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Sunday, May 29, 2011

Schools Matter: Challenging Charter School Segregation Almost 60 Years After Brown

Schools Matter: Challenging Charter School Segregation Almost 60 Years After Brown

Challenging Charter School Segregation Almost 60 Years After Brown

Once considered hothouses of educational innovation, charter schools have become corporate-run testing sweatboxes of segregation and subjugation of minorities in America's urban centers. In suburban areas of the South and Southwest, charters remain segregated, too, but in the form of milky white dream schools with rich curricula, highly-qualified teachers, and new facilities bristling with technology. Just like in the heyday of Jim Crow.

The question remains: will white neolibs like Duncan and Gates continue to ignore the chance to incentivize desegregation, and will the half-million dollar a year black executives like charter CEO Geoffrey Canada continue to support segregation, and will the Wall Street hedge funders continue to drive wedges between black parents and the NAACP with their phony astroturf groups?

A piece from the New York Daily News on a recent epiphany from a charter supporter:
About 90% of students attending charter schools in New York City are minorities. This has provoked some to accuse charter schools of creating "racial isolation" and rolling back the integration efforts that started with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954.

At the national level, UCLA's Civil Rights Project issued a report lamenting that "charter schools enroll a disproportionate share of black students and expose them to the highest level of