Birds on the Brain

In New Orleans, where charter schools have the biggest presence of any major city, enrolling about 75% of all students, a group of special-ed parents and advocates, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination in 2010, based on complaints that several schools—charter and traditional—refused to enroll disabled students, kicked them out or neglected to provide proper services. The suit says that special-ed students made up 12.6% of the total population in non-charter schools, but only 7.8% of charter-school enrollment in the 2008-09 school year.