Friday, July 27, 2012

Diverse Neighborhoods and the Charter School Movement - Dana Goldstein

Diverse Neighborhoods and the Charter School Movement - Dana Goldstein:


Diverse Neighborhoods and the Charter School Movement

My colleague Sarah Garland has written a wonderful piece for The Atlantic about a local/federal/charter school partnership to racially and socioeconomically integrate the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta. Across the country, more and more charter school movement leaders are realizing that if charters serve only poor, black, and Latino families, they will limit their potential educational reach, and will leave themselves open to criticism that they are reifying the segregated nature of American public education. Here in New York, for example, Eva Moskowitz's controversial Success Academy charter network will soon open two new schools in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Cobble Hill, where many white and college-educated families live. An explicit goal of the schools is to attact a student body far more diverse than that of the typical "no excuses" charter school. In the process, charter advocates hope to increase the base of political support for charter school expansion.
But as Sarah writes, the successful Atlanta charter she reported on, Charles Drew, is not a "no excuses" or