Segregating Surbubia: Difficult but Apparently Not Impossible
Posted on October 30, 2013
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Others around me have for some time been raising concerns about the emergence of boutique, suburban charter schools. Until now, I’ve largely blown off those concerns in part as I’ve questioned just how much sorting a charter school can achieve in a relatively homogeneous suburban area.
Suburbs have their own unique portfolio of schools. One might find in any leafy suburb near a major metropolitan area a very fine local public school district, perhaps a private catholic school in certain regions of the country and in many areas, an elite private independent day school or two – oft named “day school” or “country day school.” These portfolios have been in existence, in some cases, for centuries. At some future point, I may discuss more extensively the public private balance issue and the role that elite, and less so, private schools play when embedded in otherwise elite communities that also have relatively elite public school systems.
Rarely would one expect to find the charter school movement trying to infiltrate this environment, adding that other element to the portfolio. And if and when this does happen, what niche do they try to fill? On the one hand, one might try to establish a charter that handles the “difficult” cases