Can you imagine the NYT headline if top charters had a formal policy about not serving students in the bottom 10% of performance?
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On the substance of the issue, I’m sympathetic to Lebron’s approach. Serving students in the 10th-25th percentile well is both very hard and very important.
Also, starting without the hardest to reach kids helps reduce the risks of creating a new school.
I’ve seen new charter schools nearly collapse because of 5-10 kids who have severe mental health afflictions.
Of course, it’s not scalable for every school in a city to not serve the lowest performing 10% of students. And I also worry about segregating these students into separate schools.
But I think a reasonable policy would be to allow schools to get their footing and reach a bit of scale before having to build programs for the hardest to reach students.