Charters among most segregated

By 1996, it appeared that systemic school segregation — in which attendance policies herded students into separate buildings by race — had been untangled in Ohio.

A federal judge released Segregation hinders education / A6

Cleveland that year from 23 years of court-ordered busing, and Columbus abandoned busing for desegregation and returned to “neighborhood schools”

and “alternative schools,” a forerunner of school choice.

But months later, the Ohio legislature launched a pilot project for the state’s first charter school. Over the next two decades, that program has evolved into a system so segregated by race that by 2015, more than 5,000

minority students attended 25 charter schools that didn’t have a single white student — even though 72 percent of Ohio’s students are white.

According to data compiled by The Associated Press nationally and analyzed locally by The Dispatch:

■ In the 2014-15 school year, more than 24,600 minority students, most of them black, attended 107 Ohio charters that each enrolled 10 or fewer white students.

■ More than 6,000 black students attended charters where 99 percent or more

of the students were black, concentrations that statistically put the schools at risk of having fewer students who reach proficiency in reading and math.

■ Almost a quarter of the state’s charters had

enrollments that were 90 percent black or higher. During Columbus City Schools’ federal desegregation case in the late 1970s, schools where 90 percent or more of the students were black were labeled “one-race black schools” and used in court as potential evidence of segregation.

The high concentrations of minorities attending charters isn’t by design, said Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy for the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Instead, it’s a byproduct of parents who are unhappy with their district-school choices.

“That is no one’s goal,” Aldis said. “No one wants a racially divided publicschool system. But we also want to make sure we’re protecting families’ choices to attend whatever schools they want.”

The high proportion of black students choosing to attend bricks-and-mortar charters simply means that black parents want their children in a different school, and “you can’t blame them,” Aldis said.

“It’s not that simple,” responded Iris Rotberg,

“There’s no question that charter schools tend to increase segregation. To have people in separate schools, even though they’ve presumably chosen those schools, is not a plus for society.”

a research professor of education policy at George Washington University who has studied school segregation.

The re-segregation of schools via charters didn’t happen solely by chance and parental choice. Instead, she said, it is a product of historic housing and school segregation, combined with poverty, that results in many black students electing to attend segregated charters. Given different options, they might not, she said.

“There’s no question that charter schools tend to increase segregation,” Rotberg said. “To have people in separate schools, even though they’ve presumably chosen those schools, is not a plus for society.”

Not only are charters creating new segregated schools, but they’ve also done so without delivering on the promise that freemarket forces would drive better educational results. Originally envisioned as a cure for poorly performing urban districts, charters have performed poorly as a group on Ohio’s school report cards.

For example, scores released earlier this year showed that of 266 charters that were graded on the number of students who passed state tests and how well they performed on them, 85 got a D and 165 an F. Only 16 schools, about 6 percent, could boast at least a C.

Why charters are separating the races can be traced in part to Ohio law, Aldis said.

Unlike most states, Ohio allows charters to set up only in school districts that are designated “challenged” due to low proficiency-test scores. Originally, Ohio lawmakers limited charters specifically to the “Big 8” urban districts such as Cleveland and Columbus where high concentrations of poverty correlated with low scores. Later, lawmakers expanded charters to any district in “academic emergency” or “academic watch” — designations that signaled the lowest-performing schools.

The tie between poverty and student achievement, which has been known for decades, means that Ohio’s charters are more likely to be in poor, often minority, neighborhoods.

“The geographic restrictions are why we have a lack of diversity in Ohio charter schools,” Aldis said.

Ohio then underfunds these largely black schools by relying solely on state financial aid, except in Cleveland, where charters get some local property-tax dollars under a special state law. Charters spend about half the per-student government funds that district schools do, according to a report issued in 2013 by Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s Education Commission. “Funding inequity between district schools and charter schools has implications for buildings, teacher pay and transportation of students,” the Columbus Education Commission wrote.

For white students, school choice means something vastly different: not traveling to a school at all. Almost 80 percent of Ohio’s white charter students attend an internet charter from home via computer, the AP data shows.

Of the more than 34,500 “full-time equivalent” students attending one of the state’s internet charters in 2014-15, 73 percent were white, which almost perfectly matches the statewide proportion of white students. Aldis said that’s probably because, unlike bricks-and-mortar charters that draw from nearby neighborhoods, internet charters take in students from anywhere in the state.

But the online charters popular among white students have their own problems: The state’s largest, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, maintained such inadequate attendance data that it was recently forced to repay taxpayers about $80 million over two school years, and a Dispatch analysis found that up to 70 percent of ECOT students logged on for class so infrequently that they could be truant under Ohio law.

— Iris Rotberg, a research professor who has studied school segregation