The authors of new research on how U.S. charter schools are serving children with disabilities say their findings should alarm state education leaders, the agencies that authorize the independent public schools and nonprofit organizations that support them.

On the whole, charter schools do not outperform their district-run counterparts when it comes to providing high-quality special education services, the national nonprofit Center for Learner Equity concluded following a two-year deep dive. Because charter schools exist in part to serve historically underserved students and to develop effective ways of meeting their needs, this failing has a ripple effect on the education of all children with disabilities, the center’s leaders say.

“The origin of the charter sector was to expand opportunities for kids from marginalized demographics,” says Executive Director Lauren Morando Rhim. “With kids of color and low-income kids, the charter sector has done that. But for kids with disabilities, it has not.”

To her, 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 center organized its report into sections containing recommendations for three distinct groups: states, charter school authorizers, and school improvement and other organizations. Standards for enrolling students with disabilities, serving them and measuring progress should be built in at every stage of a charter school’s life, the researchers say, from the decision to grant it permission to operate to revocation of its charter if it underperforms.

Muddying the picture, they note, is the lack of clear and widely accepted standards for defining success for students with disabilities. They attribute this in part to the requirement that special education services be highly individualized — making uniform academic and social-emotional goals tough to set — and to persistent low expectations regarding children’s potential.

Education leaders should attend to the lagging outcomes for children with disabilities because it’s the right thing to do, says Morando Rhim. But a lack of urgency about improving special education also poses political problems for the charter sector.

Charter schools have long been dogged by claims — often inaccurate — that they turn away children with disabilities. Now, the bipartisan support charters have enjoyed is softening. Instead of pressing for growth in the charter sector, conservatives are calling for the rapid expansion of vouchers and other private-school choice programs. Meanwhile, as they confront unprecedented enrollment declines, defenders of traditional district-run schools are quick to decry charters as a competitive threat.

“How do we create a sense of urgency?” asks Morando Rhim. “That’s the $64 million question.”

From 2008 to 2021, the report notes, the percentage of students enrolled in charter schools nationwide who receive special education services has risen from 8% to 11.5%, but has trailed district school enrollment by some 2.5% since 2012. While enrollment is an “imperfect proxy” for equity, the authors say, it does at least in part reflect families’ perceptions that charters are viable options for children with disabilities.

A small number of schools achieve outstanding results for kids with disabilities, but separate research from Stanford University has found that while charter schools on the whole outperform their district counterparts, special education students lag by the equivalent of 13 days of learning in reading and 14 days in math.

In terms of providing children with disabilities with high-quality education, charter schools are under little pressure to do more than comply with special education laws, the center found. States and charter authorizers rarely monitor the academic performance of students with disabilities, pay little attention to whether charters encourage families of students in need of special education to enroll or engage in promising practices such as co-teaching — where a special educator and general education teacher share an inclusive classroom.

The few exceptions researchers found involved charter authorizers that explicitly hold schools accountable for good outcomes for children with disabilities, “making clear to schools that there are consequences for discriminating against students with disabilities and failing to meet their educational needs.”

A separate, 2023 survey by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers found that only half of authorizers take the basic step of asking charter applicants to detail their plans for enrolling students with disabilities.

Authorizers at Indiana’s Ball State University, by contrast, told the center’s researchers that special education students’ academic growth is a factor they consider when evaluating the schools they oversee. A lack of progress is seen as an “indicator of distress.”

This monitoring has resulted in numerous improvements, they said. Schools are now quicker to evaluate children for services, hire special educators and nursing professionals, provide instructional accommodations and better communicate with families about their rights.

The new report also singled out Washington state, which has had charter schools for only 12 years. State law gives priority to prospective charter school founders who plan to enroll and educate children from traditionally underserved demographics, with a specific focus on special education.

Washington charter schools, the center reported, enroll a higher percentage of students with disabilities than the state’s traditional district schools, place almost all of them in general education classrooms and, in instances where data is available, see bigger learning gains. However, the successes are not uniform, and huge gaps remain, the researchers caution.

Few other states push for equity in special education in charter schools, the report noted. In a handful of places, including Washington, D.C., and Colorado, charter schools are allowed to give enrollment preferences to students with disabilities.

Few state school funding systems were created with an eye toward paying for services for students with disabilities in independent charter schools, resulting in “a patchwork of retrofitted policies and practices.” Louisiana is one notable exception, giving different levels of funding to charter schools in New Orleans based on students’ disabilities. Tennessee recently overhauled its education funding formula to include 10 different “weights” for students with disabilities.

Overall, the center found no evidence that states’ “anemic” actions have yielded positive results for students with disabilities in charter schools.

“Why are we comfortable failing children with disabilities?” says Morando Rhim. “Part of the problem is an innate ableism — like it’s okay that they fail because we don’t really expect more of them.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding to the Center for Learner Equity for the research and provides funding for The 74.

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

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