not yield many examples of success that could illuminate promising practices. “We thought we would turn over rocks and find positive outliers, but really there were very few,” says Morando Rhim. “We hoped to find more states taking action, more authorizers and nonprofits.”
The NN4DA is hosting a webinar on Friday, September 6, 2024, at noon, MDT, to explore how district authorizers might address this predicament.
We will build on the study’s findings to discuss how to increase the prioritization of these challenges among our state partners, and how to help more districts innovate to improve access, services, and outcomes for students with disabilities in charter schools.
For a deep dive on the study, you can read all about the challenges, and the depressing lack of exemplars in the field, described in the study. You can review the CLE home page of the study, executive summary, and related CLE policy briefs for charter authorizers, state leaders, and non-profits, as well as CLE’s overview and analysis. For more analysis see coverage in The 74 by Hawkins cited above.
The overwhelming sense one gets of this research and analysis is that, collectively, the charter sector does not make students with disabilities a priority. Throughout the CLE research, this fundamental critique appears to hold for charter operators, authorizers, and non-profits. Our webinar will address this challenge. Please join us for the conversation and register for the call here.
I believe there are a few dynamics that experienced charter authorizers are considering when they work on these issues.
- Serving students with disabilities well and in full compliance with state and federal law is hard to do at a small scale, like a single charter school.
- Because people know how hard it is to do this well, authorizers insisting that charter schools do the work are accused of having unreasonable expectations.
- When authorizers have acted on findings of special education failure in applicants or charter schools, they have been accused of acting out of general hostility to charters, with their pursuit of “unreasonable” expectations, as evidence of their politicized charter animus.
- In appeals processes, this perceived animus can lead appellate bodies to discount any other evidence the authorizer has provided to justify their actions.
- Eventually authorizers learn to avoid using issues around special education as justification for any high stakes decision that is potentially subject to appeal.
Unfortunately, these dynamics have generated rational and strategic reasons why district authorizers have not chosen to make charter schools’ failures to welcome and better serve student with disabilities a priority.
You can read more about my analysis of these dynamics and how I believe they evolved in a nerdy draft policy document here. Ultimately, any systematic solutions to these problems will probably need to accommodate districts’ sense of charter appeal strategy and the legal liabilities they fear will come with charter/district entanglement.
While authorizers are sometimes willing to deny a charter application they believe is poised to turn into a special education disaster, they appear reluctant to deny an otherwise solid application on this basis alone. And they are much less willing to officially justify a non-renewal or revocation decision based on problematic access for students with disabilities or problems with programming and compliance in special education.
I think this situation is influenced heavily by how district leaders and their legal counsel interpret previous charter appeals.
Changing how appeals work is one strategy to remedy this problem, but in most states it will be a political long-shot. Changing the people and institutions making the final decisions through alternative authorizers and appeals can produce major political conflict in a state, and those politics playout based on fundamental positions in support of or opposition to charters rather than technical details of authorizing, like special education. It has been, and will likely remain difficult to incrementally improve how appeals play out and how districts leaders and attorneys assess their best legal strategies.
It may be that we can make more progress on these issues if we switch from thinking about special education as an issue of “big A” Accountability, and treat it more as an issue of authorizer-supported school improvement and charter/district collaboration.
Facing these challenges, I suggest we consider things that districts and charter schools can do via incremental improvements and strive to deescalate either party’s sense that these issues would become grounds on which a school would be closed.
- For example, including a deep dive in charter school annual reports that explore enrollment patterns and outcomes for all student subgroups, including students with disabilities, can potentially drive discussions between school districts and charters. Colorado’s Charter School Institute’s (CSI’s) “Equity Screener” is an excellent example of this approach. This approach uses an annual process where transparency is leveraged to drive dialogue between the authorizer and their most problematic schools.
- Likewise, a mystery shopper program is promising, but not because it will provide evidence used to shutter a charter school in some “gotcha” campaign. Instead, when applied, these calls quickly incentivize a charter school to educate all their front-line staff in how to appropriately talk about special education. Practice quickly changes in schools, removing many concerns about counseling students away, which, if left unaddressed, undermines the trust needed for other collaboration.
- Districts can also get much more explicit about how they want all this to work. Colorado’s CSI uses a special education MOU, but similarly detailed language could be codified unilaterally in district policy, regulation, and procedures, and communicated to the charter schools regularly.
In all these examples, there doesn’t need to be a looming threat of closure in the background. Charter school accountability for special education may have become a Paper Tiger. If we acknowledge that reality, efforts to make progress, through clarity about expectations and outcomes and in partnership, may provide better hope of progress.
I look forward to the discussion. I hope you will join us.
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Join us in Houston!
NN4DA Annual Meeting, Houston, TX
Sunday, October 20, 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm, and Monday, October 21, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, CDT. Houston Westin Galleria (the NACSA Conference hotel). The NN4DA Annual Meeting is scheduled in conjunction with the NACSA meeting, in Houston, TX. Authorizers, state partners, and facilitators from all NN4DA partner states are welcome to attend. There is no cost to attend. Limited funding for representatives from each partner state is available. Participants will share strategies for making their own state initiative more successful and discuss developments and challenges in authorizing of particular interest to school districts. Contact Alex Medler at Alex.Medler@nn4da.org, or your state facilitator for more information.