Data don’t tell full story in charter ’segregation’ study
Anti-charter school boards and superintendents no doubt are bookmarking a report that found that charter schools nationwide and in California are more racially and ethnically segregated than traditional public schools. They’ll cite the study, by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, as a rationale for denying a charter application or creating new demographic obstacles, under the guise of integration, that many urban charter schools cannot overcome.
That would be disastrous for minority families who choose charters as an alternative to their neighborhood failing schools.
“Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards” found that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in nearly every state and large metropolitan area in the country. Nationally, 70 percent of black charter school students attend schools where at least 90 percent of students are minorities. In California, the study found that whites and African-American students disproportionately attend charter schools, although that varies regionally. Charter schools comprise 4.4 percent of the state’s 6 million students, including 9 percent in Los Angeles Unified.
As the study points out, there has been a trend toward racial isolation in America’s schools for several decades, as urban areas have become more stratified by race and income. Widening disparities in academic achievement between white middle class children and minorities and poor children have followed.
Charter schools shouldn’t be held accountable for de facto segregation caused by poverty and housing costs. The best charter schools in California’s urban areas are graduating large percentages of students from high school and sending them on to college, offering a path out of racial and geographical isolation and into the economic mainstream. They’re doing this by setting up shop in neighborhoods where schools are failing and deliberately targeting students at risk of dropping out.
UCLA Professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, dismisses this as an irrelevant, though perhaps a noble goal. “You can’t decide to just serve one group of kids,” Orfield told the San Francisco Chronicle. “If you’re taking public funds, you’re subject to civil rights laws.”
The Civil Right Project report gave me a sense of déjà vu – and offered an omen of what may lie ahead for some charter applicants. Three years ago, San Jose Unified School rejected a proposal for an elementary school charter that would serve low-income Hispanic children because the school would not reflect the district’s overall ethnic mix, which is one-quarter white, one-quarter Asian and three-eighths Hispanic. It didn’t matter that the school planned to locate in racially segregated, low-income downtown. Saying the school would further racial segregation, in violation of the district’s integration consent decree, was specious legal talk to justify a denial. (Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary won an appeal to the county board of education and has become one of the state’s high-achieving charters.)
Recognizing that charter schools’ admissions are not restricted by district boundaries, the UCLA study looked at charter enrollments by 15 regions. But the results may include distortions of geography and district oddities. I suspect that the high proportion of whites in charters in some areas opposed to charters may include home schooled children under charter umbrellas. In the San Jose-Sunnyvale region, two elementary school districts converted to charters to escape state ed code restrictions. They are in largely white, middle class neighborhoods, and race and ethnicity were irrelevant factors.
The study suggested that that the federal government restrict funding to charters that achieve racial diversity. But most charters have no money for transportation or marketing – and shouldn’t be tying up money that could be better used for classroom instruction or longer days.
Federal civil rights lawyers should be scrutinizing instances, particularly in the South, where charters are a transparent tool for white re-segregation. But the Obama administration shouldn’t alter its strategy of promoting charters in urban neighborhoods where integration is neither practical nor relevant to turning around troubled schools.
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I agree that in many urban areas schools are likely to be segregated regardless of whether they are charters or regular district schools — and the relevant question would be whether charters were more segregated than other schools in the district.
However, I don’t think you have to go to the South to find districts where this is the case. How many Bay Area charter schools have as diverse a mix of students as the “regular” schools in the area?
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The recent misguided UCLA study regarding ethnic diversity in charter schools proves again that old truism that “In politics no good deed goes unpunished!”
Charter leaders and foundations that support the development of charter schools purposely have focused millions of dollars and tremendous energy helping the most underserved students and communities – which are predominantly (but not always) communities of color. The study faults them for focusing on the communities with the greatest need and the most difficult to serve students.
The author of the study believes that diversity for diversity sake is far more important that educational quality. Ask the parents whose children are trapped in chronically failing school and they are clear what they want for their children is a good education. The study then promotes a failed and very expensive social engineering approach – magnet schools. It also advocates destroying the freedom that makes charter work in the process – force them back into the failed system. Right – so these high performing charter schools can be reduced to nothing more than the chronically failing schools that are in these communities now – what a solution.
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It appears the major point has been missed here. It is not that a charter, or some other configuration of a school, can skim the most motivated and well supported students in an at-risk community and send those few students on to college. Or that charters supporting the less than 2% of CA’s students being home-schooled are somehow targeted by the UCLA study.
The point is that our nation, since “Brown v,” has committed itslef to the ideal that “separate is never equal.” The fact that college entry can be offered to few children in a struggling, poverty stricken, crime ridden, community is not reflective of our ideal. In fact, the existence of such schools, and their real existence is in question since many charters can use advertising as opposed to data to present their “success” to the community, is contrary to our ideals as it allows the state and the public to be diverted from the need to create a level playing field for all the students in the communities: Equitable and sufficient funding for the schools and social services is a start. Then closing the living wage gaps/ affordable housing gaps/ health care gaps/ quality pre-school gaps/ etc., etc. And providing that funding and closing those gaps over several generations. Those are solutions. These charters are the shiny false front put on a chronic civil rights problem. “Separate is never equal.” What part of that is unclear?
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I think the study misses many things. As a mother, I have looked into charter schools. They do more, and do beter, with less money than traditional public schools. However, the charters in this area all use, to determine admissions, the economic status of the family. They want to serve under-served and lower economic families. This is a good thing. They don’t skim among those families, they take al. Charters are great. They are able to do more schooling with less money than a traditionalpublic school. They actually focus on the students and the learning process. I think they should be encouraged. If the result is that the charter is less diverse than ideal, oh well. As long as the charters keep their focus on the students, they should be encouraged as a viable alternative to traditional public schools.
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Charter schools don’t live up to the ideal of being integrated as required by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. That deserves an “Oh well.” Right.
The fact is that charter school performance has twice as good a chance of being worse than regular public schools than better. See studies done by the National Center for Educational Statistics, and arm of the USDE, and the recent chater study done by Stanford University, AND the charter study done by UCLA (this one on achievement). No, charter schools do not “do more” they do less. The information is available but uncomfortable for “romantics.” Oh, well. School seggregation is worse today, in general, than it was during the time of “Brown,” and that is being exacerbated by charters. That violates the US Constitution. Oh, well.
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Equitable school funding and charter schools are certainly not mutually exclusive. And waiting several generations for adequate housing and health care is no answer to parents whose kids are trapped now in bad schools. They deserve the option of sending their children to high performing charters in their neighborhoods, and they’re doing so in droves in East San Jose, Oakland and Los Angeles. Why deny them that choice?
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I took a look at the demographics for the virtual charters serving homeschoolers in my area. School #1 is 69% white, 11% Latino, 10% multiracial, 7% Asian, and 2% African-American. School #2 is 75% white, 13% Latino, 6% African-American, 4% Asian, and 1% multiracial. School #3 is 73% white, 12% Latino, 6% African-American, 5% Asian, and 4% multiracial.
The traditional public school my children are zoned for is 69% white, 13% Latino, 13% Asian, 2% African-American, and 1% multiracial.
I would look at those numbers and conclude that the diversity in the virtual charters is pretty darn similar to the diversity of the school children in our area.
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As a counter point to Crimson Wife… A district in our area has two charter schools. One is 77% white, 7% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 14% other. The second is 77% white, 12% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 9% other. The district as a whole is 40% white, 49% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 9% other. I know that charter schools focused on serving minority students are what make the news, but at least in this area, the on the ground reality seems to be that for every charter school focused on disadvantaged student, there’s another with an over-representation of white, middle class students.
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There you go again, Fensterwald. All the claptrap about “high performing charter schools.” You too don’t want to look at the all mighty data showing 17% of charter school kids outperform regular public school kids and 37% do worse. The rest are no different. Some charters “perform” by offering a demeaned curriculum of test prep only, and some, like KIPP, “perform” by eleiminating those who don’t perform. The data is “out there.” The rest of the “performance” is advertising. To paraphrase Obama talking about the economy: We didn’t get into the achievement gap overnight and we aren’t going to get out of the achievement gap overnight.” Charter schools are the “silver bullet” of school reform. Siver bullets worked wonders for the Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger was make-believe. Grow up.
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Gary,
You seem to misinterpret and selectively cite from charter school research. First, the CREDO research you refer to did indeed find twice as many public charters doing worse than regular public schools, as those doing better, *on the average*. What you forgot to mention is that this finding was after (mostly) only one year of attending public charter school as most of the studied cohort was made of such students. When one disaggregates students by their time at the public charter, the longer they attended, the better they scored compared to their peers at regular public schools. It is only natural to see some dip within the first year after changing school.
Second, you conveniently forget to mention another study that appeared at about the same time also from Stanford, by Caroline Hoxby, that found strong advantage to public charters in NYC. Finally, you also omitted yet another CREDO study published even more recently that also shows advantage to public charters over regular public schools in NYC.
So, unsurprisingly, it seems that it all depends on the charter, and on the regular school. Not all public charters are equal, nor are all regular public schools equal. It does seem though that charters do, on the average, at least about as good job as regular schools, except that they spend, also on the average, only about 70% of the cost per student of regular schools. Anything wrong with that?
On the issue of racial composition, isn’t it true that while the demographics in public charters differs somewhat from the *average* demographics in the states, it does not differ significantly from the demographics of metropolitan areas, where most charters are located? The report itself says as much. So where exactly is the segregation you rave against?
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To expand on what Ze’ev has written, CREDO did a state-by-state breakdown. It found that African-Amerian charter school students do “significantly better” than their district school counterparts in reading but not better in math. Hispanics on average did no better than Hispanics in traditional public schools in reading but significantly worse in math. But “students in poverty enrolled in charter schools do significantly better in both reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.”
Given your long affiliation with the California Federation of Teachers, Gary, let’s be straightforward: is your main concern protecting union jobs from charter competition?
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Folks may have left this strand behind, but I have been too busy to get back to it. It is important though.
You are correct, John, that I have a long association wit the CFT. I have a longer (35 years) association with the public school classroom. From that perspective I am sensitive to all of the “reforms” and “silver bullets” thrown my way over the years that were all going to revolutionize education as we know it. Didn’t happen.
Didn’t even begin to poke around the edges of what is well known about student achievement. ETS, CA’s testing vendor, states that research on its own tests shows 2/3rd of in school achievement are dependent on outside of school factors(family, community, health care, etc.)
Most “reform” is directed at getting the 1/3rd tail to wag the 2/3rds dog.
Neither I nor CFT feel charter schools are in “competition” with the union(s). We have organized and will continue to organize charter school teachers. I helped write a charter that freed a school from the dysfunctional mandates of NCLB and protected the collective bargaining rights of the teachers. Charters certainly have their appropriate place. Starting a Montessori, Waldorf, or magnet school for example. Being careful that there is equitable access and that the school doesn’t exacerbate any possible seggregation problem needs to be looked at though.
John ,let me sum up your, and Ze’ev’s, positions on charter achievement: they do about as well as regular public schools. Is that what the charter concept was all about? Is that why RTTT considers a school “turned around” by simply becoming a charter? I don’t think so. To every serious question about education “charter” is the answer. Charters are supposed to outperform regular schools because they are inventive (they aren’t) or because they inject all of those market forces that brought the economy to the brink of destruction.
Why do you think charters resisted any accountability measures so stridently during the RTTT debates in the Assembly? Beacause they’re so confident of their performance?
And charters allegedly work at 70% of the cost of regular public schools? Has anyone looked at the foundations and private sector “sponsors” of many of these schools? The most expensive population public schools work with are special education students. Charters have routinely excluded those students. That is a significant cost saving. It is also illegal.
And, Ze’ev? Hoxby? She’s not AT Stanford. She’s at the Hoover Institution which is situated at Stanford. I don’t belive Hoover even tries to suggest they do objective research. They do conservative position papers. Hoxby is a notorious shill for the right. The only peer review of her work I’m aware of was by Arizona State Univ and they call her work a Hoax-by. Actually I made Hoax-be up. The Education Policy Research Unit situated at Arizona State U gave her a “Bunkum Award.”
A guy named Colemen developed a report for Congress back in 1966 on school achievement. Based on this report the school busing program was instituted. Coleman also said (not an exact quote): “If you really want to do something about low school achievement you need to do something about poverty.” The US started to do something about poverty but those programs were dismantled beginning with Reagan. Poverty, especially poverty for children, is higher in the US than any major industrialized nation. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is growing ever greater. That gap matches neatly with the achievement gap. Just a coincidence?
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Gary: It is unfortunate that you ignore the most salient aspect of charter schools—that they can (and should!) be easily closed if they underperform. Just starting a new public school, whether charter or not, does not guarantee much. Similar to starting a new business—you think you are a winner, but you may be wrong. The difference is that a charter school has the ability to respond faster and better because it is not encumbered by unions and thousands or rules. And, if it can’t make it, it should—and often does—close its doors. Like any failed business. Compare that with a failed non-charter public school that fails—it continues failing, and failing, … almost forever. Some charter people object to such accountability, but overwhelmingly most understand and accept that it is a part and parcel of their charter. On all the other issues, you seem to swing a very broad brush. Hoover is not a part of Stanford? Is SLAC a part of Stanford? Ask Hoover; ask Stanford. Or ask those protesters that wanted to remove Hoover from Stanford for many years. The Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State doesn’t like Hoxby? She was good enough for Harvard, and she is good enough for Hoover, but is not good enough for ASU? You mean to tell me that people like Bill Ayers don’t like Hoxby??? How unsurprising and how flattering to Hoxby! Coleman report is very dated. Things have changed a lot since then, including the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of Mao, even if some people seem not to have read any new research since. Demographics is NOT destiny—it is just correlated with it. It is unfortunate that many educators refuse to look at highly successful public schools with disadvantaged population like Kelso in Inglewood, like the Oakland Charter Academy, like the East Palo Alto Charter School (not the “Stanford” one!) and draw the conclusions. If demographics dictated destiny, parochial schools would be an utter failure. They are not. Finally, to answer your question about the connection between the wealthy and poor gap in US and our education gap as compared to other nations, there is none. Our “poor” are often better off than many “non-poor” elsewhere and, in any case, we spend more than almost anyone in the word—in purchase adjusted dollars—on education. If our education is not doing as well as others’, it is not because the lack of resources. Re-read the story of Kansas City that hit the news recently yet again. KC tried to spend its way out of educational failure with court-ordered flood of cash. Twenty years later they ended up with the same educational failure, having blown away untold billions of dollars.
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