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An increase of 4,337 students pushed enrollment to 28,206, nearly triple the number of students who were enrolled in the schools during the 2000-01 school year, the center said. Previously, the largest increase was during the 2004-05 school year, which saw an increase of 3,298 students from the year before.
“We have surveyed parents at a number of schools across the state, and people like the small class size and the individualized attention, and they feel that their kids are safe and the programs are distinctive,” explained Joe Nathan, the director of the center, which is part of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools run by parents and teachers that have greater autonomy than traditional public schools. They are meant to spur innovation, and some of them specialize in a particular language or the arts, or cater to new immigrant groups, such as the Hmong.
Minnesota has been a pioneer in the charter school movement — it passed the country’s first law to create such schools — and the state had 143 charter schools during the past school year, according to the center.
Since their inception, charter schools have been popular in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where low-income families or immigrant and refugee families with limited English speaking skills have felt underserved by traditional public schools.
But the Center for School Change said charter school enrollment is growing in suburban and rural areas, as well. In fact, if some far outer ring Twin Cities schools are counted — such as Forest Lake — then there are now more charter schools and charter school students in the suburbs than in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Nathan said.
Meanwhile, since the 2001-02 school year, the number of students attending traditional public schools in Minnesota has declined from 831,535 to 796,757, a drop of about 4.2 percent. Traditional schools lose thousands of dollars for each student that opts for a charter school, and officials have questioned the mission of the alternative schools.
Tom Dooher, president of Education Minnesota, the teachers union, said charter schools have gone beyond their original intent of being “an incubator of ideas” and are becoming “niche schools” for specific cultures and languages.
“Public schools are supposed to be the great equalizer that brings people together,” he said.
He added: “We’re not afraid of choice and we know parents want that. But we want to do it in a systematic way rather than through these small measures.”
Charlie Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, said the new numbers show him families like the choices and smaller schools that charters offer. But he also said public schools have been subjected “to an unfair and continuing barrage of criticism” because the federal No Child Left Behind law “puts schools in a much worse light than they really are.”
He also pointed out that some 96 percent of all public school students opt for traditional schools.
“We understand that the state made a decision to allow choice,” he said. “As school superintendents we’re accepting of that. We’re not very happy about that. And especially at a time when the enrollments across the state are declining, so there are fewer students to populate all of our schools.”
On the Net:
The Center for School Change: http://www.centerforschoolchange.org
