NC charter schools serve few poor kids. Now they’ll get $36 million to take more.
The lure of federal grant money is helping to convince North Carolina charter schools to increase their efforts to add low-income students to their rosters.
The U.S. Department of Education has awarded North Carolina $36.6 million to increase the number of “educationally disadvantaged students” attending charter schools. The program got off to a slow start last year, but this year a quarter of the state’s charter schools have said they’re interested in applying for a share of the grant money.
“We’ve got to get this money spent because schools have been asking for it,” Alex Quigley, chairman of the N.C. Charter Schools Advisory Board, said at this week’s meeting. “This has been a gap that we have. To be able to have such an influx of funds to drive quality in this sector is really important.”
The grant money could address how North Carolina charter schools on average don’t serve as many low-income students as traditional public schools. But Kris Nordstrom, senior policy analyst with the N.C. Justice Center’s Education and Law Project, said the money would be better directed into the state’s underfunded traditional public schools.
“We know that for the last 25 years we’ve been failing to meet constitutional needs to provide a sound basic education to the state’’s children,” Nordstrom told The News & Observer. “Anything that sends money to run a parallel system of schools shows they’re failing to meet the needs of children in traditional public schools.”
Charter schools have fewer low-income students
Charter schools are taxpayer-funded schools that are exempt from some of the rules that traditional public schools must follow, such as participating in the federal school lunch program and providing transportation for students. There are 196 charter schools now open across the state, up since the Republican-led General Assembly removed the 100-school limit in 2011.
The majority of students in North Carolina’s traditional public schools are economically disadvantaged compared to 18.8% in charter schools. But advocates say the true number of low-income students is under-counted in charter schools because most schools aren’t in the national school lunch program.
North Carolina won a five-year, $26.6 million grant in 2018 “to support a significant increase” in the educationally disadvantaged student population in charter schools. The federal government added $10 million to the grant last year.
Some of the grant money is being used to train charter-school leaders on the best ways to serve educationally disadvantaged students.
But the bulk of the grant money is meant for individual charter schools to expand the number of disadvantaged students they serve. Schools must show a plan for recruiting these students, educating them and providing them services such as lunch and transportation.
Charters want more ‘disadvantaged’ students’
Only a dozen charter schools applied for the first round of grants last year with nine being approved for a total of $3.4 million. The Exploris School in Raleigh received $600,000 to promote its diversity efforts.
Ellie Schollmeyer, executive director of Exploris, said the grant coincided with work already begun to try to make the school more representative of the racial and economic diversity of Wake County.
Although 32% of students in the Wake County school system qualified for federally subsidized school lunches last year, that figure was only 7% at Exploris. Schollmeyer said it’s up to 14% this school year as Exploris tries to reach a goal of 32% by 2024.
“We’re not where we want to be yet, but we’re moving in the right direction,” Schollmeyer said. “Our goal is to represent the demographics of our community and our world.”
One of the ways Exploris made gains so quickly is by changing its admission process to a “weighted lottery” that gives selection priority to economically disadvantaged students.
There are 21 charter schools approved by the state to use weighted lotteries, compared to just six schools before 2019. The number will rise even higher because a weighted lottery is a requirement to get grant money.
A total of 50 charter schools met the Jan. 15 deadline for letting the state know if they were interested in applying for a grant. They’ll have until March 1 to submit an application.
The majority of the grant money could be awarded this summer by the State Board of Education.
Critics question giving money to charters
The state increased the number of applicants this year by expanding which schools are eligible for the grant. Charters need to have at least a C grade in the state’s A through F school-performance grading system to be considered for the money.
In addition, the state Office of Charter Schools reached out to individual charter schools to encourage them to apply.
“It makes so much sense to headhunt for top schools trying to encourage them to do this,” said Quigley, chairman of the charter schools advisory board. “That’s the right way to go about it.”
But critics say it shouldn’t take financial incentives to get charter schools to try to be more diverse.
“It concerns me why there would be additional taxpayer money to remind charter schools to do the thing that they were originally intended for: to serve economically disadvantaged students,” said Natalie Beyer, a Durham school board member and member of the board of Public Schools First NC.
Quigley, who leads a high-poverty charter school in Durham, said the grants should be celebrated and not criticized for all the students who will be helped.
“I’m not in a position to judge the motivations of why these schools want to take this on,” Quigley said in an interview. “The bottom line is we want to see diversity and high-quality education in charter schools.
“We’ve got $30 million to address that and provide high-quality school choice options for kids from low-income neighborhoods.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2020 at 12:52 PM with the headline "NC charter schools serve few poor kids. Now they’ll get $36 million to take more.."
