It is clear that the issue of desegregation has fallen off the agenda of the nation and the U.S. Department of Education. Not even DOE’s Office of Civil Rights has shown much interest in the resegregation of our narion’s schools
However, the ACLU still remembers the Brown decision and the numerous federal court orders banning segregated schools.
The ACLU just sued the state of Delaware for permitting segregated charter schools. See the court filing here and the exhibits here.
“As detailed in Part IV of this complaint, Delaware’s expansion of charter schools has led to segregated charter schools for students of color, students from low income families, and students with disabilities. Specifically, more than three-quarters of the state’s charter schools are racially identifiable.11 High-performing charter schools are almost entirely racially identifiable as White. In addition, low income students and students with disabilities (to the extent that students with disabilities are served by charter schools) are disproportionately relegated to failing charter schools and charter schools that are racially identifiable as African-American or Hispanic. Relatedly, the proliferation of charter schools has been accompanied by increased segregation in public schools located in districts where charter schools operate.”
This is a lawsuit that could have sweeping national consequences. That is, if the Brown decision is still in effect.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t understand; are kids being forced to attend these schools?
De Facto vs De Jure
The issue is that Delaware law allows preferred charter admissions for students who show a “Special interest” in the mission of the charter school. This is contained in Title 14, Section 506.B.3.(c) of Delaware charter law. This Special Interest can legally be demonstrated through placement tests, teacher recommendations, grades and extracurriculars.
Charter School of Wilmington is called out in particular in the lawsuit. One of the first Charter schools in the country, it is the 10th ranked high school in the nation. It was founded by business leaders from DuPont, Bell Atlantic, Zeneca and others and company reps still sit on the charter board. Only 9.4% of the student body is traditionally underrepresented minorities, less than 1% are either ELL or SPED, and only 2.4% of the population is economically disadvantaged. It sits in the middle of Wilmington, DE, a city with huge economic disparities.
This is a copy of their admission policy:
The Specific-Interest Preference: With regard to an applicant’s claim to preference (A) above, the School shall evaluate the applicant for specific-interest eligibility through use of a point-system rubric as described below. In addition, specific-interest eligibility may also be assessed through a supplemental interview and the President shall have the authority to grant such interviews and the authority to decide the results thereof.
The point system rubric for assessing specific-interest shall include the following factors, with the maximum point value as shown (up to 383 points total):
• Scores on a CSW-administered placement test which assesses exposure and foundation in Math (99 points) and Reading (99 points); this test shall be based on the TerraNova™ standardized test unless
otherwise decided by Board resolution;
• Report card grades for Math and Science in 7th and 8th grades (up to 120 points);
The following factors, taken together, shall have a maximum point value of up to 65 points:
• Teacher recommendations ;
• Enrollment in honors classes for Math or Science ;
• Extracurricular activities in Math or Science ; and
• An essay written by the applicant .
The aforementioned grade reports, recommendations, honors classes and extracurricular activities shall not be considered by the School with any bias regarding the level at which the applicant was taught nor with any bias regarding which school(s) the applicant has attended.
Using this point system rubric, any applicant whose total score is 325 points or more (i.e., 85% of the total) is deemed to have met the requisite foundation for the specific-interest preference.
Lynn,
We will see what the courts decide. All of those preferences created a segregated school. Southern governors in the late 1950s would have done the same if the federal courts had permitted them to do do. They didn’t. But that wads a long time ago and segregation is on the back burner now.
I think the courts will find Delaware a compelling case. The charters have barriers to entry for low SES students and the system seems heavily slanted in favor of white and wealthy constituents. I laid out the entrance requirements to clarify that in this case it is De Jure segregation because students of color are being denied entry over “failure” to meet the special interest requirement. The waiting list of special interest students is so long that Charter School of Wilmington does not even hold a lottery. Only kids who meet the “proprietary” entrance requirements are considered for admission. That is blatantly exclusionary and I hope that ACLU wins this case.
justateacher, I remember the years after the Brown decision in 1954 when Southern leaders (white) said, “just let us have choice. Don’t force anyone to go where they don’t want to go.” They knew that this was the best possible way to preserve segregation. Whites would continue to be in all-white schools, and few if any blacks would dare to go to those schools. So, no one is “forcing” kids to attend segregated schools. But Delaware, as the ACLU brief shows, has segregated schools.
Yes, the brief shows that Delaware has segregated district and charter schools. Why aren’t the districts included in the complaint?
As you know, “neighborhood schools” have also been used as a tool by hardcore segregationists like Louise Day Hicks. Brown did nothing to address residential hypersegregation and in fact it probably kicked it into a higher gear.
@Tim – districts aren’t included in the complaint because charter schools aren’t authorized by the districts, except in the case of the one district named in the complaint. The concern is about the laws and admissions procedures that allow at least the appearance of an unfair admissions and retention practice in many of the charter schools.
Important distinction: they filed an OCR complaint, not a lawsuit.
Indeed. They ACLU recently filed a similar complaint against the “diverse” district of South Orange-Maplewood, NJ, where the segregation occurs not at the district or even at the school level, but from classroom to classroom.
The ACLU’s complaint displays some deft political maneuvering—the school hypersegregation caused by residential segregation, the district model, and a law that actually requires students to attend their neighborhood school? Nothing to complain about there, apparently.
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/05/15/sixty-years-bro
Perhaps the ACLU, like the DOJ and many others, has given up on desegregating public schools.
FLERP, that makes no sense.That filed a suit because they object to segregated schools, not because they want segregated schools.
I thought the complaint was about segregated charter schools, not segregated public schools.
@FLERP the complaint is about how the charter schools are *causing* resegregation.
Don’t schools have to be desegregated before they can be resegregated?
You’re really not seeing the total picture here, I believe. To be clear, students in the high-poverty, high-minority city of Wilmington area were divided among the four northernmost traditional public school districts in New Castle County. This meant students at the elementary grade levels generally attended neighborhood elementary schools, while students at the secondary grade levels were generally bused between the city and the suburbs to ensure a desegregated population at each school, since there were few secondary schools in the city. Once Wilmington High School closed, there was no high school in the city at all.
The Neighborhood Schools Act was intended to prevent the forced busing between the disparate areas of the districts and keep students attending local schools. However, there were still few secondary schools in the city, so at the secondary level students either attended the single 6-8 school in Wilmington and/or got bused out into the suburbs, with all high school students being bused out. This made segregation an issue in some areas and not in others, but also violated the neighborhood school regulation.
Once charter schools were introduced, one of the possible methods of selecting students was to initiate a 5-mile radius rule, meaning that transportation and other costs could be reduced and the number of potential students would be restricted because no one would be coming from more than 5 miles away. Some charter schools offer a lottery system for enrollment, while others seem to have different requirements for admission, such as placement exams (which I’ve been told are often given PRIOR TO the lottery as opposed to after students are already selected for admission). Most charter schools have a low- or no-tolerance policy with certain behaviors, such as chewing gum, not wearing the appropriate uniform, being late to school, fighting, etc., which traditional public schools do (and generally can) not have. Once students have earned a specific number of demerits for various infractions, those students are expelled from the charter school and must enroll at either a different charter (if possible), a private school, a vo-tech school, or a traditional public school. However, the funding that has already been given to the charter school for the education of that student does not get returned to whichever school the student enrolls in.
As a specific instance of where a charter school is influencing resegregation, we can point to Newark High School and Newark Charter School. In the past decade, Newark High School has seen a change in ethnic demographics (among others, but since we’re just talking about segregation…), with declining enrollment of White students and increasing enrollment of both Black and Hispanic (along with modest increases in both low income and special education student populations). Newark Charter, which in theory serves the same pool of students (although it doesn’t, actually, because of its 5-mile radius rule and that fact that the school is located just on the Delaware side of the DE/Maryland state border, thereby making its area of influence significantly less than 75 sq mi area), by contrast, has actually DECREASED in both Black and Hispanic student populations. The White student population has held pretty steady, and the Asian student population has grown. (The low income student enrollment has dropped from over 17% in 2012-13 to a mere 8.4% in 2013-14, and the special education student enrollment has also declined in the same period.)
So now we can see based on the actual numbers that two schools in the same town, serving the same population of students, has caused resegregation (based on the demographics, which can be found on the Delaware Department of Education’s website if you do a simple Google search on “delaware school profiles”) by virtue of the very fact of its existence with the legally-allowed restriction of the 5-mile radius. Newark High School takes students from the city of Wilmington while Newark Charter does not. And yes, we actually CAN compare those two schools, as Newark Charter now has a K-12 school, effectively creating a school district within a school district.
I hope this helps in some small way in your understanding of how the charter system is effectively resegregating our schools here in Delaware.
Thank you for noting our hard work in little ‘ol Delaware! Our real public schools have been drowning under segregative charter expansion here in the “First State” for well over a decade. Perhaps we can be first to roll back this national scourge and return American public education to its noble, democratic purpose.
Of course everyone in DE who has been working on this issue for the past several years is inspired by Diane’s work & writing, and the many thoughtful commenters on this blog. Thank you all for stimulating these efforts nationwide.
Perhaps one of the hallmarks of the self-proclaimed “new civil rights movement of our time” aka self-styled “education reform” is the resurgence of what used to be called “segregation academies”—although the “thought leaders” of $tudent $ucce$$ would describe it as a “choice” that parents make in order to to ensure the ROI/MC [ReturnOnInvestment/MonetizingChildren] schemes of edupreneurs. So reassuring that the hard data points aka children are now the bottom line of investors and such…
Just one of many postings on this blog alone, this one entitled “Resegregation by Charters in North Carolina?”—
[start posting]
A new study of racial segregation in North Carolina shows that 30% of regular public schools are racially imbalanced, but 60% of charter schools are.
These findings echo the work of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which has found that charter schools are frequently even more segregated than their surrounding district.
In Georgia, there are charter schools that are overwhelmingly white in districts where there are hardly any white students in the public schools. The Pataula Charter in Calhoun County is 75% white, but the local schools are only 2% white.
The first question is whether charter schools will become the new name for segregation academies?
The second question is why our society has turned its back on racial integration?
[end posting]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/27/resegregation-by-charters-in-north-carolina/
The enablers and enforcers of “education reform” constantly spew out a plethora of numbers & stats backing up their claims to miracle successes and magical results. I wonder why they haven’t pointed out that when it comes to resegregation—
They can boast of being at the front of the pack.
😎
“Relatedly, the proliferation of charter schools has been accompanied by increased segregation in public schools located in districts where charter schools operate.”
I’m relieved they’re looking at all the pieces of the system. It was inevitable and charter promoters should have anticipated it. The fact is what you do in one set of schools effects the other set, and there was never any guarantee that the effects would be positive or even equitable.
Every analysis of a charter system should include an analysis of the effects on the public system. That no one does this makes me think they don’t value the public system at all.
Someone who teaches woodshop should have a student make this sign for Arne and his gaggle of ED aides:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”,
George Santayana
Segregation is still a big problem. Even when school districts have a diverse population, many seem to get away with segregated schools and classes within schools. With charter schools there is unlimited potential for discriminatory practices. When they have the right of refusal of students, it is possible to set up “designer” schools for white students. I hope the ACLU continues to crack down on such blatant misuse of public funds.
Maybe this will work. Hope so. Somehow, in many ways my positive opinions of some of our courts has suffered immensely.
So, many of those blacklisted schools have kept and used the old facilities that were previously categorized as “segregated” schools until 1954? Or they have received the funding for new school facilities with a “charter” tag by tearing down the neighborhood schools for students of color. Anyway, this is a classic example that explains old system dies hard: how racism is socially constructed in the US, as usual.
The whole reason charter schools exist in Delaware is due to desegregation and forced busing in the late 1970’s. I was there – riding a school bus up and down I-95 for an hour and a half each day to carry out a misguided liberal social experiment. Search Leonard Schwartz and 9-3 plan for the background on this.
As a part of this the high schools in the City of Wilmington that were overwhelmingly black were closed down and the kids from these schools shipped out to the suburbs.
The initial reaction was a surge in private school enrollment as rich parents rightfully objected to this kind of nonsense.
The next reaction was a surge in charters as not-so-rich parents saw the declining performance of suburban schools their tax dollars were paying for and decided to do something about it.
Charters are tremendously popular in Delaware – this complaint will go nowhere. The complainants have no leg to stand on. Charter schools are here to stay, people deserve to have a choice in the education of their children and need alternatives when traditional public schools do not meet their needs.
It’s your tax dollars that pay for education, you should have a say in how those dollars are spent.
There’s so much I could go on about in your post, but I’ll limit myself to this: “The next reaction was a surge in charters as not-so-rich parents saw the declining performance of suburban schools their tax dollars were paying for and decided to do something about it.”
Frankly, I hope those parents lived to regret those decisions. Pulling your kid out of a school you were previously happy with allegedly because of “declining test scores” is a bunch of hogwash. They were happy with the school before, but because a bunch of poor and minority students show up, now they’re worried about the quality of the school? Please. It’s nothing other than racism. The presence of kids who don’t score well on tests doesn’t mean that your kid is going to score any less well or that your kid is getting any less of an education. It’s just another way of keeping “nice” white kids away from “those” kids.
Let me give you a hint. Test scores had nothing to do with it. Nor did racism.
The primary issue was disciplinary. Teachers wasting too much time dealing with kids who obviously didn’t want to be there. Too many fights, too many kids with absolutely no respect for authority. Assaults on teachers.
My apologies – the judge in the 1978 case was Murray Schwartz, not Leonard.
Ken, Charter School of Wilmington uses an old, formerly segregated high school building. It is in fact the only district-administered high school in the city of Wilmington–and ironically, most of its students bus in from the suburbs (busing is apparently not a problem if it moves white & Asian middle class kids into their own public school!). Nearly all low-income minority students in Wilmington, grades 9-12, must bus OUT to a suburban public school. Wilmington was carved into four pieces shared among four suburban areas, during a late ’70s deseg. order after New Castle County, DE, failed to obey Brown for decades. My district, Christina, combines Newark, DE (where the Univ. of DE is located) with two very poor Wilmington neighborhoods. These are non-contiguous areas separated by ~10 miles along I-95–an unusual configuration established under the deseg. order.
The Newark Charter k-12 school cited in the ACLU complaint has constructed two new buildings and renovated a former warehouse for its new HS (meanwhile most district schools are decades old, and not particularly well constructed to begin with). It is permitted to employ a “five mile radius” preference for enrollment, which cuts out the Wilm. portion of our district (other fees & disciplinary policies make it hostile or outright inaccessible to the many low-income suburban kids as well; the school only instituted meal programs this fall, under duress, after 12 years in operation!). ALL Christina district students attend public HS WITHIN Newark Charter’s “five-mile radius,” because there is no district HS in the city of Wilmington (pop. ~70,000). But city students effectively have no access to the new charter HS (a recent add-on to Newark Charter k-8, which itself expanded from an original 6-8). City kids have essentially no chance of attending the charter HS due to its “radius”-based enrollment preference, which its state authorizer allows.
All of this has been reiterated ad nauseum by citizen activists and a handful of state legislators over many years. It is clear that without federal intervention, state authorities will not address these issues. Once they gave well-heeled parents in the Wilmington suburbs a HS stripped of poor, black, urban students (in 1995, the minute DE’s federal deseg. oversight was lifted), professionals in the university area demanded similar treatment, and then southern DE white families established their own charter in a region that is increasingly Hispanic (migrant agricultural workers). Mayhem has followed, as additional state constituencies demand their own publicly funded charter schools (such as one in Wilmington emphasizing instruction in modern Greek (why?!), and with a stringent proprietary uniform policy that effectively keeps out the urban poor). DE has fewer than 1 million people but 19 school districts, 19 non-district charters (along with 3 charters administered by the Red Clay district) and a state-run vo-tech HS system that is also (absurdly) exclusionary–only 8th graders with high GPAs can attend those! The Newark Charter k-12 enrolls 2,000 students now and is building out to ~2500 in the next few years; this makes it larger than several rural DE districts.
Public ed. in DE is an absolute zoo, a dog-eat-dog “choicing” scramble. Let’s hope OCR agrees to intervene. Remember that DE was among the very first recipients of federal Race to the Top dollars a few years back. We have been spending Americans’ tax dollars liberally, with little regard for American civil rights law. DE was part of the Brown desegregation order in 1954, and it may be time to come full circle.
Reading that court filing is to learn about the current fight for education equity and its history.
It is well-written with complete referencing. Very inspiring.
This would be a good use of informational text in the classroom.
It would be interesting to compare disciplinary and instructional policies for charters which are largely white with those which are largely black and/or Latino. Just guessing, but I doubt there is much snapping, SLANTing and chanting going on in the former.
Mr. Parks lives around the block from me. That should give you some flavor for the kind of social fracture this charter/choice-ing mania has led to. Residents draw lottery tickets, set up camp on one side or the other of our public schooling battle & start fighting for resources & equal treatment from the state. Not a recipe for civic cohesion. A few years ago our neighborhood was reasonably sociable, but now much less so (there are two camps). That’s what these divisive social policies produce–and here I’m only talking about the divisions among middle class white people!
Don’t worry, we are not all as crazy as Ms. Buckley makes it sound.
She is the only one that has chosen to end friendships (and her children’s friendships) based on whether they support charters or not. The rest of us find a way to go along to get along. In fact, many of those originally on the non-charter side of the “social fracture” now happily attend charter schools. It’s basically a non-issue for normal people at this point.
I have one son that graduated from a charter school and another that is graduating from the local HS (Same one I graduated from 30 years ago). One got in, one didn’t. That’s the way life goes.
I feel you can get a quality education in just about any school in Delaware (or anywhere else for that matter) if you are willing to put the work in and not be disruptive.
Ms. Buckley, the ACLU, and a few others are trying to build a mountain out of a molehill.
Respectfully, I disagree. Many on the “charter school side” have nothing but ridiculous, slanderous, negative things to say about public schools. This was especially apparent in the fight over the Newark Charter expansion. It’s a damn shame charters can’t be used as intended: to innovate and implement educational strategies and share them with traditional public schools for the betterment of ALL. Ms. Buckley has been a tremendous and outspoken advocate for the betterment of ALL students, not just her own.
It really is a shame that charters (potentially a good innovation) have been allowed to function in this way. We’re funding them; they might as well be a public good. [And thank you for the generous comments.]
Says the one going crazy in his fortress.
For context: Mr. Parks’s wife is employed by Newark Charter School, which his two sons attended. The older one is a graduate of the Charter School of Wilm. Those are the two charters in our county cited as segregationist by the ACLU complaint. There is much vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as the many neo-eugenicist comments about “those people” (poor urban blacks) and “their children” now piling up on Delaware’s online paper attest:
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2014/12/03/aclu-charter-schools-causing-resegregation/19832097/
From within the charter enclaves, which are socially homogenous, it may not be apparent that the rest of the community has withdrawn from those families. But it is quite apparent from within the actual district school communities and the organizations that have cropped up to bolster genuine public schools in the face of state-sponsored destruction.
Some further context:
Ms Buckley has not always been so disdainful of charter schools. In fact, at one point she applied to one of these segregationist (her words, not mine) institutions.
It was only after the ping pong ball with her number on it failed to come out of the hopper that she apparently had an epiphany about charter schools.
Certainly might lead one to wonder just how much of her opposition is based on rich white liberal guilt and how much is based on good old fashioned sour grapes.
I’ll take the over on the latter.
Our epiphany re: DE charters came when we learned in 2011 that a.) Newark Charter (to which we had applied for our two oldest children) declined to offer subsidized breakfasts & lunch to low-income children, who comprise 1/3 of its “five-mile radius” enrollment pref. & 2/3 of its district population; and b.) that (likely due to this, and other discriminatory practices) it enrolled shockingly few low-income or minority children. These are facts that many DE public ed. advocates have known & objected to for years, but others of us learned only during a heated debate in 2012 about NCS’s desire to expand from K-8 to K-12.
Since that point, my family has declined to enter any lotteries for DE charters & has become savvier about what our area’s “choice” process often entails. We are not alone in this–it is interesting, within district public school communities, to meet the many families who also decline to take advantage of what they rightly perceive as a system unfairly biased against the poor. In my household, we have a range of options (private school, moving) if we decide we really can’t obtain a good ed. for our kids in this area’s fully public schools. So far our experience with the actual public schools has been quite positive, and we are learning how much of their bad local reputation is myth, exacerbated by racial & class fears and charter school marketing strategies. The truly admirable families are those (and there are quite a number) who cannot possibly access private schools and yet still will not enter the “choice” lotteries due to their understanding that these are unjust & discriminatory. Those families are the core supporters of DE’s public districts–shoring up the PTAs, etc., in the face of middle class & white flight.
It is an uphill battle, but well worth fighting (as readers of this blog know!). Parks is a good example of native Delawarean comfort with class & race privilege. Many of the opponents of DE ed. injustices arrived here from other states & cannot quite believe how this state still operates, in 2014. DE was until fairly recently effectively a Dupont subsidiary; it is slow to democratize.
Reblogged this on Exceptional Delaware and commented:
Thank you Diane for posting this. If anyone reads the brief, this is not only about minorities. It is also enrollment preference that shuns students with disabilities. The state average for children with special needs is about 13.5%. Many of the charters in Delaware have very low special needs populations. The highest performing school in the state, Charter School of Wilmington has a .2% population of students with IEPs. As a writer of a blog on special education in Delaware, I get emails all the time from parents who have children in DE charters who are denied IEPs and special education rights. All too often these students are either “counseled out”, expelled, or the parents pull them out of the charters. The child then attends the local district school, but the funds for that school year tend to stay at the charter school depending on if it happened after September 30th (when student enrollment is determined for each school in DE). The state of DE is actually in the process of closing one of the two special needs charters in the state because of low standardized test scores from a test they don’t even use anymore. The charters have many special education lawsuits which even helped contribute to one charter school in Delaware a couple years ago. In some cases, students with disabilities who are also a minority and low-income are victims of a twisted triple segregation as a result of these tactics. And yet our unelected State Board of Education is well aware of what is going on and does nothing to address this. The biggest comments coming out of our DOE in the state’s IEP Task Force is fighting against having parents get an advanced copy of an IEP draft and praising standards-based IEPs claiming they are not about Common Core. This is just as big a sin as the discrimination against minorities in our state. The director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, Kendall Massett, actually responded to this complaint by stating ““These complaints are not new to any state that has a charter school law. These allegations, myths – we actually call them myths – are actually talked about all over the United States,” – See more at: http://www.wdde.org/70472-aclu-delaware-files-federal-complaint-state-charter-schools#sthash.QREgRuky.dpuf
The only myth I see is the education reform common core standardized test environment that has become the obsession of our Governor Markell, the Delaware DOE, and a very shady non-profit organization called Rodel that funds Teach For America, Relay Graduate School, Innovative Schools and so on. This is a tipping point for Delaware charters. I am very glad this complaint was issued and that the state is finally being held accountable for allowing these things to happen.
One of my above comments should be “The charters have many special education lawsuits which even helped contribute to the closing of one charter school in Delaware a couple years ago.”
Massett’s comments on this have been priceless. In addition to her acknowledgement, above, that these accusations against charters are nation-wide (hmmm, why might that be?) she reassured other reporters that DE absolutely does have charters specially for black & Hispanic kids, which is of course the ACLU’s point–separate, unequal. One wonders whether she is working secretly on our side (in which case she is close to blowing her own cover).
Often wonder what might have happened if the Brown decision had been accompanied by coordinated legal maneuvers and federal policies to stop red-lining property (blocking loans and insurance on property based on race), increase the regulation of real estate transactions, and distribute low income housing throughout metro areas–all for the purpose of dismantling segregation.
This is to say that the choice of public schools as the institutional focus of desegregation efforts was not the only policy option. I suspect the fear of massive civil unrest and deep seated racism prevented this kind of coordinated effort. The events at Little Rock and throughout the south with the “alternative” schools of choice for white students confirmed the political risks of trying to end racism.
Thanks to Ms. Ravitch for her blog post on this very important subject, and thanks to Ms. Buckley and Mr. Ohlandt for their incisive and relevant comments.
I am a State Representative in Delaware and I have found it to be statistically provable and accurate that the Delaware Charter School law, as written, has permitted (and encouraged) a segregation of minority, low-income, and special needs students throughout the entire public school system. This law was and is inherently flawed, and the recently passed HB 165, promoted as a charter law reform measure, contributes to a further segregation of student population and resources ($$$). I made numerous attempts to amend the bill and could not muster the votes due to pressure brought by the wealthy charter school network and its patron organizations such as RODEL, Vision Network, and Innovative Schools, et al.
If the amount of money being spent to fight legitimate reform needed in the charter school law is any indication, then it is surely a hugely profitable venture for those privateers of public education who seek to drain public taxpayer money and resources from the less fortunate. An average of 8-10 well-heeled lobbyists roam the halls of Dover whenever legitimate attempts to correct the many flaws in the existing code are proffered or whenever there is a proposal to create more access to public funding (exclusive to charter schools) that they support. Quite frankly, it can be exhausting encouraging those people who have an appropriate sense of fairness, justice, and equality for all, to raise their voices and demand fair-play. This is notable and somewhat understandable, especially in the face of such a logistically wealthier special interest that seems to promote a tunnel-vision ambition that excludes many more than it includes and erodes already inadequate resources that are needed to provide equal and accessible educational opportunities for all Delawareans.
So let me express my thanks to ACLU and CLASI and all of the Buckleys and Ohlandts and Ravitchs who clearly see the reality that this is an honest and just fight for equality. Let me conclude with an apology for my own failure to convince enough of my colleagues and others of influence that we, on behalf of all of the children and families in Delaware, must do better and must do more to correct these inequities.
State Representative John Kowalko (25th District Newark)
Bravo, Representative Kowalko! Those you represent are fortunate to have you. Welcome to the fight.
John is one of a small handful of DE legislators who have fought ceaselessly for a fairer approach to public Ed here, but too few of their colleagues have joined them, & there are strong opposing forces. For some sense of DE’s hedg fund/school privatization nexus (a national problem, I know) see
Christine,
My humble thanks for the welcome, but I have been in the fray for the last six years and it’s not exactly a breathable atmosphere here in Delaware under the current Administration which is hellbent on privatizing and charterizing public education at the expense of the children. The corporate, for profit ( and disguised as non-profit), interests are well accoutred with financial resources to purchase influence among the influential in the Delaware political theater and combined with an attitude of apathy that can permeate political willingness it is difficult to keep the barbarians at the gate so to speak. The “priority schools” debacle is only the latest attempt to intimidate and coerce local school boards into acquiescing their autonomy and authority granted them by the electorate. Any help you, or anyone around the country, can give would be welcome and appreciated. Even a kind thought or supportive remark would do. Thanks for paying attention.
Rep. John Kowalko
Dear Rep. Kowalko,
Please check out the website of the Network for Public Education. We have members in every state and we endorse candidates who support public education and resist the corporate assault on our public schools. We would welcome you as a member.
Charter schools exist to serve the students who need them most. These students are disproportionately African American. Parents choose charters for their children.
Equating choice with forced segregation is reprehensible and just another tactic of anti-charter folks to protect the schools that these parent don’t want for the best interests of the adults they employ.
I’d love to have less segregation in my charter. But, what I don’t want is children from economic advantage. They already have great schools to go to and the ability to move for better schools. They don’t need my school and will take places away from those who do.
Children from economically disadvantaged families have more and different challenges than other children. Schools that focus on those deficits make sense and get much more success with them than (for example) sending kids to private schools frequently ill-equipped to deal with those challenges. Integration that forces students into schools that their parents don’t want for them, whether failing neighborhood schools, or less segregated schools that they will be less successful at is wrong.
Wow! Must be some strong KoolAid!
We agree on a few things.
“Children from economically disadvantaged families have more and different challenges than other children.”
Agreed. Wrong however, about “focusing on their deficits” making sense. What makes sense is focusing on their strengths. And teachers with a background in child development, adolescent psychology, history of education and decades of experience in the classroom, as well as life experience, are far more able to identify those strengths than someone with a few weeks of “training” who believes these deficient children can be “fixed” by snapping, chanting and SLANTing in a highly controlled environment, under the implicit threat of being banished from the charter Garden of Eden to those (uuhh!) public schools.
The charter theater plays both to those well-meaning parents and to those idealistic young teachers who don’t see they’re being used “for the best interests of the adults” – well paid administrators like Evita Moskowitz and her hedge fund manager friends.
Christine, by “focus on their deficits”, I meant a school that was well equipped to handle those deficits, not focusing on them with the students.
Please explain to me how hedge fund managers benefit from charter schools. They are philanthropists in this situation, trying to get more student-focused policies in the face of much greater union spending. It’s also condescending to refer to “well-meaning” parents and “idealistic” young teachers because the schools they’ve chosen to be at aren’t ones you support.
John, the ACLU complaint regarding DE focuses on three charter schools that have mechanisms for excluding low-income and minority children. They exist to carve (from limited public resources) publicly funded schools for professionals’ children within socio-economically diverse school districts. In the past this desire for class- and race-segregated schools here was met by a plethora of private schools; but since DE’s federal desegregation oversight was lifted in 1995, publicly funded schools have been established to meet that demand, with no increase in our tax base. Exclusive charter schools can top off their public funds with private contributions from families delighted to be spared the tuition that they would otherwise have elected to pay. Actual public schools, now with higher concentrations than ever of low-income and spec needs children (disproportionately black & Hispanic), have less funding to serve those children and few if any private funding sources to tap.
For a quick sense of what we’re dealing with, see the pie charts on pp 10 & 11 of the ACLU complaint–they compare demographics of our exclusive charter schools with those of the surrounding public district:
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/12/06/leaving-behind/20017277/
Eve,
Thank you for pointing out that aspect of it.
John
You are welcome, John–and thank you for being so polite! I always gird my loins when entering the blogosphere–this is most unexpected courtesy. 🙂
Click to access ACLU-et-al-v.-State-of-Delaware-and-Red-Clay-Consolidated-03-Dec-14.pdf
Ms. Ravitch,
Thank you. I will check it out and join that like-minded group. Please keep up the excellent work that you do.
Respectfully,
John Kowalko
There wouldn’t be as much of a need for this if the state of Delaware wasn’t still practicing busing!!! My friends from other states can’t believe that we still do this.