The Danger of California Charter Schools
Black and Latino students in California are attending schools as racially segregated and unequally funded as those of the “separate but equal” era of late 19th-century America. And parents eager to give their children a better education are responding by enrolling them in charter schools.
But although charter schools are intended to offer students better educational opportunities, they also pose a danger of making inequities worse than they were.
That’s according to a new study by Preston Green, professor of education and law at the University of Connecticut, and Joseph Oluwole, associate professor of counseling and educational leadership at Montclair State University.
In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Transformative Leadership & Policy Studies, Green and Oluwole compare charter schools, which by design have greater latitude from state rules and regulations than traditional public schools, to the “schools of excellence” established by the African-American community in the wake of the 1869 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson.
Those schools – so-called “separate but equal” – were characterized by high-quality teachers and administrators determined to prepare students for the racism they would face as adults in a segregated society, a stern but caring educational environment, and a partnership with their communities to overcome the deprivations caused by unequal funding.
I think we are not taking seriously the dangers that privatization creates.— Preston Green
While charter schools can offer black and Latino students a modern-day version of that opportunity, there are outside entities that put financial gain ahead of educational quality looking to open charter schools in these communities, warn Green and Oluwole.
Unfettered expansion of the schools driven by these groups could further drain the educational resources of these communities, creating conditions even worse than those in the Jim Crow-like era after Plessy.
“A lack of restrictions in California’s charter school regulations could potentially create a situation that would be even worse than Plessy, as a result of black and Latino communities losing control of education funding allocated to them,” says Green.
California is certainly not the only state attempting to offset segregation and funding inequality with charter schools, but a complex set of factors in that state has heightened the risks associated with them. A series of court decisions and ballot initiatives have limited the ability of local school districts to raise taxes to pay for education. That has left the funding of schools largely up to the state, but the state failed to adequately do so.
In 2013, state lawmakers enacted a funding formula aimed at correcting that, funneling $18 billion in supplemental grants to school districts, based on their population of English language learners and low-income students – an initiative that a study shows has increased math scores and graduation rates among poor black and Latino students.
That’s where the danger lies, says Green. If outside organizations are allowed to develop charter schools without restrictions, they could drain these resources away from already underfunded traditional public schools serving poor minority students, he says.
In 2017, the state supreme court shut down one such strategy: resource centers.
Before that ruling, rural districts fueled the growth of resource centers – non-classroom-based independent study programs typically housed in office buildings, strip malls, and even former liquor stores located outside the authorizing school district’s borders. Rural districts would create resource centers to generate revenue for themselves from the authorizing fees, even Continue reading: The Danger of California Charter Schools - UConn Today:
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