Racial isolation at odds with goal of improved education
MILWAUKEE — Charter schools are among the nation’s most segregated, an Associated Press analysis finds — an outcome at odds with their goal of offering a better alternative to failing traditional public schools, critics say.
National enrollment data show that charters are vastly over-represented among schools in which minorities study in the most-extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.
The problem: Those levels of segregation correspond with low achievement levels at schools of all kinds.
In the AP analysis of student achievement in Ohio and the 41 other states that have enacted charterschool laws, plus the District of Columbia, the performance of students in charter schools varies widely. But on average, schools where minorities are 99 percent of the students — both charters and traditional public schools — have fewer students reaching state standards for proficiency in reading and math.
“Desegregation works. Nothing else does,” said Daniel Shulman, a Minnesota civil-rights lawyer. “There is no amount of money you can put into a segregated school that is going to make it equal.”
Shulman singled out charter schools for blame in a lawsuit that accuses Minnesota of allowing racially segregated schools to proliferate along with achievement gaps for minority students. Minority-owned charters have been allowed wrongly to recruit only minorities, Shulman said, as others wrongly have focused on attracting whites.
Even some charter-school officials acknowledge this is a concern. Nearly all the students at Milwaukee’s Bruce-Guadalupe Community School are Hispanic, and most speak little or no English when they begin elementary school. The school set out to serve Latinos, but it also decided against adding a high school in hopes that its students will go on to schools with more diversity.
“The beauty of our school is we’re 97 percent Latino,” said Pascual Rodriguez, the school’s principal. “The drawback is we’re 97 percent Latino ... Well, what happens when they go off into the real world where you may be part of an institution that’s not 97 percent Latino?”
The charter-school movement born a quarter of a century ago has thrived in large urban areas, where advocates say they often aim to serve students — typically minorities — who have been let down by their district schools. And on average, children in hyper-segregated charters do at least marginally better on tests than those in comparably segregated traditional schools.
For inner-city families with limited schooling options, the cultural homogeneity of some charters can boost their appeal as alternatives to traditional public schools that are sometimes seen as hostile environments. They and other charter supporters insist that these are good schools, and they dismiss concerns about racial balance.
“We’re just happy with the results,” said Araseli Perez, a child of Mexican immigrants who sent her three children to Bruce-Guadalupe. Her youngest child, Eleazar, now in seventh grade, is on the soccer team and plays the trumpet at the school, which boasts test scores and graduation rates above city averages.
There is growing debate over just how much racial integration matters. For decades after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, integration was held up as a key measure of progress for minorities, but desegregation efforts have stalled, and racial imbalances are worsening in American schools.
Charter schools have been championed by the U.S. education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and as the sector continues to grow, it will have to contend with the question of whether separate can be equal.
Vanessa Descalzi, a spokeswoman for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said today’s charters cannot be compared to schools from the Jim Crow era, when blacks were barred from certain schools.
“Modern schools of choice with high concentrations of students of color is a demonstration of parents choosing the best schools for their children, rooted in the belief that the school will meet their child’s educational needs, and often based on demonstrated student success,” Descalzi said. “This is not segregation.”
Charter schools, which are funded publicly and run privately, enroll more than 2.7 million nationwide, a number that has tripled over the past decade. Meanwhile, as the number of non-charter schools holds steady in the U.S., charters account for nearly all the growth of schools where minorities face the most-extreme racial isolation.
While 4 percent of traditional public schools are 99 percent minority, the figure is 17 percent among charters. In cities, where most charters are located, 25 percent of charters are over 99 percent nonwhite, compared with 10 percent of traditional schools.
School-integration gains achieved over the second half of the 20th century have been reversed in many places in the past 20 years, and a growing number of schools have student bodies that are poor and mostly black or Hispanic, according to federal data. The resegregation has been blamed on the effects of charters and school choice, the lapse of courtordered desegregation plans in many cities, and housing and economic trends.
The Obama administration and some states created programs to promote racial and ethnic diversity in charters, but they have been applied unevenly, according to Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Penn State. School choice, she said, leads to stratification unless it is designed in a way to prevent it.
“Word spreads by networks that are segregated,” said Frankenberg, who has found that black, Latino and white students in Pennsylvania choose charters with higher racial isolation when they have options that are more diverse.
The options to promote diversity depend entirely on what is available under state law, according to Sonia Park, director of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, a 2-year-old network of 100 schools that are deliberately cultivating integration. Only some places have weighted lotteries, transportation budgets for charter students, or the ability to draw students from urban and suburban districts.
Decades of research have shown that schools with high percentages of minority students historically have fewer resources, less-experienced teachers and lower levels of achievement.
About half of U.S. students reach state proficiency standards in traditional public schools, and on average, charters are only a few percentage points behind. Among schools that are 99 percent minority, however, only about 20 percent reach proficiency levels at traditional public schools, and about 30 percent do so at charters, according to the AP analysis.