The superintendent of a small district in Arkansas has advice for Mississippi leaders who are impressed with the charter idea.
She says, yes, she admires charters.
Yes, they can work very well.
But wait.
The charters demand parental involvement and good behavior.
They can kick out the kids who don’t comply, and those kids return to the public schools.
The question for Mississippi and other states that once ran a dual school system for white and black children:
Are we re-creating a dual school system, one for the motivated, another for the rest?
The unasked question: Will the federal courts allow the re-emergence of segregation under the guise of “choice”?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Black children are not necessarily unmotivated. “Choice” is not by definition racist.
The UCLA Project on Civil Rights has reports establishing that charters are more racially segregated than the districts in which they are located. Nothing in the past said or implied that black children are unmotivated. The new segregation will divide by class, not race. OK with that?
It’s not that hard for most people to say they’re not ok with segregation, but it’s more complicated when what’s at stake is the education of your own children. Would you rather have your children attend a school with students who were more motivated rather than less motivated, where there was more rather than less parental involvement, where there was better rather than worse student behavior?
And there is already segregation under the guise of “choice.” See, e.g., the parents who “choose” to send their kids to private school in NYC for $40,000 per year. The only question is which parents, and how many of them, get to choose.
Not to mention the segregation in housing. Geographically based school admissions reinforce that segregation in schools.
Yes, we are now re-creating a dual system of education. We know how it will end because it’s been done in other countries: the poor, children of color, and the disabled will be segregated in schools that must take everyone. At the beginning of the movie “To Sir With Love,” which takes place in London, the principal of a downtrodden school says “We get the kids no one else wants.”
Let’s hope parents, concerned citizens and civil rights organizations catch on before more harm is done to our public schools, which rightly belong to the American people.
Please read this and all the comments. This is not a parody:
The Silent Treatment: A Day in the Life of a Student in ‘No Excuses’ Land:
http://edushyster.com/?p=1425
Charter schools are a big joke on us. They are not “Real Public Schools.” They are private institutions run for profit and power and that is it. Their performance nationwide as shown in the Stanford Study and others is not very good. If we use the “Correction Factor” to take into account charter schools not having to follow most ed code and local regulations, cherry picking parents and students, not dealing with behavioral problems, ESL and special education they really do not do so good. This “Correction Factor” is the only way to correct for a heads up view of their performance or lack of it. When a charter school does not like a student or parent they are eliminated. What does this have to do with “Public?”
One of the oldest charter schools Vaughn Street Learning Center run by Yvonne Chan for about 18 years now and who was also on the California State Board of Education has an API score of only 710 and increased by only 20 points a year for the last 10 years. This stinks. Compton elementary schools have API scores of from 800-900 and Inglewood, which was just taken over by the State of California, has elementary API scores of about 800 without charter schools. Any time you can pick and choose and throw out what you do not want you would expect very high scores and yet that is not generally so. Why are we continuing with these failed systems.
The only reason why the charters may kick out the students who “don’t comply,” is because there are waiting lists–sometimes 2 years long. And the reason why they have waiting lists is because charter schools operate in small buildings.
There are no waiting lists to get into “regular” public schools because they are usually held in very large buildings and no one is all that excited to be a part of that mediocrity.
Drank the Kool-aid, did you? Have you read up on the track record of these miracle schools? If you had, you would have known that most do not perform any better than their public counterparts. As to mediocrity, I suggest you spend more time in a public school before you make such denigrating and generalized assumptions.
But I thought charters were taking the best students, had more parental involvement, and are pulling out middle clas kids while leaving working class kids behind. And it’s Gospel that poverty is the biggest cause of poor performance. So the charters must be better, no?
Again, have you read the track record of charter schools? Do you know how long teachers last in charter schools? By the way, I know of a few instances where people have lied about their address to get their children into my school system.
There are no waiting lists to get into (actual, real) public schools because BY LAW public schools must accept ALL school-aged children within their jurisdictional area. No one can be turned away, even if they present singificant challenges to the teaching staff.
Also, I live in a very well-regarded school district. Even during the worse of the financial/housing crisis, houses on the market in my neighborhood sold fairly quickly and for decent prices, and that was because families ARE “excited” to have their children attend our public schools.
There are many school districts like mine all across the US. True, they are usually in the suburbs; it’s also true that their ratings and student achievement match those of any other industrialized nation.
There’s a saying, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.” You might want to adopt that as your watchword.
Plenty of actual, real public schools with waiting lists in NYC, unfortunately.
Then I stand somewhat corrected — just curious, would these waiting lists be the result of the changes brought by mayoral control?
Still, every child in NYC is entitled to a seat in a public school classroom within the district and the same cannot be said of seats in charters. Maybe the situation in NYC is analogous to to what we parents of special needs children are often told, that when the law says our children are entitled to “an appropriate education,” that can be translated to, You don’t get a Cadillac, you get a Chevy.
Of course in an ironic way, your point that there are waiting lists for some NYC public schools refutes Lyn’s contention that no one waits to get into any public school as much as my point that public schools must take all comers.
Barbara — no, this was around before Bloomberg. It’s gotten worse on his watch, but that’s mainly due to the general increased obsession with getting your kid into Yale pursuant a plan that starts at age 3.
Thanks
Unfortunately, in Mississippi there already (still) is a dual school system. This was posted at The Atlantic yesterday, talking about the town where I live:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/
I’m a MIssissippi Delta resident and hesitantly supportive of charters in the state. They certainly aren’t going to fix all of our problems here, but if families had the option to send their students to a strong school, that can’t hurt. I am absolutely convinced that charter school, if well run, would quickly become the most integrated school in the region. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that KIPP-Delta is more diverse than the public school district in Helena-West Helena, AR – though Arkansas schools are in general more integrated than Mississippi schools.
The UCLA Project on Civil Rights reported in September 2012 that charter schools are more segregated than the districts in which they are located.
The Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School found that charters in the Twin Cities were intensely segregated: many schools were nearly all of one group: Black, white, Hispanic, Hmong, Somalian, Native America.
John Hechinger of Bloomberg.com visited the Twin Cities and wrote an article saying that it was reminiscent of the era before the Brown decision of 1954.
So, no, don’t expect to see integrated charters.
The charter that the Mississippi delegation visited In Helena, Arkansas, is 95% black.
Hard to track down the statistics, but from what I can find the public Helena-West Helena SD is just about 95%, as well: http://febp.newamerica.net/k12/AR/507680
I would expect you, Diane, to recognize that local context matters. The rural Delta is not the Twin Cities.
Schools simply cannot get more segregated than Gentry High School, and many places in Mississippi; here it already–and always has–looked like 1954. Read the Atlantic piece. It’s anecdotal evidence, but I know a number of white families who would choose to stay in the Delta if there were a charter school where they could send their kids. As it is, many will move away when their children get to school age, because the public schools are not performing, and sending their kids to white academies feels morally unacceptable.
As I said, I’m wary of charters, wary especially of the way they can strip away local voice in schools, but I’m equally wary of blanket claims and false comparisons from either side of this argument.