Charter Schools' Discipline Policies Face Scrutiny

Students in Monica Farren's 6th grade English class read outside during a poetry exercise at Albert Einstein Academy Charter Middle School in San Diego.
—Sandy Huffaker for Education Week

Some major urban districts move to create uniform standards for expulsions

As the number of charter schools continues to grow, one facet of their autonomy—the ability to set and enforce independent disciplinary standards—has raised difficult questions about whether those schools are pushing out students who pose behavior or academic challenges and how their policies affect regular public schools.

Research on the issue is sparse, and data on expulsions and disciplinary incidents at charter schools paint a nuanced picture nationwide.

A new Education Week analysis of 2009-10 federal data collected by the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights, for example, shows that the expulsion rate for charter schools was no higher than for regular public schools, and that the regular schools had a...

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Correction: 
An earlier version of this story included the wrong first name for Adele Fabrikant.

A previous version of this story had incorrect information in a photo caption.

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