The Centrality of Access in Charter School Debates

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Most policy debates about charter schools cannot be fully understood without wrestling with issues of equitable access. These access practices that alternatively welcome or turn away families are particularly important at a time when families and communities are struggling for their economic and physical survival—confronting disease, state-sanctioned violence, and economic privation. Yet access issues are rarely brought into these other charter-school discussions.
This symposium will bring together scholars whose research has spanned a wide variety of charter-school issues, to engage in an interactive discussion of how access connects their work. The panel will consider the charter-school issues listed below through the lens of equitable access.
Note that while each participant has published on one or more of these topics (and will each upload a paper), the symposium will not include formal presentations; the scholarship will emerge through the interactive discussion. The chair will ensure a rapid flow throughout the discussion, to pursue the generative objective: new understandings of the centrality of access. In this 90-minute session, we will leave the final 30 minutes for audience engagement.
Publicness: Charter schools have long been mired in a debate about their actual publicness (e.g., Lubienski, 2001; Miron, 2008). In truth, they combine elements of private and public. Access plays a major role here: the more restricted, the less public.
Innovation: Charter school advocates point to their potential to drive educational innovation (see Preston, Goldring, Berends, & Cannata, 2012). Such innovations often create differences that increase or decrease access.
Funding & finance: Charters can have a fiscal impact on public budgets (see Bifulco & Reback, 2014; Ladd & Singleton, 2018), and funding systems can create incentives to either increase or decrease access to a given set of students, such as students with special needs.
Scalability: Access issues and scalability issues arise when a charter school’s model is one that depends on enrolling a specific type of student (e.g., very high achievers).
Discipline: Discipline policies impact access and are also influenced by access (Golann, 2015; US Department of Education, 2014).
Transparency & accountability: Good-governance (Green, Baker, Oluwole, & Mead, 2015) requires awareness of, and attention to, access barriers.
Segregation & stratification: Access barriers contribute to researched enrollment patterns: Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley & Wong, 2010 (segregation by race and class); Lacireno-Paquet, Holyoke, Moser, & Henig, 2002 (stratification of high-need populations, particularly students with language or special education needs); Mickelson, Bottia & Southworth, 2008 (stratification by race, class and achievement); and Miron, Urschel & Saxton, 2011 (low enrollment of students with more severe disabilities).
Measured outcomes: Access barriers can lead to bias in studies offering achievement comparisons between charter school students and non-charter students (e.g., CREDO, 2013; Betts & Tang, 2014).
Competition: Research about charters’ effects on other schools (e.g., Imberman, 2011) similarly requires an understanding of which students are in play.

Each of these 10 issues is important in its own right, and each is linked to issues of access.

Sub Unit

• Division L - Educational Policies and Politics

Chair

• Wagma S. Mommandi, University of Colorado - Boulder

Papers

• Publicness and Competitive Incentives - Chris Lubienski, Indiana University

• "No Excuses" School Discipline - Joanne Golann, Vanderbilt University

• Access and Opportunity for African American Communities - Julian Vasquez Heilig, University of Kentucky; Dana Thompson Dorsey, University of South Florida - Tampa

• The Centrality of Access - Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado Boulder