The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently released a major study of segregation and charter schools by Dr. Helen Ladd and Muvzana Turaeva of Duke University.
Dr. Samuel Abrams introduced it here.
The issue of school choice and segregation has been central to education policy debates for decades. In his initial argument for vouchers, published in 1955, Milton Friedman conceded that segregationists stood to employ vouchers to enroll their children in all-white private schools instead of public schools mandated to integrate a year earlier by Brown v. Board of Education. But to Friedman, the answer was not regulation but moral suasion. Friedman’s opinion was rendered technically moot in 1976 by Runyon v. McCrary, which barred private schools from making admissions decisions based on race, yet it nevertheless indicated a fundamental problem with systems of school choice.
With the introduction of charter schools in the early 1990s, commentators raised concerns about school location, inadequate transportation, contracts mandating significant parental involvement, and shared parental proclivities as implicit mechanisms or pathways to segregation. In “Parental Preferences for Charter Schools in North Carolina: Implications for Racial Segregation and Isolation,” Helen F. Ladd and Mavzuna Turaeva add substantially to the literature validating these concerns.
Using data for the nearly 11,000 North Carolina families who transferred their children from traditional public schools to charter schools in 2015-16, Ladd and Turaeva document that the migration of white, though not minority, switchers from traditional public schools to charter schools increased segregation. “We find that by switching to charter schools that are whiter than the traditional public schools they leave behind,” they write, “white switchers contribute to racial segregation across schools.” At the elementary level, 67 percent of white switchers enrolled in charter schools with lower shares of minority students; at the middle-school level, 72 percent of white switchers did so.
To buttress their analysis, Ladd and Turaeva employ a conditional logit model to estimate revealed preferences. To infer parental preferences by race as well as socioeconomic status, Ladd and Turaeva use five criteria to define the value of charter schools for parents: racial composition; proximity; academic achievement; availability of transportation and lunch; and mission. Ladd and Turaeva conclude that with these dimensions considered together, it is clear that white parents disproportionately favored white charter schools and exhibited a pronounced aversion to significantly minority charter schools.
With this working paper, Ladd, a professor emerita of public policy and economics at Duke University, and Turaeva, a doctoral candidate in public policy (with a specialization in economics) at Duke as well as a research associate at the Duke Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, build on research Ladd did with Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein for an article published by Education Finance and Policy in 2017 on growing segregation across the charter sector in North Carolina from 1999 to 2012. In addition, Ladd and Turaeva’s analysis complements a 2019 NCSPE working paper on charter schools in Kansas City by Patrick Denice, Michael DeArmond, and Matthew Carr, who found a disproportionate number of white students transferring from traditional public schools to new charter schools from 2011 to 2015.
Lucid, rigorous, and supported with eight tables of telling data, this study advances our understanding of school choice and raises important questions about how choice systems should be designed.
Samuel E. Abrams
Director, NCSPE
“Unless policymakers are unwilling to require that individual charter schools be racially balanced, the expansion of charter schools is likely to promote racial isolation.”
For years our consciousness has been conditioned to believe that school choice is the “civil rights issue of time.” We need to wholly reject this false assertion. The foundational values and application of school choice are racist. This is a documented conclusion. We should repeat this truth as many times as we can in the media. We should not be passive when school choice advocates try to euphemize their message.
By the way in last night’s dumpster fire, Trump talked about a national curriculum because “they are teaching people to hate America.” We as educators should not allow this falsehood to stand. It is an affront to all the teachers that work to teach our young people, and it is an outright lie.
what he and his cronies mean with this statement: “they are teaching people to see White Male Americans as problematic”
Since busing, or the inevitability of busing, began to be used as a strategy to integrate white families have used their choices to leave integrated schools. I first experienced this as a student in 1970 when parents in Chattanooga saw what the courts were doing and they pulled their students out of the City Schools, sending them to county schools or private schools, two years prior to actual busing. I have also seen this happen to urban schools as an educator. Families leave schools as soon as they perceive changes in diversity that they interpret as a drop in the academic culture. Families do not act in loyalty to school communities but out of narrow self interest.
In Chicago, Urban Prep Academies’ website promotes itself as an all boy high school. In various media, UPA is promoted as a Black boy or Black men or Black male high school. 😐
UPA is located in predominately Black communities of Chicago. ✔️
As a Black man, I object the word “boy” for its racist history and for the fact 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 year old males are teenage males, not boys. 😐
I’m curious, how UPA with its own posted non-discrimination policy and similarly posted Chicago Public Schools’ policy is allowed to operate, considering how CPS eliminated single gender high schools in the 1970s. 😐
While I attended and graduated from Chicago’s Austin High School, it was never marketed as Black only. In fact, two neighborhood White males graduated with me. 🙂
Are there any states where segregation isn’t a huge factor in the growth of charter schools?
This data viz shows how charters in NC tend to have students from higher families. But when analyzed in the context of each schools socio-economic profile, public schools still outperform charters when it comes to student performance on the Reading/Language Arts section of the 2019 testing. Even though many of the high performing students have moved from public school to the charters. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/tom.brown1147/viz/NorthCarolina-CharterPublic/Sheet1