Have West Sacramento Charters Become Self-Segregated Enclaves?
Borders, boundaries and barriers have been a way of life in the lower Sacramento Valley since the Gold Rush days. The newest form of green line here are charter schools.
West Sacramento is hardly alone when it comes to racially isolating charter schools. A 2017 Associated Press study was the latest to find rampant self-segregation in the national charter sector, reporting that charters are “vastly overrepresented” among so-called apartheid schools — those with at least 99 percent minority enrollments. Even in majority-minority California, which scores higher on charter school integration than other states, black students have been shown to typically move from a traditional public school that is 39 percent black to a charter that is 51 percent black.
“The problem with charters is their fundamental premise that if something’s not public it’s going to be better,” says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project (CRP) and a research professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education. “We learned in the civil rights period that you had to have requirements on [school] choice if you’re going to get a positive outcome. But a lot of these charter schools are set up in a way that explicitly [segregate]. They don’t reach out for other groups of kids and have no integration policies at all, which raises big constitutional issues.”
“Dual-language programs have been a way that many people have seen to integrate schools. But they can be used to segregate kids.”
A landmark, 2010 CRP study on school choice and segregation found that schools specifically CONTINUE READING: Have West Sacramento Charters Become Self-Segregated Enclaves? | Capital & Main
