White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system
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It is hard, at first, to find anything wrong with the idea that some public schools should have the freedom to be a little different. This was the original pitch for charter schools, as think-tank scholars Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter recount in their recent book A Smarter Charter.
“Schools were meant to be laboratories for experimentation from which the traditional public schools could learn,” Kahlenberg told the Post’s Valerie Strauss last week.
President Obama has lavished praise on charters for this same reason,calling them “incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country.” His administration has provided more in charter school grants than any other.
It’s true that the charter movement has a sunny side. KIPP schools, for instance, mostly serve low-income and minority students, putting them through extra-long school days and imposing strict rules on their behavior. Many KIPP schools have accomplished what their public school counterparts couldn’t: yanking up test scores for kids on the wrong side of the achievement gap.
But for every successful school, there have also been failures. The research is mixed on the performance of charter schools, and it’s a mistake to believe that different is necessarily better. The question then becomes one of equity: Who gets to attend the good charter schools?
Setting aside the drama between charters and teachers unions, or complaints that charter schools lead to the privatization of public education, there has been the persistent critique that charters increase inequality by plucking advantaged students out of traditional public schools.
The most recent cautionary tale comes from North Carolina, where professors at Duke have traced a troubling trend of resegregation since the first charters opened in 1997. They contend that North Carolina’s charter schools have become a way for white parents to secede from the public school system, as they once did to escape racial integration orders.
“They appear pretty clearly to be a way for white students to get out of more racially integrated schools,” said economics professor Helen Ladd, one of the authors of the draft report released Monday.
Charter schools in North Carolina tend to be either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white—in contrast to traditional public schools, which are more evenly mixed. Compare these charts from the report:
The bottom chart shows students that attend North Carolina’s regular public schools. There is a healthy variety of schools with different racial makeups. Only about 30 percent of students attend schools that are highly segregated, meaning schools that are more than 80 percent or less than 20 percent white.
The top chart shows students at North Carolina’s charter schools. More than two thirds attend schools that are highly segregated. You can see on the chart because the histogram has two humps, one at each racial extreme.
The charts also show how racial makeups have shifted over time. By 2014, a fifth of charter schools were overwhelmingly — more than 90 percent — white. In 1998, less than 10 percent of charters were that way.
Parental preferences are part of the problem. The charter school admissions process is itself race-blind: Schools that are too popular White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system - The Washington Post:
