Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Fairchild, Emily

Keywords

Charter Schools, Florida, Recruitment, Enrollment

Area of Concentration

Social Sciences

Abstract

Charter schools introduce market forces into public education by offering parents a choice of school options and, as a result, demanding that schools compete for students and funding. While this offers many caregivers a set of tuition-free options for their child’s education, the freedom of this choice has been called into question (Bartlett et al. 2002; Wells, Slayton, & Scott 2002). Because a number of factors limit some caregivers from choosing among schools, it has been suggested that charter schools may serve to segregate those empowered to choose and attend them (Lareau 2003; Wells et al. 2002). I identified charter schools’ recruitment and enrollment of students as central to this question, and interviewed key decision-makers at one charter school about how they made decisions surrounding recruitment and enrollment. I found that, within the degree of autonomy allotted to these schools, the market forces of supply and demand were key to understanding how thorough the charter school would be in meeting the needs of its current students, and in recruiting new students across diverse communities. Specifically, with a waiting list in almost every grade, the school I studied was able to market itself more narrowly— and more strategically— going into its second year. Likewise, the school’s charter agreement provided its governing board with measures through which to weed out certain students. These findings contribute to and elaborate upon the ways that market-based charter school reform might serve to segregate populations of students, and to isolate pools of resources within their communities.

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