Bill Raden of Capital & Main writes here about racial segregation in West Sacramento’s charter schools.
Capital & Main has done an outstanding job covering the charter industry in California.
Raden writes:
Representing the newest form of green line in West Sacramento are charter schools — publicly funded but privately operated academies that are free from many of the regulations governing public schools. Although that freedom was once supposed to encourage innovation, the door it has opened has also made charters the latest flavor of school segregation. For a state like California, which enshrines diversity in a statutory balancing test that requires charter schools to “achieve a racial and ethnic balance among its pupils that is reflective of the general population” of their districts, unregulated school choice can be like putting out a fire with gasoline.
West Sacramento is hardly alone when it comes to racially isolating charter schools. A 2017 Associated Press study was the latest to find rampant self-segregation in the national charter sector, reporting that charters are “vastly overrepresented” among so-called apartheid schools — those with at least 99 percent minority enrollments. Even in majority-minority California, which scores higher on charter school integration than other states, black students have been shown to typically move from a traditional public school that is 39 percent black to a charter that is 51 percent black.
“The problem with charters is their fundamental premise that if something’s not public it’s going to be better,” says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project (CRP) and a research professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education. “We learned in the civil rights period that you had to have requirements on [school] choice if you’re going to get a positive outcome. But a lot of these charter schools are set up in a way that explicitly [segregate]. They don’t reach out for other groups of kids and have no integration policies at all, which raises big constitutional issues…”
The tendency of charters to isolate students by race and class is baked in by what education researchers call selection biases — features that attract certain kinds of families at the expense of others. Because California doesn’t fund transportation for charter schools, for example, simply by being a charter in the Golden State is to select out the most disadvantaged, single-parent families that live the furthest away from the campus. Impose a complicated application process, or require pricey uniforms or “voluntary” parent labor, and that effect is magnified.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The problem with charters is their fundamental premise that if something’s not public it’s going to be better,”
We need to ask politicians that promote privatization this question. There is no evidence to show that private charter schools are better; yet in state after state, it is a guiding assumption of takeovers. What we do know that state takeovers usually produce poor results, but states continue to inflict this punishment on public schools. We also know that private charter schools generally increase segregation. Yet, many states continue to spend public money on private schools that intensify segregation.
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Charters and Vouchers are about Jim Crow.
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and stepping in early to teach ‘upstart’ populations to ‘know their place…’
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Not surprised that in California, “black students have been shown to typically move from a traditional public school that is 39 percent black to a charter that is 51 percent black.” In Los Angeles, that sort of segregation seems much more stark than 39 and 51. There are neighborhoods in downtown and South L.A. that are almost entirely Latinx with charters that are almost entirely African American. The Latinx students in public schools, many ELLs in need of extra support, suffer a drain of funding to the segregated charters. The social and learning effects of segregation are bad enough, but the loss of financial resources including increased class size is the real racial dagger. In Los Angeles, the two-mile radius around most schools is very diverse. The only solution, therefore, is to go to school with thy neighbor.
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Many readers of this blog are aware of a long and deep history of segregated schools, thanks to Diane Ravitch and other historians of education.
That ugly history is now plainly installed in the promotion of charter schools. In other words, this is not a problem of the charter school model, but a feature of the charter industry, especially when charters achools are linked to promotions of “choice” policies.
The charter industry is actively promoting schools that are segregated, e.g., black students only and black owners for the schools. The 74 Million is promoting Roland Martin’s organized multi-city campaign arguing that “school choice means black choice.” https://www.the74million.org/?s=roland+Martin
See this post on the same topic https://www.the74million.org/article/allen-why-we-need-more-black-led-charter-schools-and-what-ive-learned-in-atlanta-about-the-challenges-of-running-them-well/
See also promotions of Howard Fuller’s work on choice as black choice at the Walton-funded charter-loving 74 Million website. https://www.the74million.org/article/bradford-fuller-stewart-liberating-black-kids-from-broken-schools-by-any-means-necessary/
Not enough people are paying attention to who else has been funding segregated charter schools. As usual, I dived into the database of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) for some examples of financial support for racially and ethnically segregated schools.
In 2018 B&MGF sent $600,000 to Education Leaders of Color Inc. to “expand and elevate the voices and perspectives of education leaders of color in the national charter school debate.” Key staff and advisors listed at the Education Leaders of Color Inc website are from TFA, the New Teacher Project (TNTP) and other charter-centered programs.
B&MGF has sent over $9 million to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials NALEO Educational Fund for advocacy… in tandem with funds to UnidosUS, over $10 million with $7.5 million explicitly “to support expansion of the Charter School Development Initiative into new sites and to create new early college charter high schools and redesign existing charter high schools.” Add another $6,752,627 “to develop a network of new charter schools across the United States.” Add the Raza Development Fund grant of $6,000,000 “to be used to provide facilities support and solutions for charter public schools in Washington State.”
The B&MGF has also funded charter school development through grants to the Asia Society, where 344 articles appear about the Asia Society’s ”International Studies Schools Network.” Not all of the schools in the network are charter schools, but the imprints of the Gates-funded Common Core are noteworthy at the website. Moreover, the B&MGF invested $17. 3 million to start this network. https://asiasociety.org/international-studies-schools-network/our-model
I am sure that other data-diggers can find many more example of explicit and implicit promotions of segregated charter schools, especially in the Walton Foundation grants among others.
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The Fordham Institute is trying to pitch this as a plus for charters. It just released a report saying that black students in charter schools are more likely to have black teachers and that this is a good thing. But segregation is NOT a good thing. We’ve been through this. Separate is not equal. It’s astonishing that we still have to be making this argument.
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