New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination”
Last week this blog explored some of the ways the expansion of school choice ends up creating injustice and inequality. The National Education Policy Center just published a new report, How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination, in which Julie Mead of the University of Wisconsin and Suzanne Eckes of Indiana University further investigate one particular aspect of the same topic: how privately operated charter schools and private schools receiving publicly funded tuition vouchers fail, often quite legally, to protect the civil rights rights of their students and staff.
Mead and Eckes explain: “Our review of relevant laws indicates that voucher and charter school programs open the door to discrimination because of three phenomena. First, federal law defines discrimination differently in public and private spaces. Second, state legislatures have largely ignored the issue of non-discrimination while constructing voucher laws and have created charter laws that fail to comprehensively address non-discrimination. And third, because private and charter schools have been given authority to determine what programs to offer, they have the ability to attract some populations while excluding others.”
The new report briefly summarizes the history of attempts to ensure that public schools protect the rights of all students: “Whether and to what degree schools should be available to all children without regard to race, national origin, religion, immigration status, first language, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability has a long litigious history. While it is routine now to observe that public schools must enroll all students, that understanding evolved over time beginning with litigation in the 1950s. As illustrated by the decisions in Brown v. the Board of Education, Lau v. Nichols, Plyler v. Doe, and Mills v. the Board of Education of the District of Columbia, it took many brave plaintiffs and unflinching jurists to reach the conclusion that the term ‘public’ excludes no one and that equal educational opportunity defines our collective obligation to our nation’s children. Congress reinforced those rulings by enacting a series of federal laws to emphasize that discrimination has no place in public education… Despite such hard fought judicial and legislative battles, public schools still struggle to realize that aspirational ideal. Persistent achievement gaps, funding disparities, over-representation of students of color in special education, under-representation of students or color in advanced placement and honors programs, and the continued overuse of suspension and expulsion all suggest that public schools and the state and local officials who operate them have much work to do before equal educational CONTINUE READING: New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination” | janresseger
