Charter Schools: What Would Dr. King Say?
Responding to a defense of charter schools’ record on integration, education professor and blogger James Horn argues that where there’s smoke there is indeed fire.
It is unfortunate that the charter school industry now finds itself on the wrong side of educational progress and civil rights history, even as spokesmen like Nelson Smith, writing at Miller-McCune.com last month, engage in a public relations campaign aimed to minimize awareness of thesegregated conditions that exist in the majority of American charter schools today.
Whether located in the poorest, brownest neighborhoods of theTwin Cities or in the leafiest, whitest suburbs of North Carolina, charter schools often engage in a form of intensely segregated schooling that either contains or isolates minorities in urban centers, while offering