Across the south and elsewhere, charters are turning into a force for resegregation–not only by race but by language, class, and disability. They are the ultimate weapon today for those who hope to roll back the Brown decision.
In Tennesssee, Chris Barbic said that diversity was not his problem. If society is segregated, there is nothing he can do to change it.
That is shirking responsibility. Society segregated people by race and class, and one if the responsibilities of PUBLIC schools is to overcome those divisions and create citizens who know how to live together as equals.
But as Barbic reminds us, that’s not the job of charters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There have also been posts on this blog arguing hat it is the responsibility of PUBLIC schools to reinforce neighborhood cohesion. Given the SES segregation of residential housing, it would seem that these two responsibilities often conflict with each other. Which should win out?
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Indeed. Is there a public school superintendent or leader who has said “racial segregation is everyone’s problem, even my low/no minority district’s, and here is what I’m doing to fix it?” In a similar vein, have there ever been well-integrated traditional public schools in the city of Memphis or state of Tennessee?
FWIW, I can think of two Ravitch honor roll educators who’ve acknowledged the harm posed by residential segregation, and the tight relationship between residential segregation and school segregation, but neither believed the traditional school district could or should act to change that dynamic. I disagree; I don’t think we should confuse a lack of political willpower for impossibility.
Anything that reinforces our society’s stark racial segregation should be avoided. However, I will take the crying foul about charters a lot more seriously once traditional public districts do something–anything!–to work toward a solution.
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I suppose that is true in most cases but I teach in a traditional public high school that has high levels of cultural, racial and economic diversity. No single ethnicity has a majority percentage in our school (over 50%). We have kids in cheap apartments and kids in $400,000 homes attending our school.
We survey as many kids as we can track down five years after graduation on a variety of issues. One question that requires a written response asks students to identify the greatest benefits of attending our school. One of the most common answers: exposure to people of differing backgrounds and the ways in which it has allowed them to understand others in their post-high school lives.
By the way, I could turn your argument on its head a bit. Since charters are not tied to zip code, wouldn’t they have a greater ability to provide diversity than a neighborhood school?
Charter ability to semi-choose its students leads to such winnowing. For example, it’s well-known that a nearby charter is basically a school for kids whose parents attend a megachurch. In fact, the parents of these kids brag about it. Seems charters choose not to integrate on some occasions. Public schools sometimes don’t get that choice.
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” Since charters are not tied to zip code, wouldn’t they have a greater ability to provide diversity than a neighborhood school?”
That was one of the main original selling points of charters – kids wouldn’t be “trapped” in “failing schools” because of their “zip code”.
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Your school sounds like a terrific place, and I’m not at all surprised by the value survey respondents placed on that exposure. Honestly, I think that relatively well-off segregated districts will eventually begin to take steps toward integration for precisely this reason–their kids are at a growing competitive disadvantage when it comes to this exposure.
I live in New York City, where charters are usually (not always) in overwhelmingly poor minority neighborhoods and attended (not always) by poor minority students. Hypersegregation here tends to be extreme between neighborhoods and (especially) between cities and nearby suburbs, and it’s hard to see how charters could possibly make that any worse.
I’m aware that there places where the charter/district dynamic is different, and certainly that even an open and transparent lottery process skims off dysfunctional families. I don’t have a great answer to this, other than pure sunlight, but I’ll point out the obvious, which is that lotteries don’t skim anywhere near as much as the cost (inflated by exclusionary zoning laws) of real estate does.
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A lot of ed reform is incoherent to me. It doesn’t hang together. The goals a lot of times seem to be conflicting.
He says over and over again “school reflect the communities they serve” and compares charter schools to district schools, but that isn’t what we were sold. In fact, we were sold the idea that charters weren’t tied to “zip code” so would have a broader mix of students. Indeed, that was supposed to be one of the major benefits of having two school systems.
I suppose the operating assumption was they wouldn’t need any legal duty or regulations around diversity because markets would take care of it. Now that markets aren’t taking care of it, ed reformers don’t have a response other than to point to the district schools and say charters can’t be “blamed”.
But it isn’t really “blame”. Again, we were sold the idea that getting rid of “zip codes” would solve the problem- markets would take care of it. Now that markets aren’t taking care of it, how do ed reformers plan to mitigate or correct this situation? Pointing to district schools isn’t a response, because then why have two systems?
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“I suppose the operating assumption was they wouldn’t need any legal duty or regulations around diversity because markets would take care of it.”
It amazes me that people can still believe that. (Or do they really know better, but they keep peddling it because they think it sounds good?) How many times does history need to teach us something before we start to understand it?
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I was reading about the charter schools that is opening in a gated community yesterday. They ran up against the problem of claiming to be a public school and not having a way to get kids from the surrounding community to and from the school. Obviously they can’t claim to be a public school if they set it up so only children in the development can attend.
Car pools is the solution. Every public school superintendent in the country must guffaw at this. Why do they think public school systems have elaborate transportation systems? It’s because they’re PUBLIC schools. They have to get ALL the kids to school. We didn’t set these up because we love regulation and wanted to complicate matters. We put it in the Ohio code because we’re PUBLIC schools. We have a legal duty.
“Car pools! Why didn’t we think of that!”
I’m going to bring it up at the next school board meeting. We’ll save a TON on transportation costs with this “free market car pool” idea they’ve come up with!
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Helped along by the educational policies of our first black president!
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Ironic
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Very sad and disappointing.
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Honestly, I see a lot of arrogance in this. “Schools reflect the communities they serve”. Obviously. Which is why we had huge legal battles and a 150 year long effort and resulting elaborate regulatory schemes to mitigate that.
These problems are really, really difficult. That’s why we’ve struggled with them for 150 years. If they could have been solved by “markets” and tossing out some dismissive phrase about “zip codes” I think the really smart and well-intentioned people who have struggled with this for 150 years might have grabbed that easy fix long ago, don’t you think?
Charter schools were supposed to be a de-regulatory route to get to the same place that district schools are mandated to work towards. They can’t now point to district schools and say “they haven’t fixed this either!” Yeah, well, that’s why we supposedly created the charter system.
I don’t think it will matter, though. Once you commit to “markets are the solution” the response to a failure is always “markets weren’t free ENOUGH or it would have worked”.
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“I suppose the operating assumption was they wouldn’t need any legal duty or regulations around diversity because markets would take care of it.”
People espousing market dogma fail to take into account that public schools are part of a complex system. We can’t have millions of people doing things randomly – that’s 17th century thinking. Power abhors a vacuum and will replace itself with bad actors or indifferent billionaires. Do they want Google or Bank of America to run everything?
Or decisions by bureaucrats looking at spreadsheets? Oh, wait, that IS what they want.
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It’s funny, too, because the “zip code” response by ed reformers only works in urban and suburban settings.
I’m in a rural district that is not ethnically or racially diverse but is HUGELY economically diverse. We have the entire economic spectrum in one school district, and they all go to school together.
I know they’re moving into rural areas to “help” us (unasked, I might add-I didn’t know we needed Bill Gates’ help) and I wonder how they justify ending the jurisdictional aspects of public schools in districts like mine. They wouldn’t be “fixing” any problem. In fact, they’re much more likely to set up an alternate charter system that is LESS economically diverse, wealthier students in charters, thru self-selection.
That would actively harm my public school system. It would make it less equitable.
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I keep wondering what’s the back-up plan? If we get rid of public schools like the NO recovery district has done and Philadelphia, Newark, Chicago and Detroit are doing, and this bold experiment in free markets crashes and burns, what do we do then?
What if the net effect is less equity? Do we start from scratch and rebuild a public school system that took 150 years to create?
I just see this as incredibly reckless. I don’t understand throwing away public schools, as if they have no value at all.
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That is exactly where my head starts spinning too. I understand greed. I understand people not caring about resegregating and children from poverty or English Language learners or special education. But where is everyone they do not want with them in their gated communities and elite private schools supposed to go if there are no public schools? Do they really the think the for profit charters will fill in the holes? Free market will ride in a save society? Does anyone really believe this is true if there is no money to be made? I am not a huge fan of federally run programs, nor am I enjoying states who are ransacking their education budgets to pay their corporate interest supporters. But to put everyone in jail costs money too. Wait I forgot- those are now becoming privatized too.
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What if the net effect is less equity?
It appears to me that this is the intention.
Many politicians are cashing in own this financial boomlet–Neil and Jeb Bush, former WI Governor Tommy Thompson, former CO Governor Roy Romer, etc.
It appears to me that ‘quality’ education for the masses is not a high priority for Mr. Duncan–regardless of his rhetoric.
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The future of education under the reformers and corporate education: Every child in America has a right to a free education. Whether they take advantage of it or not is up to them. If people don’t want to go to school, that is their choice. We will educate those that want it. No one will be forced to go to school. We only want those who want an education.
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And those that don’t will…….?????
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And along the way we’ll do our best to convince as many of those poor and minority kids that they don’t want an education. We’ll drill them over and over and over again with meaningless busywork, we’ll deny them anything worth learning like music, art, literature, science, civics, language, etc, we’ll abuse and demean them with “no excuses” “discipline”, and then when they drop out and end up in the criminal justice system, we’ll tell them that it was all their own fault.
Meanwhile, we’ll encourage affluent white kids to love learning by allowing them to learn at their own pace and in depth through projects, field trips and other authentic experiences. We’ll discipline them through whole-child, developmentally appropriate social-emotional understanding. We’ll support and guide them every step of the way and give them everything they could possibly need to succeed, and then when they get rich stealing other people’s money we’ll tell them that they earned it all on their own and they don’t owe anything to anybody.
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Well said Dienne. And sadly that is what it looks like out in the schools now.
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Dienne: you are describing in plain and simple words what is happening today.
This is the result of taking the “public” out of the term “public education,” of treating parents as consumers and students as end products and teachers & paraprofessionals as devalued and low paid education delivery specialists, of narrowing teaching and learning to preparing people for the McJobs of the future, of emphasizing drill-and-kill micromanaged rote instruction that emphasizes docility, obedience and conformity…
You get my point. But a crucial caveat you made: the education the leading charterites/privatizers and their cronies ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN has been, is, and will be qualitatively different.
Now we can understand why the self-styled “education reformers” hold themselves accountable but not responsible: when it comes to $tudent $ucce$$, the data points just keeping adding up, making more and more ₵ent¢ all the time; when it come to segregation and isolation by class, race/ethnicity, religious belief, etc., and the rigid caste-like system it reflects and reinforces, they are not responsible because “that’s what the customer wants.”
The owner of this blog and a few of the commenters here are quite right to wonder out loud when the “segregation academies” of yesteryear and the thinking [I use the word loosely] behind them suddenly became popular again.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Diverse societies tend to be low trust and gridlocked by innumerable competing groups. That is their condition when things are going well. When things are not going so well you get situations like present day Syria or Libya or the former Yugoslavia back in the early nineties.
A place like Northern Ireland is actually pretty successful as a multicutural society. There have only been a few thousand people killed in the troubles over the last few decades.
We need more diversity like we need a hole in the head.
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It is not diversity causing the strife, it is the inequities.
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Right, which is why we should kill all the Jews as quickly as possible – the racial purity of our nation is at stake.
Oh, wait, that was tried once. Didn’t work out so well. Turns out homogeneity isn’t such a good thing either.
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I understand the comment. The school I teach in is 80+% Hispanic and low-income. That’s not going to change. But the funding should. Don’t ask me to improve test scores but refuse to flood these schools with free books…
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Let me see…He said good charters are segregated…So that means that bad charters…No, he didn’t mean that, did he???
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Janna & Dienne – Relatively homogeneous societies like those in Scandanavia or Japan are generally fairly peaceful. A place like the former Yugoslavia was peaceful as long as it was ruled by an iron fist. As soon as that started to end all hell broke loose. Now that the former Yugoslavia has been divided in much smaller and more ethnically homogeneous countries there is much less violence.
Some years ago I did a little research exercise for myself involving going through the BBC website and noting which of the stories there involved to some extent conflicts between differenet human groups. I found that almost all of them did. I even came across an ethnic conflict I hadn’t known about. Two Melanesian tribes living on the island of Guadacanal were fighting one another.
Dienne – The Halocaust is of course a striking example of the horrors of ethnic conflict. Jews have lived among Europeans for almost two thousand years and during that time there have been thousands of instances of bloody conflict and continuous tension and mistrust. Putting Jews and Europeans together hasn’t worked out that well.
History shows very clearly that ethnic conflict is both very common and potentially extremally dangerous. We are playing with dynamite.
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Our world is becoming smaller and more diverse each year. Educators and parents have to be part of the solution to intergroup strife. We cannot afford to keep our heads down. All major religions teach acceptance and tolerance. Atheists of good will realize this too.
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I hate to break it to you Jim. That ship has sailed. Our country is already diverse. So unless you are proposing we start shipping people out of the country we need to make sure we treat all groups well. I am am not disputing that groups that have one culture have less strife when things get rough, but it is a bit too late for us. America was founded on having immigrants as I recall. Even the founding fathers were immigrants. So unless you are a Native American this whole argument is a bit silly. We already tried the separate but equal. Did not work too well. Plus, today I am not sure how the lines would be divided. Many of us are multi-ethnic. So we should divide on socio-economics? We kind of already do that and it is not working well for many in the lower brackets.
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If you go back to the colonial and Revolutionary times,the Founding Fathers and their predecessors were worried about the poor. There were some pretty harsh laws then having to do with loitering and other infractions committed by the poor ( and certain groups of immigrants, e.g Germans, Irish). Some of the Constitution, such as the creation of the Senate and the Electoral College had to do with distrust of the masses. Remember, most of the leaders of that time were wealthy landowners so the laws were written with them in mind. Things haven’t changed that much, just greater gaps between have and have nots.
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Do you really think the gap between the haves and the have nots in colonial America was smaller than today?
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No, just that there are more billionaires!
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History shows that goodwill counts for very little. No doubt goodwill will solve the ethnic conflicts in Israel.
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Israel getting the hell out of the occupied territories would solve most of the “ethnic conflicts” in Israel.
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By the way, I find it difficult to characterize much of the Islamic religion today as teaching acceptance and tolerance.
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Do the teachings of Islamic religious leaders in Egypt today always suggest a great enthusiasm for “acceptance and tolerance”.
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A friend of mine from the Middle East once told me when we were looking at a TV picture
of a demonstaration in Syria a few years ago that one of the signs in Arabic read “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave”. No doubt a little weak on “acceptance and tolerance”
Naivety does not change reality.
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The religion is only as good as its practioners. And, by the way, it’s naiveté
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There was a news story today of a massacre of Moslems by Buddhists in Burma. No Charlotte it is emphatically not the case that all religions of the world teach “acceptance and toerance”.
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Oh well, if “acceptance and tolerance” don’t work we can always try drone-guided bombs. Oh yes, we already have. .
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Barbic: Barbaric. Nuff Sed.
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Dienne – Whether it’s a good idea or not for Israel to evacuate the occupied territories the population of Israel even within the pre-1967 borders has quite enough diversity to generate enormous ethnic conflict now and in the future.
Charlotte – “Naivete” and “naivety” are both considered acceptable. Being a native speaker of English I find the latter more natural.
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Thank you. You taught me something new!
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