Charter segregation adds layer in Brown v. Board debate
Sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregated schools, the problem of separate and unequal hasn't gone away — and some say charter schools are part of the problem.
About 6 percent of Nashville public school students attend charter schools, but with the state's blessing and start-up money behind it, they're poised for exponential growth. The problem with that, critics say, is that charter systems pay more attention to student achievement than to racial diversity and, in some cases, end up with neither.
Charter advocates here and nationwide counter by listing a number of limitations on their recruitment, including the facts that they draw from already-segregated traditional schools and that school choice means just that — parents don't have to pick them. But at the same time, there's a new movement within the charter community locally and nationwide to open schools with a premium on racial balance.
Today, just before Saturday's 60th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that integrated public schools, renowned University of California-Los Angeles desegregation researcher Gary Orfield releaseda new report on the state of racial balance in U.S. schools.
Segregation overall is increasing after the 2007 Supreme Court decision ending the practice of assigning students based on race, and federal courts dropping oversight of school districts' desegregation plans, the report says. Tennessee is 13th most segregated in the nation, it says, with only a quarter of black students attending majority-white schools when two-thirds of public school students in the state are white.
Orfield insists charter schools should seek diversity — and states should enact laws that force them to — recruiting by socioeconomic status that often follows racial Charter segregation adds layer in Brown v. Board debate: