When “Success” Leaves Students Behind: How Market-Based Schools Exclude Students with Disabilities
As a freshly licensed teacher, I entered the profession hoping to challenge common stereotypes about teaching. I was ready to defy persistent myths of the ‘jaded teacher’ who re-used their lesson plans year after year and taught from their desk chair. So, I sought an environment where teachers taught with rigor and acted as advocates for change. When I encountered a job listing for a national charter school network, it felt like the perfect place to teach: the network emphasized high expectations for both staff and students, all in the name of helping disadvantaged communities beat the system.
Once the school year started, every moment of lesson prep and execution was centered around a single goal: excellence. As the year progressed, the administration increasingly painted certain students as threats to this goal students who struggled to comply with the demanding curriculum and constant test taking. These students—many of whom were multilingual learners and had a learning disability—were many grade levels behind. The strict behavioral regime didn’t accommodate their needs, and they were often in the dean's office instead of participating in instructional time. But when I questioned what we could do to support them, I encountered pushback. They will learn to meet the expectations. We need to focus on the cuspers. Because we were compared to other charters in the district, my leadership wanted to prioritize “cuspers”—students on the verge of advancing performance categories, whose gains would most directly improve accountability metrics—over students who were severely under proficient and therefore viewed as unlikely to advance brackets.
That school year taught me a lot about the nuanced and tense views on how to help disadvantaged students succeed in a world of standardized success. However, a broader question stuck with me years after this experience: To what extent do charter and private schools exclude students with disabilities within a highly standardization education system? Existing research confirms that charter and private schools do, in fact, exclude students with disabilities—- not only by discouraging initial enrollment, but also by pushing students out after enrollment.
Due to the rapid expansion of charter schools and the widespread adoption of private school voucher programs in many states, this research is all relatively new. However, one argument that has consistently championed the charter movement is that charter schools perform slightly better than traditional public schools on standardized tests. This stance became less clear as research has muddied reported score growth when accounting for student demographic and location. More recently, political verbiage has shifted to center priorities like educational freedom and parent choice to push for market-based schools. Beyond political rhetoric, this shift raises important questions about the larger costs to public education. Here are three key patterns that demonstrate how market-based schools exclude students with disabilities.
Pre-Enrollment Exclusion: Cream-Skimming and Counseling Out
Prior to charter school enrollment, phenomena like cream-skimming and counseling out are used to discourage or prevent students with disabilities from being admitted. These tactics are often utilized by school administrators or teachers to suggest that their school is unable to provide adequate services that a large public school can. Researchers largely argue that charters employ these tactics because students with disabilities are more expensive to educate and tend to score lower on standardized tests than students without disabilities. Through a qualitative study of NYC’s small and large public schools, researcher Jessica Bacon found a problematic pattern of students with disabilities being pushed from charters to traditional public schools to avoid low test scores.
When Bacon interviewed teachers and administrators at a small charter school, she found that conversations about students with disabilities were often framed through deficit-based assumptions. One teacher described advocating for a student with a learning disability to be transferred out of the school because they couldn’t keep up academically. Despite a robust body of research demonstrating that inclusive settings better support academic growth, the teacher believed the student belonged in a self-contained classroom and convinced the parent to concede (Bacon, 2019, pg. 37). An administrator from the same school further explained that the principal chose not to open any self-contained classes due to what they described as “fear and ignorance,” noting concerns that such programs would attract students who might “take the school down” academically (Bacon, 2019, p. 36). This interaction exemplifies how counseling out is enacted through moral pressure and professional authority, and functions to protect charter schools’ academic standing.
Teachers from the large public high school described the consequences of these practices, explaining that they often absorbed students whom charter schools implicitly discouraged from enrolling. One teacher acknowledged that “a certain amount of creaming is still happening… there are schools still not taking kids across the continuum of disability and need. Certain schools send a message: ‘Don’t come here, we don’t want you’” (Bacon, 2019, pg. 39). As a result of charter schools’ exclusionary tactics, large public schools become responsible for educating a disproportionate number of students with disabilities and are subsequently labeled as failing due to lower academic standing shaped by this unequal distribution.
Structural Barriers in Admissions and Enrollment Policies
A more explicit form of exclusion exists in private schools, which are legally allowed to deny admission to any student, including students with disabilities. Many private schools require academic testing for admission, charge an average annual tuition of around $15,000, and have no requirements to provide data on school performance to parents. In fact, many parents must sign away their rights to federally regulated IDEA protections in order to admit their child to private schools.
Studies show that adequate information is not shared with parents regarding losing their federal IDEA, FAPE, and LRE rights when enrolling for a private school. The National Center for Learning Disabilities found that “many parents participating in school choice programs did not understand the impact their participation had on their IDEA rights” (NCLD, 2024, pg. 15). This pattern opposes the argument that privatization efforts support all families through increased academic performance as the numbers simply don’t represent all students' experience.
Disciplinary Practices and the De-Identification of Disability
Even when students with disabilities are enrolled in a charter or private school, they are disproportionately suspended and deidentified from their initial disability status. New Orleans touted high achievement marks after switching to an all-charter school system but also suspended a third of the city’s special needs students for disciplinary reasons. In Newark, researchers found that being in a charter school led to a decrease in students keeping their IEP services after 2-3 years. Gilmour et al. studied Newark’s charter enrollment for students with disabilities, using models to measure the casual effect of charter enrollment and receiving an IEP (Gilmour et al., 2022). They found that enrolling in a “participating charter school led to a statistically significant decrease in the probability that a student who at entry was receiving special education services still had an IEP two or three years later” (Gilmour et al., 2022, pg. 15). These findings support a broader pattern suggesting that charter schools are likely to deidentify students with disabilities, which contributes to the earlier mentioned under enrollment findings in the field.
Implications
Exclusion of students with disabilities has been proven to occur before enrollment, during enrollment, and while a student is enrolled in market-based schools (Barnard-Brak & Schmidt, 2018; Bacon, 2019; McKittrick et al., 2019; Gilmour et al., 2022; NCLD, 2024). This exclusion happens implicitly in charter schools with cream-skimming, and explicitly in private schools with exclusive admissions processes. Within these systems, teachers often become unintended agents of exclusion because of the systems’ sole focus on academic achievement. In charter schools, teachers must conform with academic pressures, which results in very negative implications like segregation (Bacon, 2019). This pressure to conform may be related to the phenomenon of students being deidentified from their disabilities after being enrolled in a charter school (Gilmour et al. 2022) which takes away their mandated support and could affect their future opportunities (Dudley-Marling & Baker, 2012).
In private schools that face no IDEA regulation, “private schools can change or eliminate a child’s services without notifying parents— and at any time” (NCLD, 2024, pg. 12). This further exacerbates families’ confusion regarding what services they are entitled to receive, while private schools benefit from their enrollment through high tuition costs. In short, although market-based schools frame themselves as offering parental choice and academic excellence, they often narrow families’ options and weaken the legal protections available to students with disabilities.
Rethinking Educational Success in a Standardized System
The most troubling aspect of market-based schooling is the advertised premise that it improves academic outcomes for all students. These findings not only suggest that students with disabilities are being excluded from charter and private schools nationwide, but that their exclusion is an integral part of improving academic scores and leaves many families confused about their student’s rights (Dudley-Marling & Baker, 2012; Bacon, 2019; McKittrick et al., 2019). While there are short term solutions to these exclusions, like setting up equitable enrollment preferences and ensuring transportation for students, the long-term solution must prioritize all students' education access over some students’ academic performance.
These patterns suggest that while existing research has informed efforts to reduce opportunity gaps for students with disabilities and support their parents within the current system, systemic change remains essential to remediate these gaps. Future research should compare similar states to one another and engage in longitudinal studies that track the effects of enrollment discrimination on students with disabilities over time. Ultimately, future market-based education policy must account for the students of disabilities and their families who are disadvantaged by these schools, as well as the broader consequences of exclusion, unequal access, and the prioritization of short-term academic gains over equitable education for all.
Market-based, neoliberal education reforms have commodified students in a way that moves the symbolic educational goal post from access to performance. Because of this shift, students with disabilities do not have the support to succeed in charter or private environments. These researched patterns necessitate a consideration of the standardized system of success the education system relies on. If public education is meant to serve all students, we must redefine success beyond narrow metrics and ensure that students with disabilities are given access, support, and opportunity to succeed.