Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor, has long been the nation’s foremost chronicler of racial segregation in schools. According to today’s Washington Post, a new study by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project shows that public charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional schools.
“As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools,” the report concludes.
This assertion seems suspect on several grounds, and it illustrates the pitfalls of viewing the public charter school movement through the frame of the nation’s great school integration battles of the 1960s and 1970s.
For one thing, minority families are freely choosing charter schools. In the bad old days of Jim Crow, they were forced to attend segregated schools. Later, as many whites fled the cities to avoid sending their children to integrated schools, black families were left behind and had no choice but to attend their local district school. As Orfield and others have documented, this “re-segregation” in impoverished urban neighborhoods was a disaster for big city school systems.
Public school choice arose in Minnesota in the late 1980s to give parents the option to send their children to schools outside their local districts. The charter school idea was conceived in part as a way to bring innovative public schools to the students, rather than forcing them to travel to other districts to find them.
As it happens, Washington is in the vanguard of the public charter movement (full disclosure: I’m a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board). About 84 percent of charter school students here are black, compared with 78 percent in traditional public schools. Why have so many charters located in poor and working-class minority neighborhoods? Because it is precisely the kids in those communities who urgently need better education options. The city’s regular public schools have historically ranked near the bottom in comparisons of major urban education systems, although Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michele Rhee have launched a determined effort to lift their performance.
The city’s 58 charter schools have given low-income black and Latino children something they never had before: a choice of where to attend school, as well as an array of innovative learning programs tailored to diverse interests and learning styles. That 28,000, or 38 percent, of D.C.’s students have exercised that choice — in effect voting with their feet — attests to the need for new options. And the shrinking of the traditional school sector’s “market share” was no doubt a big factor behind Fenty’s decision to take it over.
The important question, as Charter School Board Vice Chairman Brian Jones observed to the Post, is not the racial composition of charters, it’s whether they are providing a better education than traditional schools.
The answer is fiercely contested in the research community. Here the evidence is mixed: Many of the District’s best schools are charters, but not all charters are performing well. That’s why our Board has shut down four schools and accepted the voluntary surrender of charters from seven more since 2003.
There’s considerable irony here. When I was advocating for charter schools back in the early 1990s, many Democrats in my native Virginia and other southern states were suspicious. Given the region’s bad racial history, they feared that charters would become a new, publicly funded version of the old “segregation academies” – private schools to which white families turned to avoid sending their children to school with blacks. That’s one reason Virginia has lagged in charter school innovation.
In this respect, the Orfield report indirectly raises a very interesting question: Why aren’t there more charter schools in white neighborhoods in Washington and other major cities? Given that the dismal reputation of urban education is a chief catalyst for suburban flight, more charters might be a good way to keep more middle-class families (white and black) in the urban core.
If charters are less racially diverse than other public schools, it’s largely because they are cropping up in the urban communities that desperately need school innovation and choice. Since many charters aim at closing the educational achievement gap between white and minority students, it seems perverse to cast them as agents of school segregation.
There is a civil rights issue here, but with all respect to Gary Orfield, it’s not segregation. It’s that too many low-income black, Latino, and immigrant students are trapped in dysfunctional urban school systems.