Archives for category: Segregation
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West Sacramento’s Charter Schools Have a Segregation Problem

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2019 //
6

 

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.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Segregation

A Billionaire Declares: Better Public Schools Won’t Fix America

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2019 //
160

 

Nick Hanauer was a big supporter of charter schools. As he explains in this fascinating article, he swallowed the Corporate Reform Dogma whole. He believed that America’s “failing public schools” were the cause of poverty and inequality. Fix the schools and—poof—poverty and inequality will disappear.

He writes:

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million each to an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

For all the genuine flaws of the American education system, the nation still has many high-achieving public-school districts. Nearly all of them are united by a thriving community of economically secure middle-class families with sufficient political power to demand great schools, the time and resources to participate in those schools, and the tax money to amply fund them. In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

By distracting us from these truths, educationism is part of the problem.

Oh, my God! Did he read Reign of Error?

I wrote exactly that! I demonstrated that the graduation rates of every group were the highest ever, the dropout rates were the lowest ever, we were never number one on international tests but consistently mediocre or less because of high child poverty rates, etc etc etc. I said that test scores were a reflection of family income and education, not a cause of poverty.

Could I be dreaming?

Then he wrote:

Whenever i talk with my wealthy friends about the dangers of rising economic inequality, those who don’t stare down at their shoes invariably push back with something about the woeful state of our public schools. This belief is so entrenched among the philanthropic elite that of America’s 50 largest family foundations—a clique that manages $144 billion in tax-exempt charitable assets—40 declare education as a key issue.

Well, of course. These are the billionaires who want to privatize public schools without the permission of the families and children who like their public schools.

Here is the kicker: Educationism appeals to the wealthy and powerful because it tells us what we want to hear: that we can help restore shared prosperity without sharing our wealth or power.

Well, this is an article you must read.

I wonder if Nick Hanauer would join the Network for Public Education and help us push back against the powerful elites that he now understands so well. Then he could join with those who understand what he has happily recognized.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Jonathan Rodrigues: When Segregation Is the Innovation

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
24

 

The privatizers got badly beaten in 2016, when they tried to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. Funded by the Waltons and the usual coven of billionaires, they asked the public to endorse a proposal to launch 12 charter schools every year, wherever they wanted to open. The referendum was overwhelmingly defeated, much to the surprise of its sponsors.

Governor Charlie Baker is a Republican who has appointed a choice-friendly State Board, so the privatizers have not given up hope for undermining democracy.

Now they are back with a proposal for “innovation zones.” 

Jonathan Rodrigues writes:

In a world where we’re more and more accustomed to jargon inherited from corporate start up world like “disruption” and “big data”, “innovation” stands out as one of the most empty vessels in which we project meaning without much thought of it.

In the education world in particular, almost anything can be “innovative”. Even bringing back purposeful segregation and differential treatment under the guise of educational opportunity. Governor Baker’s latest “Innovation Partnership Zones” may be clever, but it’s certainly not very innovative.

If only segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace had known it would be this easy to fool people, he’d had changed his 1963 speech to “innovation today, innovation tomorrow, innovation forever!”.

So what are “Innovation Partnership Zones” (IPZs), and what would the governor’s bill do? It’s important to note here this idea has prominent Democratic support as well, it was only last year that Education Committee co-chair Alice Peisch (D-Wellesley) and Senator Eric Lesser (D-Longmeadow) sponsored very similar legislation.

The bill allows groups of 2 schools or more (or one school with more than 1,000 students) to create an IPZ which would allow an outside organization to manage these schools and give the “zone” autonomy over things like budget, hiring, curriculum, etc. Essentially third-partying away the public good, but doesn’t “partnership” sounds so much better than “takeover”?

The IPZ can be triggered in two main ways.

  1. Through local initiative of school committee members, a superintendent, a mayor, a teachers group or union, and parents. .
  2. Through the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Commissioner’s choice from schools determined to be “underperforming” by high stakes testing metrics.

The process would then call for proposals jointly with an outside entity that may include nonprofit charter operators and higher ed institutions….

If past is prologue, the results should look familiar. Brown University Annenberg Institute’s 2016 report “Whose Schools?” analyzed the board composition of charter schools in Massachusetts. 60% of charter schools in the Commonwealth had no parent representation at all. 31% of charter board members were from the corporate sector, heavily from finance.

We should all look forward to our IPZs filled with executives from places like TD Bank, who certainly might live in the “region,”, but have no respect for Boston’s biggest neighborhood.

It is especially worrisome that IPZs will be inevitably pushed on communities of color, continuing a nationwide trend of stripping away voice from families of color from Philadelphia to Chicago, Detroit to New Orleans.

A 2015 Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools “Out Of Control” report examined the disenfranchisement of black and brown families through mechanisms such as appointed school boards, and state and district turnovers. In their 2014–15 analysis, there were 113 state takeover districts nationwide. 96 were handed to charter operators. 98% of affected students were Black and/or Latinx. In New Orleans, parents had to navigate 44 different governing authorities; in Detroit, 45.

The most important innovation of all would be the full funding of schools in poor communities.

He concludes:

In no place where black and brown families are the majority in the school district is the innovation of a fully funded quality public school with adequate staffing, special education services, mental health supports, art and music, full-time librarians, and school nurses ever even attempted.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Inequity, Innovation, Massachusetts, New Orleans, Privatization, Segregation

Mercedes Schneider: An Innovative “Reformer” Idea: A Return to Segregated Black Schools

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2019 //
25

 

Mercedes Schneider writes here about a peculiar development that is percolating among “reformer” groups: Bring back racial segregation!

While civil rights groups are concerned about the alarming increase in racial segregation in recent years, about the retreat of federal courts from enforcing desegregation decrees, and about the role of “school choice” in promoting segregation, a few leading figures in the “Reform” movement have decided to embrace segregation.

At a recent convening of Global Silicon Valley (GSV) at Arizona State University (ASU), “Reformers” offered a panel discussion titled: “No Struggle, No Progress: An Argument for a Return to Black Schools.”

The panel was moderated by school choice advocate Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform; its leadoff speaker was Howard Fuller, who has received millions of dollars from rightwing foundations to promote school choice among African Americans.

Schneider writes: The panel description reads like, “Since racial separation and hate crimes abound, let’s just go with it.”

School choice has predictably led to every kind of segregation–by race, religion, ethnicity, and social class, not only in the U.S., but in other nations that have adopted school choice.

Fuller’s organization, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, was the recipient of grants from the pro-voucher, rightwing Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation. BAEO was a good gig while it lasted–its revenues ranged from $2 million to $8.5 million a year. Fuller and BAEO carried the gospel of school choice to black communities, especially in the South. BAEO closed its doors at the end of 2017; the rich white philanthropists must have decided to shift their resources elsewhere.

In 2011, Schneider points out, Fuller won an award established in John Walton’s name to honor “champions of school choice,” presented at the national convention of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.

Rucker Johnson of Berkeley has written about the substantial and lasting advantages conferred by attending integrated schools. His latest book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, co-authored by journalist Alexander Nazaryan, explains why school integration was a great success, and why we must not abandon it.

I would pay to watch a debate between Howard Fuller, the well-funded advocate of a return to segregation, and Rucker Johnson, whose research demonstrates the value of school integration.

Fuller has become the black voice of separatism and segregation, a line that seems to resonate with wealthy white conservatives and philanthropists like Betsy DeVos, the Bradley Foundation, and the Waltons.

Powerful rightwing foundations like Bradley and Walton generously funded Fuller’s advocacy.

Did he use them or did they use him?

Categories Billionaires, Civil Rights, Education Reform, Philanthropy, Segregation, Walton Foundation

Education Law Center Criticizes Equity Practices in Philadelphia Charter Sector

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2019 //
9

 

The Education Law Center is one of the nation’s leading legal organizations defending the civil rights of students.

In this important new report, it presents a critical analysis of Philadelphia’s charter sector and its indifference to the civil rights of students.

I urge you to read the report in full.

When charters take the students who are least challenging to educate, the traditional public schools are overburdened with the neediest students but stripped of the resources required to educate them. It is neither efficient nor wise to maintain two publicly funded school systems, one of which can choose its students, leaving the other with the students it doesn’t want.

Once again, we are reminded that charter schools ignore equity concerns in their pursuit of test scores, that they enroll proportionately few of the neediest students, and that they intensify segregation even in cities that are already segregated.

Here is a summary of its findings:

  • As a whole, traditional charter schools in Philadelphia are failing to ensure equitable access for all students, and the district’s Charter School Performance Framework fails to provide a complete picture of this concerning reality.
  • Annual compliance metrics and overall data on special education enrollment mask high levels
    of segregation between district and traditional charter schools. Traditional charter schools serve proportionately high percentages of students with disabilities, such as speech and language impairments, that typically require lower-cost aids and services. However, they benefit financially from a state funding structure that allocates special education funding independent of student need, leaving district schools with fewer resources to serve children with more significant special education needs.
  • District schools on average serve roughly three times as many English learners as traditional charter schools, and there are high levels of language segregation across charter schools.Roughly 30% of traditional charters have no English learners at all. In addition, nearly all of the charters at or above the district average of 11% are dedicated to promoting bilingualism, suggesting the percentages at the remaining charter schools may be even further below the district average.
  • Despite provisions in the Charter School Law permitting charters to target economically disadvantaged students, traditional charters, in fact, serve a population that is less economically disadvantaged than the students in district-run schools.
  • Students in Philadelphia charters are more racially isolated than their district school counterparts. More than half of Philadelphia charters met our definition of “hyper-segregated,” with more than two-thirds of the students coming from a single racial group and white students comprising less than 1% of the student body. This is roughly six times the rate for district schools. Conversely, 12% of traditional charters in Philadelphia enroll over 50% white students in a single school. This is more than twice the rate of district schools (5%). iii

We know from other research that certain underserved student populations – such as students experiencing homelessness and students in foster care – are underserved by charter schools. For example, Philadelphia’s traditional charter schools serve
only one third the number of students experiencing homelessness compared with district schools.iv

Both the district’s own Charter School Performance Framework and national research point to systemic practices that contribute to these inequities. Among them are enrollment and other school-level practices that keep out or push out students with the greatest educational needs.

A charter authorizing system that focuses attention on academic and financial performance to the exclusion of equity incentivizes charters to continue to underserve students with the greatest educational needs. To improve equity, the Education Law Center recommends that the Philadelphia Board of Education do the following:

• Ensure that its evaluation of new and existing charters includes and monitors equitable access findings.

• Direct the Charter School Office to build upon the existing Charter School Performance Framework to better center issues of equity during the application and renewal processes, including collecting and reporting key data elements regarding equitable access.

• Grant the Charter School Office additional capacity to provide appropriate oversight, including serving as a recognized resource for parent complaints and reviewing each charter school’s policies and practices.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Equity, Philadelphia, Privatization, Segregation

North Carolina: “White Flight Academy” Turns into a Charter School to Get Public Funding

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2019 //
11

In this post on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet, North Carolina educators Justin Parmenter and Rodney D. Pierce report that a “white flight academy” is turning itself into a charter school so it can collect public funding. More than two-thirds of the state’s charter schools are more than 80% black or white.

Hobgood Academy opened in 1970 as an escape route for white children whose parents wanted to avoid sending them to integrated schools. Now Hobgood wants to convert to charter status so its parents don’t have to pay tuition. The North Carolina State Board of Education has approved the conversion, so the funding for the segregationist academy will come in large part from the funding now provided to the highly segregated public schools.

Please read the full article to understand the history of segregation and racism in Halifax County. If it is behind a paywall, let me know and I will post it in full.

 

Last month, the North Carolina State Board of Education voted unanimously to approve the conversion of Halifax County’s private Hobgood Academy to a public charter school. Halifax County ranks 90th out of 100 North Carolina counties in terms of per capita income, and more than 28 percent of its residents live below the poverty line — nearly double the national average. Hobgood’s student population is 87 percent white, while only 4 percent of those attending Halifax County Schools are white.If you read the charter application that Hobgood submitted to state officials, you might be inclined to think that the very purpose for the school’s existence is to lift children out of poverty by offering them a better education.

The application notes the “low performing” status of the public schools in the area and the “vicious cycle of poverty” that contributes to that low performance. It lays out the applicants’ supposed view that “the potential exists to turn the tide of poverty in this community through excellence in education” and refers to Hobgood as “the perfect place to impact the most vulnerable of our children.”

The real reason Hobgood is converting to a charter school is something entirely different. In the application’s section about enrollment trends, applicants admit to a “significant decline in enrollment,” acknowledging that the private school’s $5,000 annual tuition could be a barrier for some families.

A Google Site called “Let’s Charter Hobgood,” set up to organize Hobgood parents to push for the charter conversion, shows the motivation has nothing to do with extending opportunity to people who don’t currently have it.

Rather, it is for parents of students who already attend the school to be able to keep going there without paying tuition. In addition, responses to recent questions that are posted on the parent site include the statement: “No current law forces any diversity whether it be by age, sex, race, creed.” The question isn’t posted, so you’ll have to infer what it was.

Hobgood’s conversion to a charter school means the school could see a windfall of more than $2 million from the state. Of course, that money is coming out of someone else’s pocket. Remember those impoverished students Hobgood’s charter application claimed to be so concerned about? They’ll be paying much of that tab via pass-through transfer funding from Halifax County Schools.

Halifax County’s entire education budget, including community college, is $11.2 million. In the Department of Public Instruction’s most recent facility needs survey, the district reported $13.3 million in capital needs, including more than $8 million in needed renovations to existing school buildings. Financially, Halifax County school district is most definitely not in a position to be bailing out private schools.

The history of racial segregation in Halifax County is crucial to understanding what is currently playing out….

Hobgood currently receives $69,300 a year from the state’s voucher program. Once it turns into a charter, it will receive an additional $2 million a year. The population in Halifax County is almost evenly divided between whites and blacks. Hobgood Academy is 88 percent white.  The public schools are more than 90% black. The families who send their children to Hobgood will no longer have to pay tuition. The children in the Halifax County public schools will have less money for their education.
We are reminded that school choice was first advocated in response to the Brown decision of 1954 by segregationist governors and senators. Sixty-five years later, their vision is being realized.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation

The Failure of Market Reforms in Sweden

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2019 //
6

German Bender writes here about the failure of market-based school reform in Sweden.

Privatized schools that get public money, for-profit schools that get public money, the gamut of school privatization has degraded the education system of Sweden.

The main results of privatization: education inequality, falling test scores, and segregation.

Please take note, Center for American Progress, Ann O’Leary (the new chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom, former chief of staff for the Hillary Clinton campaign), and other devotees of school choice (Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, the Dell Foundation, John Arnold, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, etc.).

Categories Inequality, International, School Choice, Segregation

Henry Levin: Want Lower Test Scores and More Segregation? Try School Choice!

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2019 //
6

In this article, published in 2017, Economist Henry Levin explains the international failure of school choice.

The main effect of school choice is to privilege the advantaged and harm the have-nots.

Categories Inequality, Injustice, International, School Choice, Segregation

Justin Parmenter: School Choice in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2019 //
2

Justin Parmenter, an NBCT high school teacher in North Carolina, writes here about the rapid expansion of charter schools in his state, which is doing serious damage to public schools. Charters were not promoted in North Carolina but by Tea Party Republicans who want to destroy public schools and make money.

Charter schools are playing a damaging role in North Carolina, acting as a vehicle for resegregation of the schools.

He begins:

This week is National School Choice Week, and you’re going to hear a lot of charter school proponents talking about what a great thing choice is for families when it comes to education. Folks who are opposed to unchecked charter expansion will be derisively labeled ‘anti-choice,’ as if their views run counter to American democratic values. But the charter movement in our state is deeply problematic, and it’s important that we have a fact-based conversation about it.

On its face, choice sounds good. We expect it when we go to the store for salad dressing, when we’re looking at books at the library, or when we’re holding the tv remote. What kind of person could possibly be against others having the freedom to make choices when it comes to their children’s education? But what happens when the choices I’m making have a negative impact on those around me? What happens when those choices don’t occur in a vacuum?

Charter schools were originally intended as places of innovation, where educators could develop new approaches in a less regulated setting and collaborate with traditional public schools to improve outcomes for all. In some states, charter schools have been able to stay relatively true to that mission. Not so in North Carolina.

On a systems level, the good that charter schools are able to do is determined 100% by the policies that govern them. In North Carolina, charter school policy is a mess, and that mess is leading to some really bad outcomes for our children.

Since the cap on charter schools was lifted by North Carolina’s state legislature in 2012, the number of charter schools in the state has nearly doubled. This year we have 185 charter schools in operation, serving more than 100,000 students across the state (overseen by a staff of 8 people). Next year we’ll have 200.

The rapidly expanding charter schools siphon money away from traditional public schools and reduce what services those public schools can offer to students who remain, according to a recent Duke University study. As students leave for charters, they take their share of funding with them–but the school district they leave is still responsible for the fixed costs of services such as transportation, building maintenance and administration that those funds had supported. Districts are then forced to cut spending in other areas in order to make up the difference. In Durham, where 18% of K-12 students attend charter schools, the fiscal burden on traditional public schools is estimated at $500-700 per student. As the number of charters increases, so will that price tag.

While charter schools in some states have been used successfully to improve academic performance for low-income students, in North Carolina they’ve been used predominantly as a vehicle for affluent white folks to opt out of traditional public schools. Trends of racial and economic segregation that were already worrisome in public schools before the cap was lifted have deepened in our charter schools. Now more than two thirds of our charter schools are either 80%+ white or 80%+ students of color. Charter schools are not required to provide transportation or free/reduced-price meals, effectively preventing families that require those services from having access to the best schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Segregation

Mercedes Schneider: The Racist Origins of School Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2018 //
30

Mercedes Schneider wrote a history of vouchers and school choice called School Choice: The End of Public Education? She is aware that libertarians like to credit the origins of vouchers to Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. But, their ideas never took root in American soil.

School vouchers, and the larger concept of private schools paid for with public money, is rooted in racism.

Schneider writes:

The history of school vouchers in American K12 education is rooted in racism.

This fact is indisputable.

Libertarian economist Milton Friedman wrote his famous proposal for vouchers in 1955. Southern governors loved the idea of using public money to escape federal court orders.

She writes:

When it comes to racial integration, school vouchers have yet to “show promise.” Moreover, even though over 60 years has passed since vouchers were first used in K12 education to stymie the federal desegregation mandate, school voucher usage has yet to redeem its reputation as a catalyst for racial resegregation.

In the face of this reality, crediting Paine, or Mill, or Friedman with “the” idea for school vouchers matters little, for it is an idea that only fares well on paper.

Vouchers have also fared poorly in studies of academic achievement.

They seem to be best at reinforcing Inequity.

Categories Accountability, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers
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