While 95 percent of students will return to charter schools in the fall, as many as 37 percent of students left some schools during their inaugural year. The charter schools are paid for by tax dollars from students' public school districts. The schools are intended to spur competition and innovation in traditional public schools. Fourteen opened in September 1995 and nine more will open this year, and the Weld administration is pushing to eliminate a 25-school cap. About 3,000 students attended charters, with several thousand more expected to enter in the fall.
Students win admission to the schools through a lottery.
Critics, primarily teachers' unions and parents with children in public schools, argued early on that charter schools would attract white students in large numbers, and skim the smartest students and most motivated parents from public schools. The study debunks those predictions, showing that the schools had more than twice the number of minority and bilingual students as public schools. Both the Renaissance and the Atlantis Charter School in Fall River have three times as many low-income students as the public schools in each city. The survey showed that most students at charter schools were not academic standouts in public schools. At the Cape Code Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans, students had typically scored in the 84th percentile on the California Achievement Test.