Wake County school board criticizes charter schools
The issue of competition from charter schools hung over the Wake County school board’s recent two-day retreat.
In the past three years, Wake's charter-school enrollment has increased 54 percent to reach 9,577 students this school year. During the Saturday and Monday meetings, board members discussed the impact of competing with charter schools while also accusing charter schools of resegregating schools.
Charters came up in the course of talking about the limits of using student assignment to promote diversity and what kinds of programming the district can use to compete for students. Charter schools are taxpayer-funded public schools that are exempt from some of the regulations that traditional public schools must follow.
Charters, along with home schools and private schools, reduced the school system’s percentage of the county’s students – aka market share – to 81.1 percent last school year. With 157,180 students, Wake is the largest school system in North Carolina.
On Saturday, school board member Susan Evans talked about how offering small, innovative schools could help the district compete with charter schools.
“The other thing that we’ve got to continue to think smart about is how we maintain our market share and how we remain attractive to those families who can make other choices to go to private schools and charter schools,” Evans said.
“The additional competitive nature in our market of charter schools and other alternatives does create somewhat of a political hot potato to go back to practices that may have been in place in the mid-’80s of just moving people to a more diverse environment,” school board member Bill Fletcher said Monday.
All the talk about competition with charter schools raised concerns from school board member Jim Martin on Monday.
“In our discussion, it frequently comes up we’re trying to compare about competition with charters,” Martin said. “I think we need to be really cautious about that comparison.
If we look at a lot of the choice of charters, it has been a choice to resegregate. We don’t want to be involved in that competition.”
Martin was talking about how charter schools in Wake County tend to have either much higher percentages of white students or higher percentage of black students than the district. Not many charters mirror the school district’s demographics.
Martin said the district has already got enough magnet schools and innovative programming that he wanted to talk more about what they can do for most of the schools as opposed to having more one-off schools.
School board member Christine Kushner followed up Martin’s remarks by talking about how magnet schools help Wake provide choice in an “ethical way,” unlike charter schools. Like Martin, Kushner has had children attend the magnet program.
“That is where the strength of the magnet program – which is nested in those overall valuesWake County school board criticizes charter schools | News & Observer: