A new blogger, a teacher in Detroit who has taught in both charter and public schools, ponders here why it is so hard to desegregate the public schools in Detroit.
Detroit has lots of segregated schools and lots of choice.
He notes:
“Thus, a problem with school of choice is that many White parents simply remove their children from schools with increasingly Black student populations, either taking them to Whiter public school districts Whiter charter schools, or Whiter private schools. Regardless if this is the intention, the result is the same: students are losing out on the valuable opportunity to learn next to students that don’t look like them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder why white parents are losint ” the valuable opportunity to learn next to students that don’t look like them” by removing “their children from schools with increasingly Black student populations”? Anyone have any ideas?
And … suppose these schools had “increasingly Chinese populations” or “increasingly Indian populations”. Would these short-sighted white parents act in the same way? I suspect not.
What a mystery!
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We live in a profoundly racist society. One need look no further than our president for verification.
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I am one of those white parents moving my child into a private school. I live in Howard County, MD, one of the most diverse communities and a highly rated school system on the outskirts of DC. I love that my child goes to school with children of all ethnicities and color. I DO NOT love Common Core, the abusive testing scheme, the push for AP for all, NGSS, data collection etc etc. Having to pay for my child to receive a decent education in a district/state that has a high tax rate is not something that I really want to do….but I need to do that for my child. This was a hard decision to make and one that I wish we didn’t have to make. My only hope is that in this private school, there will be a diverse population of children.
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@ LisaM : I live in WashDC suburbs. I am sorry that the publicly-operated schools in your area of residence do not meet your standards. Have you attempted to get the schools, paid for with your tax dollars, to alter their administrative practices, to more closely suit your needs? Can you opt-out of the testing, which obviously is against your wishes?
The problem with a government-run school (or any government-run enterprise) is that they have a “take it or leave it” mentality, plus “Take it or leave it, but we still get your tax money”.
You are now paying for an education that you prefer for your child (at the private school of your choice), and paying for an education, that you disdain (at the publicly-operated school).
How do you feel about paying twice? Would you like to get at least a partial rebate, on your tax contributions to the public schools you avoid?
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A truly necessary look at reality in 2018: weighing options and choosing probable segregation to avoid what is being viciously done to undermine public schools.
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No Charles….I do NOT believe in vouchers! I will NEVER believe in vouchers. I believe in public education, but I don’t like what reforms have done to public education. I do not like Common Core and it’s evil twin the BS test. I do Refuse for my children, but MD has adopted PARCC as a graduation requirement. Yes, we will be paying twice for my son to go to private school…once with our tax dollars to public schools and again out of pocket for the private. My wish would be that the “reforms” would go away and our public schools could return to a more civil place of learning for ALL children of ALL races and colors.
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“Whiter charter schools”
Is this actually a phenomenon in the metro Detroit region? Whites make up something like 2% of the Detroit population, and much of the outer suburban ring is already so white that the concept of “white flight” to charters seems strange.
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Having looked at the article, I see the author’s focusing on a number of metro Detroit cities that are considerably more diverse than the Northern ‘burbs I had in mind.
She also writes this: “with school of choice policies, Black Detroit parents now have the option of sending their children to public school districts outside the district.” I wasn’t aware of that. I assume “public school districts outside the district [of Detroit]” means “charter schools located in public school districts outside the district [of Detroit].” That’s interesting. But it doesn’t surprise me that this doesn’t end up yielding diverse charter schools, given my sense of how charter operators tend to target specific communities (which in Detroit will always end up being students of color), and how reticent many white parents seem to be to send their kids to schools with substantial minority populations.
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“how charter operators tend to target specific communities..”
Good point. This happens in NYC, too, in charter schools. For example, in District 21, where the public school population is 32% white and 69% poor, Success Academy runs a charter that is 56% white and 34% poor.
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I wrote the article. School of choice has led to some interesting student demographics- many inner ring suburbs (lower income white suburbs near Detroit) have schools that have many Black Detroiters now. However, as I say, this “choice” is false for Black parents because these schools are inadequate as Detroit Public Schools are. Wealthy parents continue to keep their kids away from lower income students (which are largely Black)
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The core near the CBD is being developed in Detroit as in several other cities such as New Orleans and Philly. The goal is to flip a neighborhood to make lots of money for developers. With choice they offer cheap charters on the outskirts of the city for the poor minorities, and selective charters for white students that move in near the CBD.http://www.bridgemi.com/detroit-journalism-cooperative/welcome-new-detroit-white-people-so-long-poor-folks
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Charters are allowed to have selective admissions in Michigan?
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The hyper segregation of Detroit includes both black and white students that operate overwhelmingly majority black or white resulting in more racial isolation. West Michigan Aviation Academy is majority white through creating selective entrance requirements. I am sure there are others as well. This article claims that charters are doing better than the public schools in Detroit. This is probably true if the middle class black students from the city can go to working class districts in the suburbs, and the more compliant black students are placed in charters in the city. The Detroit public schools become the schools of last resort by default, but now they have few resources to help the neediest, most troubled students. http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2017/12/04/michigan-schools-education-segregated/108295160/
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Detroit is an interesting case study on the impact of “choice.” It is a prime example of cause and effect which also shows that it is impossible to deliver equity through “choice.” It also shows that there is no such value to separate and equal as stated in the Brown case where they said,”“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
So called choice is inherently unfair, and it fails to address the larger issue of poverty. In fact, as indicated by Detroit with optimum opportunities for “choice,” all the the options spawn more opportunities to discriminate against the poorest, most troubled students resulting in enhanced segregation.
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Indeed. The choice is between AWFUL and AWFUL.
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To what extent can this be blamed on Trump and DeVos?
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Betsy Devos is a huge proponent of school choice. School of choice has exacerbated educational problems in the Metro Detroit area. You can definitely blame Betsy Devos.
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We don’t have the race issue because we don’t have many students of color in our school system. Therefore, it should be apparent that there is an economic segregation that exists within school systems, as well. I didn’t move out of my home town because of the fact that there were people of other races in the school. I moved because there was an attempted sexual assault among first graders on the playground. I have no idea, to this day, what race the children involved were. All children need and deserve to be safe. Most parents want to provide the best for their children. Maybe race is the most “visible” difference, but entertain that there are many other mitigating factors you might not be considering when concluding your opinions about the exodus from “black schools.”
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I wrote the article. I agree with you- I think I tried to get across that I don’t think white parents who move their students away from blackening schools do so for intentionally racist reasons. But this creates a difficult conundrum- how do you break the cycle of two worlds: one world with white students and one with Black? Even if students are not going to school with people who don’t look like them, we need to find other ways to get students to interact with people who are not like them.
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Many of those young adult racists who marched in Charlottesville are products of that portion of America’s school system that has been re-segregated by the charter schools movement that became widespread at the beginning of the 1990’s…and there are tens of thousands more of them in the segregated charter school pipeline that keeps churning them out.
Racist re-segregation being fostered charter schools is clearly an issue that isn’t even on the radar of Senators Sanders and Warren, and none are at all aware of the racist roots of charter schools or how they are re-segregating the education of America’s children. But the NAACP is, and it has called for a total moratorium on charter schools. For your ready reference, here’s a thumbnail background on the racist roots of charter schools, “choice”, and vouchers:
The racist roots of charter schools traces back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that required the racial integration of public schools. That triggered “white flight” from public schools and into private schools. But white parents found the cost of private schools was expensive, so the call went out for vouchers to enable white parents to have a “free choice” of schools. In 1959, just before the Court’s deadline for racial integration of public schools, a prominent newspaper in Prince Edward County, Virginia, published the outline for the charter school scheme to resegregate education: “We are working [on] a scheme [with members of Congress] in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to corporations, reopen them as privately operated schools with tuition grants [vouchers] from [the State of Virginia] and from Prince Edward County. Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with [the Supreme Court and non-whites].”
At the same time, a prominent Virginia attorney who was an advisor to Virginia politicians announced a corollary scheme for resegregating public schools by means of standardized testing: “Negroes can be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they can’t maintain. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches [from white parents].” That was the conceptual beginning and foundation of all the standardized testing we see today, many of which tests are are designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure. The test results were and still are used to “prove” that traditional public schools are “failing” — a claim abetted by drastic underfunding of public schools so that they lacked the resources to teach effectively. The “failing” test scores were and are also used to “prove” that unionized public school teachers are “ineffective”.
That’s the beginning of charter schools, vouchers, and testing. That conceptual foundation remains the same today, which is why the NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter schools, which are openly practicing racism. For more details, read the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project report “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards.”
But charter schools are even more insidious: They are also a financial scam. The thoughtful person must ask why hedge funds are so interested in expanding the number of charter schools. It certainly isn’t an altruistic concern for children. Here’s a hint: The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools are a risk to the Department of Education’s goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud and the skimming of tax money into private pockets, which is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
For example: One of the profitable charter school scams is to have the puppet private school boards lease buildings that are owned by real estate investment trusts (REITs) held by the hedge funds. The charter school board members, in exchange for kickbacks, pay lease rates far above the market rate, and the profit goes to the hedge funds. Another incredible scam is that in many states when a charter school buys things like computers for the students, the computers — even though purchased with taxpayer money — become the private property of the charter school. At the end of each school year, they sell the computers, pocket the money, and receive more taxpayer money to purchase new computers…and repeat the process year-after-year.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. There is simply no such thing as a “public charter school” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school operator must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property. These aren’t “burdensome” requirements for charter schools — they are simply common sense safeguards that public tax money is actually being used to maximum effect to teach our nation’s children.
Hedge fund groups, such as “Democrats for Education Reform”, provide money for Democratic Party campaigns and President Obama has long ties to the DFR, so the Party is not going to willingly push for financial accountability for the charter school gravy train. But teachers and retired teachers who vote in high percentages are going to continue to sit on the sidelines until the Party actually brings genuine financial accountability to charter schools and ends charter school racism. Teachers and retired teachers know that if charter school operators are required to actually reveal what they are doing with public tax money, the gravy train will grind to a halt and hedge funds will move on to other schemes to get their hands on public money, leaving the charter school movement to wither away.
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Here we go again with diversity based on race, which actually is racist. What advantages does one get by going to school with people that do not look like you. Again, they do no think any differently because they are of another race. So, what is the advantage?
Most countries in the world are not all of that diverse and they seem to do just fine.
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“Most countries in the world are not all of that diverse and they seem to do just fine.”
We should try to make America less diverse, so we can do just fine, too.
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