The Game of Telephone in Charter School Enrollment

A school posts a cheerful enrollment graphic. It says that families can learn more, schedule a tour, and begin a new educational experience. Nothing about the post appears malicious. Yet a parent could reasonably read it as saying that a tour is part of the admissions process, or that the school decides whether the family is a good fit.

That small ambiguity is worth noticing. Public charter school access is often weakened not by one dramatic act of discrimination, but by a chain of ordinary decisions that gradually become institutional practice.

I was reminded of this recently when I came across a school enrollment post that appeared to make an optional tour sound like part of the enrollment process. I raised the question with a supportive authorizer, who responded thoughtfully. Nothing about the exchange suggested bad faith. It was a useful reminder that even after years of clearer law and policy, this work is never finished.

The problem is often inherited, not invented

A principal arrives from another organization with a familiar enrollment process. An office manager copies language from an old handbook. A staff member turns that language into a flyer or social-media post. A new school borrows the form from an established school. A district or sponsor once gave advice that was incomplete, overbroad, or simply wrong. Over time, nobody can identify the original source, but everyone knows that this is how enrollment is done.

That is the game of telephone. The original instruction may have been lawful in a narrow context, misunderstood by the next person, and transformed by the third person into a requirement. The resulting practice can look official even when it has no clear basis in law or policy.

The people implementing these practices are often trusted, capable school generalists. Some are parents of students at the school and view it as a transformative opportunity for children from their community. They are deeply committed and they go above and beyond: answering phones, responding to parents, processing records, tracking attendance, coordinating transportation, supporting the principal, and handling whatever crisis arrived that morning. They wear many hats, but they should not be expected to call a lawyer or conduct a deep dive into charter law every time they create a Canva graphic.

Teach the work, not just the rules

KIPP DC CEO Shannon Hodge made a related point in a 2026 CharterFolk conversation with Jed Wallace. She described using interactive “Charter 101” and “The Truth About Charters” sessions during pre-opening professional development to help staff understand that charter schools are public schools, how the movement began, what is at stake, and the bargain of accountability in exchange for flexibility. She also emphasized the importance of helping staff explain that work to their neighbors, friends, and families.

That is not separate from enrollment access. It is part of the same infrastructure. Staff need to understand not only that charter schools are public, but what that means in practice: who may apply, how lotteries work, which activities are optional, what schools may ask families to provide, and how the school serves students with disabilities and other students protected by law.

When leaders do not teach those things intentionally, people fill the gaps with fragments. A teacher repeats something heard at a previous school. An office staff member relies on an old template. A family hears a confident answer from someone who works at the school and assumes it must be official. The telephone carries the message outward, and an assumption slowly acquires the force of policy.

Conversely, the telephone can carry accurate understanding. When staff are prepared to explain the school’s public obligations and distinctive mission in ordinary conversation, they become a distributed source of clarity rather than another source of confusion.

Intent matters, but impact matters more

A school may intend a tour to be an optional opportunity for families to understand an unusual educational model. A parent may experience the same language as a prerequisite. A school may intend a request for information to support planning. A family may experience it as a test of whether the school wants its child.

That gap between intent and experience is where access problems grow. The question is not only whether a school formally excludes a student. It is also whether its communications, forms, meetings, fees, and routines make some families less likely to apply, less likely to complete the process, or less likely to believe that the school is really open to them.

What research and oversight have taught us

Civil-rights reviews of charter-school enrollment materials have found recurring concerns involving fees, volunteer requirements, academic expectations, discipline history, special education, language access, and other practices that can discourage or exclude students. Follow-up work in other jurisdictions has shown that the pattern is not confined to one state or one kind of school. Those findings do not mean that every school using similar language is acting in bad faith. They do mean that relying on good intentions and informal norms is not enough.

But this is not an abstract concern for me. It is part of why I was drawn to the charter-school movement in the first place. As an undergraduate from modest means, I worked in university dining halls, where I met parents who would do almost anything to get their children out of low-performing schools. I understood the movement’s appeal as a promise that public education could change the life trajectories of children whom existing systems had too often underserved or dismissed: children of color, children from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners, and many others.

One of the movement’s central commitments was that we would serve all kids (and we would not allow adults to make excuses based on children’s intrinsic characteristics). That was never a nice to have for me. It was the North Star. It was the moral premise that made the work worth doing in the first place. In some early charter states, including Arizona and Nevada, policymakers initially believed that simple first come, first served enrollment and limited notice periods were sufficient to produce open access. Over time, many states and operators learned that broad notice, meaningful outreach, and fair lotteries were necessary to reduce the role of happenstance and adult discretion. But not every authorizer, operator, or lawyer received (or absorbed) the memo.

That promise continues to drive my work. When a family is discouraged from applying, asked to complete an unnecessary step, or left to wonder whether a school is really open to their child, the problem is not merely a technical defect in a flyer or enrollment procedure. It is a failure to live up to what public charter schools said they would be. I take that personally. I do so not because every mistake reflects bad faith, but because the consequences fall on families who have already been asked to navigate too many closed doors and because those behaviors undermine the moral foundations of this movement. If we believe that schools can change children’s lives, then making access genuinely open and understandable is not optional. It is part of the work itself.

Some things have improved since the first wave of civil rights reports. States, authorizers, and charter support organizations have clarified rules, created complaint mechanisms, and built more explicit monitoring tools. But that is not the same as proving that the underlying problem has disappeared. An analysis of the 2020 to 2021 federal Civil Rights Data Collection found a gap in the share of students identified as having disabilities: 11.5 percent in charter schools compared with 14.1 percent in traditional public schools. California guidance also makes clear that charter schools may not discourage students from enrolling based on disability or other protected characteristics. These figures do not prove that a communications error caused the difference. They do show why formal rules and real access must continue to be examined together.

Some authorizers and states have responded by looking beyond formal compliance. Nevada’s enrollment guardrails, for example, address interviews, informational meetings, fees, records, and other practices that can become barriers. My experience in Nevada also taught me why voluntary guidance cannot always carry the entire burden. Some district sponsors were telling schools that they could or should exclude students, including students with disabilities. The more complicated problem is legal siloing. A lawyer may be highly competent in contracts, governance, procurement, employment, tax, or general nonprofit matters and still not routinely integrate charter-school enrollment law with civil-rights, disability, language-access, and public-school obligations. Advice that is sound within one lane can still miss an important intersection. In some cases, counsel may tell a school that if the law does not expressly prohibit a practice, the school may do it. The resulting problem is not necessarily bad faith by the school. It is a failure to recognize that public-school obligations often include affirmative duties that cannot be reduced to a list of explicit prohibitions. That logic turns statutory silence into permission and creates pressure to write into regulation what should have been obvious from the underlying public-school obligation. DC PCSB has also used equity-oriented review to examine how schools serve students and families. These tools can be perceived as gotcha exercises if they are introduced only as enforcement mechanisms. Used well, they are learning tools that help schools see patterns that are invisible from inside their own routines. The answer is not to regulate every ambiguity. It is to combine clear law, good support, and proportionate oversight.

Who should do the work?

No single institution needs to own all of this work. A state charter association, trusted charter-support organization, or vendor may be best placed to develop and maintain state-aware tools. A CMO may adapt them across its schools. Individual schools should own their final communications and ensure that they fit their programs and communities. An authorizer may clarify applicable legal and policy expectations, point schools toward credible resources, and notice patterns that merit attention. It should be cautious about prescribing copy or approving a particular message, because context matters and no sample sentence can substitute for judgment. That distinction matters because authorizer-school relationships are not always as collegial as they could be. Some carry a legacy of hostile authorizing. Others are recovering from a period of lax expectations. Still others are strained by structural ambiguity or simple misunderstanding. In those settings, a new regulation, required report, or authorizer checklist can be experienced as another reduction in autonomy, even when intended as a guardrail. Sector-wide support may sometimes be better positioned to build capability without turning every ambiguity into a compliance event. Autonomy and guardrails are not opposites: the aim is to establish a clear floor while giving schools the tools and trust to do their best work.

A small intervention can prevent a large problem

A collegial note from a trusted partner can sometimes solve the problem before it becomes a policy dispute. The most productive response may be a quick clarification: tours are welcome but optional; information sessions do not affect admission; the school does not screen for fit; and enrollment decisions follow the applicable lottery and preference rules.

That kind of intervention is not an accusation. It is institutional maintenance. It protects families from misunderstanding, protects school staff from inadvertently creating a barrier, and protects the charter sector from giving a hostile legislator or superintendent an easy example to use against it. A CMO can build the same protection into its shared systems while preserving appropriate school-level responsibility. A charter association or support organization can make the tools available across schools without placing every clarification inside a regulatory relationship.

The practical lesson

Charter schools need access infrastructure just as they need financial controls, special education systems, and data protocols. The goal is not to make every school hire a lawyer for every Facebook post. The goal is to make the right thing easy for the person who is doing the work.

A good checklist, a small library of approved language, periodic access reviews, and carefully bounded technology could prevent many problems before they become complaints, investigations, or litigation. Public education deserves that level of operational care, especially when the promise of choice depends on families believing that the choice is genuinely open to them.

Companion documents

Charter-School Enrollment Communications Checklist

Building Access Infrastructure for Public Charter Schools: Building Access Infrastructure for Public Charter Schools

Charter Enrollment Access Review: Charter Enrollment Access Review

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