Star Student Athlete: This Kid Has A 4.0 GPA And Golfs

Charter school lotteries are immensely important. They’re meant to be the process through which public schools and charter schools are placed in fair competition - the lotteries are supposed to ensure that the charter schools can’t get choosy with students in the way that private schools do. And some of the charter school research depends on these lotteries for their basic randomization processes, through which they supposedly derive evidence of charter school superiority. It’s absolutely essential to the whole system that charter school lotteries actually work, that every applying student has an exactly equal chance of being accepted to a given school than any other. (We will leave the inherent bias of having parents who care enough to sign a student up for a charter school lottery for another time.)

If you’d like a good summary of the great variability in charter school lottery systems (from a very pro-charter source), here’s a document from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Here’s the problem: we really don’t have anything like solid national understanding of what’s happening in these lotteries. There’s great variability from state to state - and, according to several people I talked to in the early stages of researching my book, within states - when it comes to who handles the lotteries and how the results are determined. As I understand it, it’s not unusual for charter schools to run the lotteries themselves. Which is crazy! These lotteries are an accountability mechanism. These charters are in competition with regular public schools for scarce public funds. They have every reason to bend the results in order to benefit themselves by selecting the easiest-to-educate students. And, indeed, there have been a number of scandals, such as when better than 250 California charter schools were found to be illegally manipulating their admissions practices. We know charters sometimes cheat. Shouldn’t there be a major public accounting of how their admissions systems work? And nobody should want such an investigation more than charter advocates. If you’re so sure your system works, you should want more daylight on how it functions!