Charter Expansion in Durham, NC Separates Children into Winners and Losers
From Durham, North Carolina comes the story of the destabilization of an urban public school system by rapid expansion of charter schools. Ned Barnett, the editorial page editor of the Durham News & Observer, and author of this guest post reprinted in Valerie Strauss’sWashington Post column, declares that Durham’s charter school “experiment is spinning out of control.”
Since the North Carolina General Assembly voted to lift the cap on authorization of charter schools across North Carolina, the number of the publicly funded but privately run charter schools has risen from 100 in 2011 to 127 this school year, with 26 projected to open in the fall of 2014 and 62 under consideration for 2015.
The growth of charters has been faster in North Carolina’s urban areas, where Barnett points out, the local per-pupil payments are higher. Over 12 percent of Durham County’s students now attend charters. “Durham County provides $3,086 per student… When a child enrolls in a charter school, that money goes with him or her.”
Not only is funding flowing out of the traditional public schools that continue to educate more than 87 percent of Durham County’s children, but, according to Barnett, the rush to charters is resegregating the schools by economics and by race: “The charters’ effect on the district schools has been a loss of middle-class children of both races and a concentration of poor and