Although charter schools are required to serve high-needs students at the same rate as most district schools, the truth is they don’t. A hard look at the data shows they aren’t even close.

Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo has tacitly acknowledged that charters take the easier-to-educate students when he called for “anti-creaming” measures in his State of the State address on Jan. 21. The UFT has produced detailed evidence demonstrating shockingly wide gaps between charters and the district schools in their neighborhoods.

In 23 of the 25 New York City school districts that contain elementary or K–8 charters, charters serve significantly fewer students in every need category — English language learners, special education students, students in self-contained classrooms and students living in temporary housing — than do district schools.

When charters assert that they outperform district schools, they are basing their claims on very different students.

Even in charter and district schools that share the same building, charters take far fewer of the most challenging pupils. Manhattan’s PS 30 and Harlem Success Academy Charter 2, which share the same building in Manhattan’s District 5, is a case in point [see chart]. Citywide, public schools that are co-located with charter schools serve three times the rate of students in temporary housing and double the rate of English language learners.

Charter boosters make a civil rights claim to be educating children in poverty. Charter schools do serve many reduced-price lunch students, those whose family income is between about $24,000 and $43,000. But once the UFT compared only free-lunch students, whose family income tops out at $23,850, charters serve about 5 percent fewer children in the deeper-poverty category.

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A needs index

Putting the various demographic factors together, including free-lunch eligibility, the UFT created a needs “index” in order to get a single data point for each school. The index is based on the peer index for elementary and K–8 schools from the School Progress Reports, updated to include newly available information about high-need special education.

Charts for each district line up schools by their needs index number from highest to lowest and show that charters consistently serve children at the low-needs end of the spectrum. Of all 98 elementary and K–8 charters in 25 districts, three-quarters of them fell below their district average in terms of student need.

In District 5 in Harlem, none of the highest-needs schools were charters while nine of the 10 lowest-needs schools were. Among District 7’s 24 schools in the South Bronx, the six lowest-needs schools were all charters while the 13 highest-needs schools were all district schools. An almost identical pattern holds for District 9 in the Bronx and for Districts 16, 19 and 23 in central Brooklyn.

Finally, the UFT looked at suspension rates, using state data reports that count only out-of-school suspensions. In almost every district, students are suspended at far higher rates in charter schools than in district schools.

In District 3 in Manhattan, charters on average suspend 19 percent of students compared with just 1 percent in district schools. The seven charters in District 17 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, suspend 20 percent of students compared with a district average of 2 percent.

To read the reports, go to www.uft.org/where-we-stand/reports.