Segregation Is Worse in Charter Schools: a Q & A with Julian Vasquez-Heilig
In New Jersey, where I live and work as an educator, there are eighty-eight charter schools.
Seventy-three of these charter schools are located in municipalities with poverty rates above the national rate. Of the 23,795 black students enrolled in New Jersey charter schools, 93 percent attend charter schools in municipalities whose poverty rate is above the national average—compared to only 52 percent of white students.
Unfortunately, charter schools have exacerbated segregation like this in many other states, too.
A new study in Education Sciences by Julian Vasquez-Heilig—the newly named dean of University of Kentucky’s College of Education and, like me, a Public School Shakedown fellow with The Progressive—found that the rate of double segregation by race and class is
Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig is the newly named dean of University of Kentucky's College of Education.
substantially higher in charter schools than in traditional public schools.
Vasquez-Heilig and his co-authors, T. Jameson Brewer of the University of North Georgia College of Education, and Yohuru Williams of the University of St. Thomas College of Arts and Sciences, analyzed publicly available data to confirm what public school advocates have said for years: Nationally, higher percentages of charter students of every race attend “intensely segregated” schools.
I had an opportunity to speak with Vasquez-Heilig about his study and the urgency to address the hard truth of his findings.
Q: What questions were you were looking to answer with this study?
Vasquez-Heilig: So what we really wanted to know is, are charter schools more segregated, when you look at the state-level data, the national level data, and the local level data. We wanted to determine if the one reason why charter CONTINUE READING: Segregation Is Worse in Charter Schools: a Q&A with Julian Vasquez-Heilig - Progressive.org
