A Comparative Analysis of Sub Populations between Charter and Traditional Public Schools

There is doubt as to the ability of charter schools to be the overall solution to education reform, and whether charter schools are comparable side by side with traditional public schools. Charter schools are often accused of taking the highest performing students and eliminating lower performing groups of students. This study compared students labeled under four key sub populations of Special Education (SPED), English Language Learners (ELL), Mobility (MO), and Disciplinary Placements (DP) to determine if there were significant differences in the proportions of these students between traditional schools and charter schools. Data was drawn from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) publicly available data maintained for each campus and district for archival purposes when determining academic yearly progress. Two campuses were selected from each of three metropolitan statistical areas in Texas; Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. A chi square analysis showed that traditional public schools had a statistically, and significantly larger proportion of these sub populations when compared to the charter school counterparts in the same area. The implications are that there may be discrepancies or disqualifiers when attempting to do side by side comparisons of traditional public schools and public charter schools. Education stakeholders could increase the levels of understandings by comparing multiple districts, multiple states, and performing other statistical analyses such as cause and effect and correlations on academic scores in addition to the reported sub groups.