It’s time to irrigate New Haven’s charter school deserts

In a country built on the freedom to choose — whether that’s Verizon or AT&T, Hulu or Netflix, Dunkin Donuts or Krispy Kreme — it’s hard to understand why we don’t give poor families the opportunity to choose their schools, just as middle- and upperincome families can do via private schools or buying into the right neighborhood.

The advent of charter schools in the mid 1990s was supposed to change all of that by leveling the playing field for poor families. These are independently run schools of choice, meaning that students are not assigned to them because of where they live, but because families choose to enroll their child in them.

Many charter schools are specifically opened to serve disadvantaged youngsters in urban areas — and rigorous research has shown that most do a fine job on that count. Yet, until last month, no one had ever determined whether we’ve been overlooking neighborhoods in America that are home to lots of poor children but lack charter schools.

Our organization’s new study, Charter School Deserts: High-Poverty Neighborhoods with Limited Educational Options, did just that. The lead author, assistant professor Andrew Saultz of Miami University, defined “charter school deserts” as areas of three or more contiguous census tracts with moderate or high poverty and no charter elementary schools. He found that, of the forty-two states that allow charter schools, thirty-nine of them have at least one desert each.

Yet of all the locales across the country desperate for charter schools, portions of New Haven are among the areas that need them most, as we were able to determine via an interactive website that accompanies our report. The New Haven area has only three elementary charter schools, leaving those in many highpoverty neighborhoods, including the southwestern sector, where the poverty rate is consistently over 40 percent, without options. The children who inhabit these communities struggle academically; no doubt their parents want better choices for them. But rather than have access to oases of learning, these youngsters are stuck in a charter school desert.

And policies designed to curb charter growth, despite long charter waitlists, are likely to blame. Connecticut’s charters receive less funding than their traditional public school counterparts. And the process to gain approval to open new charters is overly arduous. Prospective operators must seek to gain approval from as many as three entities, including the state board of education, a local board of education, and the state’s general assembly.

And even if one obtains board approval, they might never open if legislators don’t appropriate funds. Such anti-charter policies prevent the proliferation of better choices for New Haven’s most disadvantaged children.

There is, nevertheless, hope. Lawmakers can make funding more equitable and empower able and willing authorizers to more easily open the schools that families want. Only then will the desperate demands of parents be met. Only then will deeply disadvantaged children finally be able to attend the high quality schools they want and deserve.