64 years after Brown: How private religious schools are taking America backwards on segregation

64 years after Brown: How private religious schools are taking America backwards on segregation:

64 years after Brown: How private religious schools are taking America backwards on segregation

Thursday marked the 64th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1954 decision, which established legal racial segregation in America as unconstitutional.

It was also a time for reflection for civil rights attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union, which played a pivotal role in fighting the Brown case. The organization continues that fight today, as many schools regress toward being nearly as separate and unequal as they were when the Supreme Court made its 1954 ruling.

“There was a long-fought period of states and school districts fighting back against desegregation,” ACLU Racial Justice Program director Dennis Parker said in a phone interview. “We’re now in a period where a lot of our schools are becoming more segregated. You no longer have the racial explicit limitations, but you have other things that challenge explicit integration.”

These newer anti-integration elements include the maneuverings of some religious private schools and voucher programs — two of the more insidious but lesser-known institutions driving school resegregation today.

School vouchers are certificates of government funding designed for low-income K-12 students that allow them to take the government money that would have gone toward them attending a public school and use it to attend a charter or private school instead. The ACLU has routinely sued states across the U.S. for implementing voucher programs that defund public schools in favor of sending students to private ones.

“One of the sad consequences of a lot of voucher programs has been the increasing of segregation,” Parker said. “Having a voucher is not always enough to get you into a private school. It ends up being a way to give tax breaks to middle-class families to have kids go to private schools. The overall effect is public education funding is used by private and religious schools.”

t’s a problem decades in the making. White communities in the South began establishing non-Catholic Christian private schools in the 1960s to keep segregation alive after Brown forced integration. And today, the fallout is not just a Southern phenomenon. Private religious schools in the Midwest and elsewhere have high tuition rates that disproportionately poor parents of color often can’t afford to pay. As a result, these schools are nearly as segregated today as public schools were in the South during Jim Crow, according to Parker.

Elder High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, was founded as an all-male Continue Reading: 64 years after Brown: How private religious schools are taking America backwards on segregation: 

Cash Incentives for Charter School Recruitment: Unethical Bribe or Shrewd Marketing Technique?

Cash Incentives for Charter School Recruitment: Unethical Bribe or Shrewd Marketing Technique?:

CASH INCENTIVES FOR CHARTER SCHOOL RECRUITMENT: UNETHICAL BRIBE OR SHREWD MARKETING TECHNIQUE?

IN CASH-STRAPPED SCHOOL districts, where traditional public schools and charters compete over funds, schools face acute financial pressure to attract and retain students. In recent years, some charter schools have discreetly turned to a controversial recruitment strategy: offering low-income families cash stipends or other prizes in exchange for drawing new students into their schools.

The practice is a not-much-discussed part of the school choice debate, and it’s not well-known how widespread it is either. This is in large part because schools are typically under no obligation to report it. Critics say these incentives amount to unethical bribes targeting primarily low-income families, though defenders say they’re just shrewd marketing techniques.

The KIPP charter network is one of the largest and most prestigious charter school networks across the country. In December 2016, KIPP Adelante, a San Diego charter, sent a newsletter out to enrolled families offering substantial cash stipends to those who could help recruit new fifth graders to their school.

The promotion read:

If you know a 5th grader at another school and you get them to come to school here, you will receive a premium of $500 to offset your child’s educational expenses. In addition, the family you bring to KIPP Adelante will receive a premium of $100 (also for educational expenses) for enrolling their child here. Bring two 5th Graders to the school – get $1000! These students have to attend our school for at least 2 weeks before you can collect your premium.

A former KIPP Adelante teacher shared the newsletter with The Intercept, troubled by the ad targeting a school where 99 percent of students enrolled are children of color, and 98 percent qualify for free-and-reduced-price lunch.

That same year, the school offered a smaller cash incentive program to KIPP Adelante employees to help recruit fifth graders. The specific drive to recruit those students can be explained by the school’s unique makeup. In San Diego, elementary schools tend to go through the fifth grade, with Continued Reading; Cash Incentives for Charter School Recruitment: Unethical Bribe or Shrewd Marketing Technique?: