Rita Rathbone, an NBCT teacher in Durham, explains how the increase in charters in Durham is causing more segregation in the Durham public schools. Curiously, this post appeared at Education Post, which is normally cheerleading for charter schools.
Rathbone reports that when the legislature lifted the state cap on charters in 2011 and loosened state regulation of charters, charters became a vehicle for white flight.
As a result of these policies, charter schools in the state are more segregated than traditional public schools. Researchers at Duke University have pointed out that 20 percent of all charter schools in the state are 90 percent or more White. Durham, a district with less than 40,000 school-aged children, now has 13 charter schools with number 14 scheduled to open this fall and number 15 already approved for the future.
The net result of the growth in charters is that they have concentrated poorer children of color in the district schools and complicated district planning with unanticipated student movement. According to the 2010 census, 40 percent of Durham County’s population is White.
As of last school year, only 18 percent of Durham Public School students were White. Meanwhile, four Durham charter schools are 54-67 percent White. Essentially, since the growth of charter schools beginning in the 2007-08 school year, approximately 1200 White students have disappeared from Durham Public Schools.
Rathbone is concerned about the future as charters continue to open:
While each student who leaves the district for a charter school takes with them their per-pupil spending, the district has been left with students who are more expensive to educate. In a district with a 30 percent child poverty rate, Durham Public Schools now has a 65 percent free- and reduced-lunch rate as well as higher concentrations of students with disabilities and English-language learners.
In a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle, the exodus of White and middle-class families may cause the district schools to look more like those very schools those families want to avoid. Concentrated poverty and disadvantaged students have impacted school test data and the district faces greater testing pressures.
The future holds even more uncertainty. While area charters still claim long waitlists, insiders express concerns of a charter market over saturation with some new charters failing to meet enrollment goals and charters investing more time and money into recruitment efforts. Area charter teachers also quietly express concern about practices of grade inflation and lack of rigor as charter schools try to keep students and families satisfied.
The intersection of race and school choice is complex. Given the known benefits of school integration for all students, it is time to consider policy approaches that ensure that school choice leads to more integration rather than contributing to more racial and economic isolation in our public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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There is also a longer version on my blog: https://patientlyimpatientblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/choice-and-segregation/
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The issue is certainly not new in North Carolina and elsewhere. The desegregation in NC is the direct result of Republican power and the chronic misrepresentations of wonders of parental choice, entrepreneurial activity, and a studied subversion of the charter authorizing process. Here is an excellent account of the arm twisting in NC intended to get rubber stamp approvals for charters
https://www.ednc.org/2016/07/27/when-charter-schools-fail/
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That’s the result of not caring about the effects on public schools. Of course there would be an effect. It was insane to think there would be no changes to the public system when a privatized system was layered on top. It’s even nuttier to assume all changes would be automatically positive.
It’s still amazing to me that we have all these master planners- the “best and brightest”- and none of them are willing to admit schools ARE SYSTEMS even if they’re privatized.
They can’t seem to make this leap. They continue to talk about “choice” as if individual choices don’t impact the whole. Of course they do.
It also puts paid to the idea that they are “agnostics”. How could they be agnostics if they allowed this to happen to the public system? They couldn’t have cared about it. They had to assign it no value at all to be so careless.
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This trend will continue unless the courts get involved. Charter schools are resegregating education, and they are doing it using public money. It is time for the NAACP or some other civil rights group to start the challenge. Separate and unequal schools should never be acceptable in America. Separate and unequal is contrary to democratic governance. In my opinion, disparities in funding public education should have been challenged years ago. Even though public education aspires to equality, we know there is much work to to done. With charters further impoverishing and resegregating public schools, we are getting further from what should be our mission. Perhaps if we had seriously addressed the problems facing many urban public schools years ago, charters could not have thrown down their fake gauntlet of championing the issue of civil rights.
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I just sent an e-mail to Peter Greene about the st. Louis public schools. I am bothered by the stealth of what has happened, but the numbers are not yet that spectacular, I guess. The charters say they have 30% of the school enrollment in St. Louis. Using their own documented figures, it is now 39%. They brag about how they are helping integrate the schools….70% of their students are black. Since the overall district is listed as having at least 80% black enrollment, that means the 61% of the remaining schools have 88% black enrollment. If litigation is considered….St. Louis should be a participant. http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1186447#p16200506
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An important factor to analyze: as the test-score game now pushes our poorest students into tighter and tighter pockets of concentration, students who rely upon and NEED an active role modeling from middle class students are less and less likely to find it.
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Charters are creating segregation wherever they are. Period.
I could go on and on, but we’re all preaching to the choir here.
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The so-called “education reform” movement has always been based on a return to racial segregation of America’s schools. The fact that billionaires and hedge funds could pocket tens of millions of dollars from this new kind of segregation was just a bonus for many. The first calls for “reform” in the form of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
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