Do Charter Schools Hamper Educating Our English Language Learner Students?
Stung by loss of funding, Syracuse district wants to halt charter school expansion
Updated Feb 14; Posted Feb 14
By James T. Mulder jmulder@syracuse.com,
syracuse.com
An article I read this week was interesting as it relates to charter school funding and how whether financing these schools are “hampering efforts to improve city schools” in Syracuse. As a result, the district is asking the state to temporarily ban additional charter schools in Syracuse at the next city school board meeting. 
Other reasons given are that the charter schools
enroll smaller percentages of students with disabilities and English Language Learner students. State data show percentages given as 20 percent of the district's students have disabilities and 18 percent are English language learners whereas charter schools’ comparison of 8 percent of students have disabilities and 4 percent are English language learners.
So maybe I'm not exactly sure how this works, but it seems to me that charter schools should have the same student demographics ratio that a regular public school in the same area has. I found this to be a very interesting article, and to answer your title question, Yes, I think in this case that charter schools are indeed hampering the ELL students in Syracuse because the charter schools are draining the funding from the public schools that do serve ELLs. What we must seriously consider is if this is a snapshot of what is happening in other cities, or is it only Syracuse?
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