This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania charter school officials recently backed away from the claim that there are 40,000 students on charter waiting lists in Philadelphia, acknowledging that nobody knows the actual number. Many students’ names may appear on the waiting lists for multiple schools, and names may linger on lists even when students are happily enrolled somewhere else.
But what about the size of waiting lists at individual charter schools? Are those meaningful numbers?
Two Northwood Academy Charter students in April 2013 rallying in support of charter expansion. (Benjamin Herold/NewsWorks)
By state law, every Pennsylvania charter school that does not have enough seats for all applicants must keep a waiting list to draw from when openings occur.
Eleven Philadelphia charters say they have more than 1,000 students on their waiting lists, according to the Great Philly Schools website, which collects information about city schools. And 61 of the 72 non-Renaissance, brick-and-mortar charter school campuses that are listed separately on the Great Philly Schools website — 85 percent — have waiting lists. Of the 21 Renaissance school charters, former District schools that only admit children from a neighborhood catchment area, 13 of them, or 62 percent, have waiting lists.
Over the years, the lists have assumed a greater importance, far beyond their usefulness in admitting students as spots open up.
They are now a bragging point for many charters, used as an indication of their popularity. Take, for example, a statement from the website of the MaST Charter School that touts the accomplishments of CEO John Swoyer III. According to listings from the Great Philly Schools website, MaST, a K-12 school, has the largest waiting list of all Philadelphia charters.
"During his tenure as CEO, MaST has seen its wait list triple, growing to over 5,700 applications in three years," the website says.
The wording here points to one of the issues in using the term waiting list. Unlike colleges, which ask wait-listed students whether they want to continue to be considered for admission, charters commonly describe as a "waiting list" all students who applied but weren’t chosen in the lottery, regardless of whether they still want to attend the school.
For instance, the Russell Byers Charter School claims a waiting list of 1,597, the fifth-largest in the city. Its director of enrollment, Debbie Sperbeck, said that names are compiled during an application window that runs this year from Jan. 6 to Feb. 27. The names are then randomized, so that the order of application is not a factor, she said; the lottery is held in March.
All students not chosen in the lottery are put on the school’s waiting list. Sperbeck said that when vacancies come up during the school year, many of the students on the list have been selected by other charters or are no longer available for some other reason, so the school often goes through 20 to 30 names before it finds a student who ends up at the school.
Still, the widely used figure of 40,000 students on charter lists in Philadelphia continues to be cited by charter schools in hearings and in news releases as a sign of demand for their schools. This is so even though the source of the figure, the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, has discounted the number.
Kristen Forbriger, public affairs director for Philadelphia School Partnership, said in an interview that because there is no centralized, authoritative source for charter waiting lists, there will always be "a lot of questions about any figure." PSP raises money to give grants to high-quality schools in the city, operates the Great Philly Schools website, and has been a proponent of expanding “high-performing charters.”
To get some perspective on the number of applicants reflected in the Great Philly Schools waiting list total, she said, 8th-grade counselors often recommend that parents apply to at least five charters.
To compound the problem of wait-list accuracy, no outside organization monitors the lists to make sure schools are releasing bona fide numbers.
"There is no accountability — no systemic reporting process," said Kevin G. Welner, the director of the National Education Policy Center and co-author of a critique of charter wait lists.
"I don’t want to imply that most charter school operators are dishonest," he added. "But there certainly is an incentive to inflate numbers — to be `creative’ with them."
If charter waiting lists are being used to influence important decisions about what schools should be granted charters and how many new charters should open, Welner said, "we need a systematic, fair, and accountable way of producing them," such as having state education departments set rules and monitor them.
Many charters keep their lists for one year and then repopulate them after their annual school admissions selection day.
But there is some variation. The New Foundations Charter School, for example, keeps a multi-year list.
"Once you have submitted an application for your child, and if your child is put on the waiting list for that school year, they are automatically put into the lottery for the following year," the school’s website says. "There is no need to reapply. Every few years NFCS will mail a postcard asking if you would like to remain in our lottery and you must respond to remain active."
The Great Philly Schools website shows New Foundations with the third-largest waiting list in Philadelphia: 4,000 names each for its high school and its K-8 school. CEO Paul Stadelberger said in an interview that the school actually keeps a combined waiting list, which now has 7,197 students on it.
Stadelberger said that after this year, the school will start an annual waiting list; the School Reform Commission, as a condition of renewal, mandated that the list should be redone every year.
Though the use of these lists to claim that thousands of children are waiting to get into a particular charter school is questionable, there is no doubt that charter schools are a popular choice, especially as the regular public schools sink deeper into the ongoing financial crisis.
Since 2007, Philadelphia has approved only Renaissance charters — neighborhood schools that have been turned over to private operators. Some existing charters have also expanded. Despite the moratorium, the number of charter students has more than doubled since 2007-08, to more than 62,000 students (not counting cyber schools) — about a third of the District’s total enrollment.
MaST is not a typical charter, but its numbers serve as an example of the popularity of the most sought-after charters. With an enrollment of about 1,325, the school expects to receive between 6,500 and 7,000 valid applications this year, Swoyer said in a recent interview. It will probably have not much more than 125 vacancies to fill, he said. That’s comparable to the admissions rate of many selective colleges.
"We could fill our school many times over," Swoyer said. That’s why, he added, the school is seeking to open two more charters in the city.
Many selective District schools also get far more applications than are accepted. For instance, Central High School last year received 4,450 applications; its present 9th-grade class is just under 650 students. Masterman, which starts at 5th grade, only takes a handful of students from outside for its much smaller high school. Still, it got nearly 1,400 applications.
Said Swoyer: "There is a great demand for schools with a strong educational model, and we have a strong one."