Carol Burris former teacher, former principal, now executive director of The Network for Public Education, writes in The Progressive about the segregative effects of charter schools.
Burris writes:
As we approach the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a crucial question arises: Why are our nation’s schools experiencing increased segregation despite progress in neighborhood integration? A new study by Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California provides a startling answer—more than half of the blame is due to the expansion of charter schools.
While the courts’ lifting of desegregation orders played a role, the researchers’ analysis reveals that segregation would be approximately 14 percent lower if not for the expansion of charter schools.
In an article on the report, Laura Meckler of The Washington Post provided the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina as an example. Researchers scored segregation on a scale of 0 (matching district demographics) to 1.0 (complete segregation). In 1971, following a court-ordered desegregation plan, the district’s segregation score fell to 0.03. In 1991, it remained low at 0.10. Today, there are more than 30 charter schools in the district, and the district’s 2022 segregation score has risen to a whopping 0.44.
As the Network for Public Education, of which I’m the executive director, and dozens of national and local organizations reported to the U.S. Department of Education in 2021, North Carolina’s education department aided and abetted the expansion of “white-flight” charter schools using money it received from a grant program. One of the schools that received funding was a former white-flight private academy, Hobgood Academy, which is now a charter. Other grants went to North Carolina charters in disproportionately white suburbs of Charlotte that were attempting to self-segregate their schools from the more racially diverse Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.
And, as we demonstrated in our recent report, the expansion of right-wing charter schools like the Cincinnati Classical Academy, which received a federal grant to expand, increases segregation with website messaging that encourages the enrollment of white children from conservative families, resulting in racially imbalanced student demographics.
Do we see the same increases in segregation resulting from public school choice? Although the Reardon and Owens study did not explore that specific question, a separate study recently released by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA indicates that public magnet schools are far less segregated than charter schools.
The report, written by Ryan Pfleger and Gary Orfield, examined more than 100 districts and compared the student demographics of their charter and magnet schools. The findings were clear: The charter sector has a higher proportion of intensely segregated schools than the public magnet sector, and this gap is widening over time.
According to the study, “the proportion of intensely segregated charter schools, with less than 10 percent white students, increased from 45 percent to 59 percent from 2000 to 2021. A different trend was observed for magnets. The share of magnets that were intensely segregated was nearly the same in 2000 and 2021: 34 percent and 36 percent.”
If we hope to heal the racial, socio-economic, and political divides in our nation, public schools in districts with policies designed to increase integration among schools and within schools offer our best hope.
Unfortunately, charter schools, whether by chance or, in some cases, by design, are erasing the gains made by those who bravely fought for integration seventy years ago.
Dr. Burris is a BEAST with her research! Kudos!!!
xoxoxoxo
Yes, indeed…charters increased segregation. I suspect this is one of the main reasons for Charters and of course, Vouchers. Both are BAD!
Thank you, , Carol Burris. 👍🙏👍
By the time all the vouchers schools, many of which are white flight academies, are added to the education landscape, that 14% more segregation will be higher and public education budgets will be lower while serving the neediest students.
THE RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.” The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
In the 1990’s, hedge fund billionaires discovered that they could profit from the school choice movement and so they took over by founding corporate chains of charter schools that have reaped billions of dollars since then through various mechanisms, such as REITs that collect exorbitant lease and rental profits from charter schools…at the expense of public schools.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR DISMANTLING THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT is to simply require that charter schools file THE SAME, EXACT PUBLIC DOMAIN QUARTERLY AND ANNUAL BUDGET REPORTS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FILE.
That common sense requirement can be easily “sold” to taxpayers because the natural instinct of every taxpayer is to make certain that there is accountability that shows how their tax dollars are spent. Every state in our nation should have that same common sense accountability requirement for charter schools. It’s time for NEA to launch a national campaign for charter school accountability.
CHARTER SCHOOL FINANCIAL FRAUD: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate “school choice” charter school operators that the IG investigation declared: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.”
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that is — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers, that is, THE PUBLIC. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties or are religious organizations. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64
Having the same auditing requirements for charter schools would improve fiscal accountability. Unfortunately, when the politicians are in on the scam, they are unlikely to pass any such laws. Unaccountable public dollars are a feature of charter schools, and the GOP refuses to support any form of regulation.
If I may presume to do so, I would like to remind participants in these fora that the Network for Public Education relies on donations to keep its lights on and its doors open. I’ve actually set up a monthly donation to Carol Burris and her excellent organization.
May I encourage you to do same?
Thank you, Mark!
Perhaps this piece by philosopher Jason Stanley in The New Republic on education in a fascist America will be of interest: The End of Civic Compassion | The New Republic
Good read, thanks for pointing it out.