Charter Schools, Equity, and Student Enrollments

Abstract

For-profit educational management organizations (EMOs) are a growing phenomenon in public education, and they are an integral part of charter school reform in many states. Research suggests that charter schools operated by for-profit entities may take a more entrepreneurial approach when expanding their operations and thus may be more inclined to serve less disadvantaged and less costly students. In this article, we examine empirically whether charter schools are less likely to serve disadvantaged students by comparing the distribution of students across traditional public schools, nonprofit charter schools, and those managed by private companies. We base our analysis on data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ (NCES) Common Core Data (CCD), and we combine this data with information on the types of management organizations operating charter schools. Our results suggest that charter schools managed by EMOs draw students differently to their schools than those charter schools not managed by EMOs. They seem to seek out more Black students but are also focused on selecting fewer poor students than we see among regular public schools. When examining differences in the size of EMOs, we find that these effects appear most likely to occur among schools operated by large-sized EMOs.