The Century Foundation is a liberal think tank in New York City that is on the wrong side of the charter school debate. For years, it has issued reports claiming that charter schools would lead the way on racial integration. It’s not true, but TCF thinks that if it keeps saying it, it might someday be true.
Yesterday, TCF had a press conference to congratulate charter schools that were diverse by design. It identified 125 charter schools out of a sector of more than 6,000 charters.
To assert that charters are promoting diversity and integration requires cherry picking and willful blindness.
Last December, the AP reported that charter schools were among the nation’s most segregated schools. The AP said: “National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily….
““Desegregation works. Nothing else does,” said Daniel Shulman, a Minnesota civil rights attorney. “There is no amount of money you can put into a segregated school that is going to make it equal.”
“Shulman singled out charter schools for blame in a lawsuit that accuses the state of Minnesota of allowing racially segregated schools to proliferate, along with achievement gaps for minority students. Minority-owned charters have been allowed wrongly to recruit only minorities, he said, as others wrongly have focused on attracting whites.”
Andre Perry, a one-time charter leader in New Orleans, has called out charter advocates for their indifference to segregation. See his article for Brookings here, where charter leaders say they really don’t care about integration. Perry was even more blunt in an article posted on The Hechinger Report, where he said that any educational reform that ignores segregation is doomed to fail.” And he included charter schools on his doomed-to-fail list of reforms.
If charters were doing such a terrific job promoting integration, which they most definitely are not, why would the National NAACP have passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on new charters?
The UCLA Civil Rights Project has repeatedly called out charter schools for causing more segregation. Look what they said about the role of charters in promoting segregation in the once well-integrated Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina. (January, 2018)
“Charter Schools in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County are directly and indirectly undermining school district efforts to desegregate public schools, according to a new study released today by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools were once the nation’s bellwether for successful desegregation. Today, the district exemplifies how charter schools can impede districts’ efforts to resist re-segregation,” said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, UNC Charlotte’s Chancellor’s Professor and professor of Sociology, Public Policy and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Charlotte. “This research has important implications not only for schools and communities in the Charlotte Mecklenburg region, but for the national debate over the growth and role of charter schools in our nation’s education system.”
In its 2017 study of segregation in Washington, D.C., the UCLA team concluded that the city’s charter schools “have the most extreme segregation in the city.”
Given that the overwhelming evidence from reputable sources—nationally and internationally—says that charter schools and choice are drivers of segregation, why is The Century Foundation supporting the agenda of Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration?
Perhaps this explains The Century Foundation’s charter love: “This case study is part of The Century Foundation’s project on charter school diversity, funded by The Walton Family Foundation.” The Walton Family Foundation is the rightwing, anti-union, anti-public school foundation of the family made billionaires by the non-union Walmart empire. The Walton Family Foundation is spending $200 million a year to expand charter schools. Ninety percent of charter schools are non- union. Walton has given tens of millions to Teach for America to create a ready supply of inexperienced, non-union, non-career teachers for charter schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is something strangely apt in the use of cherry picking to show that cherry picking charters increase diversity and integration.
It’s a veritable Mobius loop of cherry picking.
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This is another pathetic attempt by the Waltons to use their wealth to control the narrative. “Reform” is known for fake news and research, and this is a perfect example of hype and spin without substance. The Waltons really want integration about as much as they want unions.
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You mean to say that the billionaire Waltons are not leading “the civil rights issue of our time”?
I have always thought the Waltons could do more for civil rights and poverty by paying their one million workers $15 an hour rather than destroy their local public schools.
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The Waltons are leading “The Civil Whites Movement of out Time”(TM)
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I read an article about how the Waltons got a lot of PR attention for the raises while they closed many Sam’s Club. This article also mentioned that behind the scenes the Waltons are actively looking more AI options to make their stores less dependent on humans. They are increasing the self serve checkouts and exploring ways to automate some of their stockrooms. They are also trying to compete with Amazon in online sales.
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I don’t think there’s anything wrong with celebrating schools, but if ed reform is “agnostic” – as they claim to be- why not also celebrate diverse public schools?
They present this as if charters are the only good or worthwhile schools, which is fine if you’re promoting charters, but NOT fine if your claim is you’re promoting “good schools”
Public schools are more than a punching bag or the useful “status quo” comparison schools. If your claim is you work for “public education” it shouldn’t be this echo chamber where public schools are used ONLY as a comparison to the preferred schools of ed reform, which are clearly charters and private schools.
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Go read Betsy DeVos speeches. They follow a pattern. There is the charter or private school she’s promoting and praising, and then this implied comparison bloc of “the status quo” – that’s how she sees public schools. As the negative her positive system replaces.
That’s just not doing her job in a country where 90% of families use the schools she disdains. It’s more than an ideological preference. It’s a deliberate decision to refuse to serve 90% of people. That’s not acceptable in a government agency. It’s outrageous and it should be corrected, or new people should replace the public employees who oppose public schools. I don’t want to pay them for this.
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his really isn’t complicated. School segregation expert Iris C. Rotberg summed it up the best:
“The primary exceptions to increased student stratification [that can be caused or exacerbated by charters] are in communities that are already so highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and income that further increases are virtually impossible. . . .”
This situation perfectly describes the relationship between segregation and charter schools in New York City, Chicago, Houston, Washington . . . the list goes on and on and on, any metropolitan area where there is hypersegregated zoned schools. The idea that a child who lives in District 23 and attends a Achievement First charter school is making segregation worse is, in a word, preposterous: that child isn’t attending a stably diverse school to begin with and there is absolutely no plan to integrate District 23’s traditional public schools.
“There is no amount of money you can put into a segregated school that is going to make it equal.” This echoes Tractenberg’s and Orfield’s conclusions: “Money can buy important things such as good preschool training, strong facilities and educational resources, if it is well targeted, but it does not typically buy the same kind of teachers, curriculum, level of instruction, level of peer group academic support and positive competition, and stability of enrollment of classmates and of faculties that are usually found in white and stably diverse schools.” I propose a moratorium on the obsessive focus on the demographic composition of charters until the traditional neighborhood public school system has left charter-going children high and dry, neatly and brutally sorted by race, comes up with real, specific, actionable plans to integrate its OWN schools.
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Tim,
As usual, you are wrong. Gary Orfield of the UCLA Project on Civil Rights said that even in segregated cities, the charters are even MORE segregated.
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I think Tim’s point — and if it isn’t, then I’ll make it my point — is that charter schools are not even close to the primary drivers of K-12 segregation, because (1) they tend to draw students from districts and neighborhoods where the public schools are already extremely segregated, and (2) with rare exceptions (e.g. New Orleans), charter schools constitute a small minority of the overall school system. As a consequence, if you could snap your fingers and immediately make all charter schools disappear, it would barely make a dent in overall levels of segregation.
Charter schools probably are making segregation “worse,” but only by a very thin margin. The big drivers of segregation, depending on the features of your local school system, are (1) segregated neighborhoods, which feed into segregated neighborhood schools, and (2) selective admissions policies that sort students by performance-indicators like test scores, grades, attendance, and the like.
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True. Segregation predates charters. But according to those who have studied segregation, charters intensify it because the charter truly don’t care about integration.
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I tend to agree with that, Diane. Charters obviously do not reduce segregation, and I haven’t seen much evidence that they seek to.
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I wish Tim or FLERP! would explain why they use a very unique definition of “diverse” which means:
Charters with disproportionately low numbers of at-risk students — and often disproportionately high numbers of white students — when compared with the school district from which said charters draw their students.
We have entered a bizzarro world where charter apologists like Tim and FLERP! claim that having a charter where only 25% of the students are at-risk in a city where over 70% of the students are at risk is something that will help all public schools be more diverse!
Maybe FLERP! can explain why having a privatized system of “diverse” charter schools which have far more than their share of affluent and middle class students and far less than their share of low-income students “helps” the other public schools in their district become more diverse?
In fact, there are plenty of “diverse” public schools but funny that “diverse” public schools actually have far more poor students than “diverse” charters!
Remember when charters say “diverse”, they almost always mean “we will make a school where most students are not poor in a city where most students ARE poor and then congratulate ourselves for being “diverse”.
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From the get-go, the charter industry has been organized to make segregated schools a feature, not a bug.
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No surprise when the roots of the current “choice movement” consist of the segregation academies that sprung up to resist desegregation.
😎
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It looks like the Century Foundation is still lost in the neoliberal miasma that it’s possible to pick and choose aspects of this project that are progressive. But that’s also been the case for NEA and AFT.
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This is shocking and disturbing and not a single journalist has picked up on it.
The Century Foundation is recognizing charters that come into districts that are largely poor and largely non-white and are praising the charters that have a disproportionately high number of middle class and affluent students (and often a disproportionately high % of white students) and a disproportionately low number of at-risk students. In many cases it is shockingly disproportionate and the % of kids who need free lunch at these supposedly “diverse” charters is a fraction of the % in the district from which they are legally obliged to “randomly” draw students.
Apparently it never occurred to Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick that every time one of these disproportionately affluent “diverse” charters opens, it means that the REMAINING public schools now have a disproportionately high number of very poor students to teach.
And they get PAID for this kind of thinking?
No doubt next year Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick will be promoting new “diverse” Medicare plans in which 75% of the senior citizens are extremely healthy in cities where only 25% of the seniors are healthy. Look at how much they “sacrifice” to take a disproportionately high number of healthy and inexpensive to insure seniors, Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick will write! Let’s have ALL Medicare programs have 75% very healthy seniors! Every single one!
How do these people get away with the kind of thinking that would give them an F in any undergrad public policy class? I guess it never occurred to Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick that their praise of charters that educate disproportionately affluent students means that the public schools now are teaching disproportionately poor students
Shameful. I think they should go work for Betsy DeVos with that kind of brilliant analysis.
Where are the diverse charters that educate the SAME percentage of poor students as are in the district? Don’t tell me that a charter that is not teaching its fair share of the at-risk kids it is supposed to teach is doing anything but making it much harder for the remaining public schools who are now left to teach disproportionately poor students.
Can you imagine if the NYC Mayor announced that from now on he was going to ONLY have public schools in every district that have 70% middle class and affluent kids and 30% poor students? Would Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick praise him?
Because that is the only logical conclusion to their study. That every public schools in NYC must have disproportionately high numbers of middle class kids and disproportionately low numbers of poor students. So that the Century Foundation will praise them as “diverse”.
A journalist should ask those two “scholars” how they make all the other poor students disappear so that public schools can model themselves after the charters they praise to highly.
Embarrassing that these people get away with such lousy grade school level research.
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” they get PAID for this kind of thinking?”
They get paid for thinking what they are paid to think and write. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It’s not research but repackaging of BS claims in the form of “squalorship” (fake “scholarship”)
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