The News & Observer in North Carolina reports that charter schools have turned into havens for white flight. Twenty-nine percent of charter schools are 80% or more white, compared to only 14% of public schools.

Charter schools in North Carolina are more segregated than traditional public schools and have more affluent students.

Most charters have either a largely white population or a largely minority population, according to a News & Observer analysis. On the whole, charter schools are more white and less Latino than schools run by local districts.

In North Carolina school districts, slightly more than half the students come from low-income families. But in charter schools, one in three students are low-income.

Charters weren’t supposed to look like this. The 1996 state law that allowed charters required that, within one year of the schools opening, their populations would reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the school district.

The law defined one of the purposes of charters: increasing opportunities to learn for all students, with a special emphasis on students who are at risk of academic failure or those who are academically gifted.

The original charter law was the product of a bipartisan compromise brokered by a House Republican and a Senate Democrat. The requirements for racial and ethnic diversity were the authors’ response to worries of charter opponents that the schools would cherry-pick the best students, said former Rep. Steve Wood, the Republican who negotiated the law.

“Opponents were concerned there would be creaming across the top,” Wood said. The diversity requirement is “a laudable goal,” he said. “Some of us said it may not be a completely achievable goal.” The original law also capped charters at 100 schools.

The charter school law has been rewritten many times in the last two decades, including a major and extensively-debated change that removed the 100-school cap. Diversity is still mentioned, but it’s no longer a requirement. A 2013 law dropped the mandate and diluted the language so charters must “make efforts” to reflect the local school districts’ racial and ethnic composition.

Wib Gulley, a Democrat and former state senator who co-authored the 1996 law, said the diversity requirement was important, and charters should have lived up to it.

“It was a key provision that was meant to ensure that the charter schools didn’t segregate in some way and did not take only students from wealthy families and that kind of thing,” Gulley said. “If that’s the result even for one school, it is an undermining of the fundamental intent of the law. It perverts the premise of charter schools in a way that we never wanted and that both houses of the legislature voted to say would not happen.”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article178022436.html#storylink=cpy