What do you do with the behaviorally challenged kids? You know the ones that throw desks, swear, threaten or hurt other kids and or teachers, in essence destroy learning time for those who need it? The ones who smoke pot in the bathrooms and are often taken out in handcuffs? If you say that you keep them, educate them and make them behave then PLEASE come to my city/and or state and show the charter schools how to handle them because the way they do it is to ship them to us. If it is a strict lottery then tell me how come so many of them who cannot cut the mustard show up in public schools? Do you have an entrance exam?
To answer your first question, yes we have kids who demonstrate all of those behaviors. Well, I personally don't deal with the pot issue since I work with young kids, but the rest is certainly familiar. And yes, we keep those kids, we write IEPs and provide therapists, and bring in behavior specialists, and do what we need to do to improve their behavior. Very occasionally the IEP team will decide that a child needs more than can be provided in our school, and we'll convene a meeting and present our case to the state who will find the child an alternative placement in a private school for children with disabilities, however we do that far less frequently than our regular public schools do despite the fact that they have self-contained classrooms for children with disabilities that they can try as an interim step. We also have the right to expel children, but only for behaviors that the public schools can also expel children. For example, we can expel a child who brings a handgun to school or deals drugs on campus. We can also refuse to admit a child who has been expelled from a public school within the past year, as they can refuse to admit a child who has been expelled by us.
Having said that, not all charter schools do a great job, and some of them aren't good at problem solving around challenging behavior. The same can be said for regular public schools as well. I can point to schools in my city that are absolute chaos, both public and charter. And while a school can't expel a child who is causing chaos in the classroom, a parent can certainly decide to withdraw them and enroll them elsewhere. Given that, yes I'm sure the public schools get children with out of control behavior from the charter schools, it happens the other way around too. And yes, it's frustrating when you get a child in your program whose issues have grown out of control because no one handled it appropriately, but it's not a one way street.
As far as sharing our practices, that's one of the big purposes of charter schools. They allow for some more experimentation within public schools so that we can figure out what works for urban education. Our local schools know what doesn't work, but because of the level of bureaucracy they deal with they aren't free to experiment and discover something that does work. Charter schools, because they're smaller, more flexible, and have less oversight, are able to do that experimentation. Sometimes they find something else that doesn't work, and those charter schools either need to find a new model or risk being closed. Sometimes they find something that works for a certain slice of the population, and they develop a niche working with that slice -- for example in our city we have charter schools that focus on students looking to move into the building trades, as well as those that focus on adjudicated youth or Chinese immersion -- we all know that these aren't models that will work district wide, but they're good options to have. Sometimes we find models that work, and produce better results than the public school. Those schools have a responsibility to disseminate that knowledge. I know we do that by hosting student teachers, holding workshops, partnering for professional development with schools who want to improve, etc . . .
As to exams, where I live entrance exams are illegal in charter schools. You can have exams after students are admitted for the purpose of grouping kids. For example, you can have all your incoming 9th graders come in for a test to determine whether they take Algebra 1 or Geometry or some other form of math. However, you can't change the actual grade assignment of a student based on that, or use that data to discourage a child in any way from attending.
Where I live/work children entering charter schools have, on average, lower skills than the children in public schools. This makes sense, generally parents whose children are performing poorly are more likely to pull them and seek new placements. On the other hand, children who have been in charter schools at the elementary school level for several years, perform on par with their public school counterparts -- so the charter schools have helped them close the gap. At the high school level, students in charter schools significantly out perform their peers. In some charter schools (like mine) students at all levels who have been in the school for 2 years or longer outperform their peers.
