Wendy Lecker: Charter schools -- civil rights rhetoric vs. reality
Education "reformers" often proclaim they are carrying on the tradition of great civil rights leaders, employing the rhetoric of that movement while in reality pushing measures that exacerbate inequality and impact most harshly on children and communities of color-like school closures, privatization, and over-testing. Last week, noted civil rights expert Gary Orfield, of UCLA's Civil Rights Project, issued a report on Connecticut school integration that included an indictment of the practices of Connecticut's most-practiced purveyors of civil rights doublespeak -- charter schools. The report also called out state officials for their willful blindness to charter school practices.
The report, titled "Connecticut School Integration," praised the state for some of the strides made in desegregating schools. However, it noted the well-documented "hyper-segregation" of charter schools, which undermines Connecticut's progress on integration. The report further remarked that national education policies, including the expansion of charter schools, ignore race and poverty and have "consistently failed" to meet the goal of improving education for our neediest children.
Connecticut law on segregation is far-reaching. While the federal constitution only prevents intentional segregation, our Supreme Court, in the 1996 decision in Sheff v. O'Neill, prohibited "unorchestrated," i.e. de facto segregation. Thus, state officials have an affirmative obligation not just to prevent intentional segregation, but to eliminate even unintentional segregation.
Most Connecticut charters are intensely segregated. They routinely fail to serve English Language Learners, students with disabilities and often our most impoverished students.
Yet, as the Civil Rights Project writes, Connecticut state officials have refused to do anything to stem the tide of charter school segregation. The report observes that the education commissioner could require changes in a charter if that school does not make measurable progress in reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation. It remarks that the state board could make this goal a prerequisite to granting a charter. Yet, as the report goes on to note, these state officials, those with the express obligation to reduce segregation, have consistently chosen to do nothing to prevent charter school segregation and its effects, including exacerbating racial, ethnic and economic imbalance in the host school districts.
Indeed, one wonders if Connecticut officials had forced Hartford's charters to abide by desegregation policies all along, would the city have reached its Sheff goals long ago, saving the state millions of dollars?
School integration is fundamental to advancing the democratic purpose of education. As the court noted in the Sheff decision: "If children of different races and economic and social groups have no opportunity to know each other and to live together in school, they cannot be expected to gain the understanding and mutual respect necessary for the cohesion of our society."
Decades of evidence prove that school integration achieves this goal, reducing stereotypes and enabling adults to function successfully in a variety of settings. The benefits of school integration are more lasting and meaningful than the empty pursuit of higher test scores.
In 1996, our highest court clearly articulated the state's responsibility to reduce segregation. Yet almost 20 years later, state officials allow charter school segregation to flourish. The State Board of Education continually rubber-stamps charter applications, trampling community opposition, and ignoring their duty to prevent charter school segregation and over-concentration. Even a new policy the state board announced, which applies to charter renewals only and not initial approvals, fails to require that charters serve the same students that their host district public schools serve.
This session, the legislature's Education Committee considered a bill that would have placed a moratorium on charter school approvals. Yet, our political leaders did not even have the will to move this bill out of committee. And now the governor wants the legislature to fund new charters while refusing to provide public schools with any ECS increase.
In his report, Dr. Orfield exhorts the state to bring charter schools in line with Connecticut's Wendy Lecker: Charter schools -- civil rights rhetoric vs. reality - StamfordAdvocate:
