Are Charter Schools Public Schools?
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- Written by Sara Roos
- 02 Aug 2013
EDUCATION POLITICS - It depends on what you mean by “public”.The term doesn’t seem to have a well-nailed-down meaning. As befits an emotionally-freighted term, there are many components of its definition. Where you happen to invest your personal priorities, governs how this word — which is essentially an avatar, a placeholder for a whole host of ideas and representations — is defined.
The first definition in Apple’s computer dictionary states: “of or concerning the people as a whole”. So ‘of the people as a whole’ would suggest that a public school, as a subset of “the people”, should look like “the people” demographically. Charter schools do not. They do not nationally and they do not locally.
Charter schools are disproportionately black and brown and pooroverall. And as well, some charter schools are disproportionately white (click on each school separately for demographic profiles) and/or wealthy. Charter schools have the – perhaps unanticipated and unintended, but extant nonetheless – result of entrenching segregation, both socioeconomically and racially, within our public school system.
And to the extent that in isolating subpopulations disproportionately they are no longer reaching a representative subset of “the people”, they are not ‘of the people’. To the extent that this unfortunate reality of “re-segregation” is detrimental to “the people”, they are destructive of that notion of ‘public-ness’. Therefore, presuming that you happen to prioritize a notion of “the people” to include a mixture of one and all, independent of their social
