Racist history of charter school movement?

[Deleted]

Why the racist history of the charter school movement is never discussed



By Christopher Bonastia, AlterNet



As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present.



The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.



Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders' strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: "We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program," he wrote. "Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with 'em."



Though the county ultimately refused to sell the public school buildings, public education in Prince Edward County was nevertheless abandoned for five years (1959-1964), as taxpayer dollars were funneled to the segregated white academies, which were housed in privately owned facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge. Federal courts struck down this use of taxpayer funds after a year. Still, whites won and blacks lost. Because there were no local taxes assessed to operate public schools during those years, whites could invest in private schools for their children, while blacks in the county -- unable and unwilling to finance their own private, segregated schools -- were left to fend for themselves, with many black children shut out of school for multiple years.



Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states and localities also enacted "freedom of choice" plans that typically allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable legally, they sought other means to eliminate "undesirables."



Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned, "Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can't possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches." (Mays vastly underestimated the determination of individual black families and federal officials.)



These nefarious motives may seem a far cry from the desire of many charter school operators to "reinvent" public education for students whom traditional public schools have failed. In theory, these committed bands of reformers come with good intentions: they purport to bring in dedicated teachers who have not been pummeled into complacency; energize their students by creating by a caring, rigorous school environment; and build a parent body that is inspired (in some cases compelled) to become more involved in their children's education both inside and outside the school. And in some cases, charter schools deliver what they promise. In others, however, this sparkling veneer masks less attractive realities that are too often dismissed, or ignored, as the complaints of reactionaries with a vested interest in propping up our failed system of public education.



The driving assumption for the pro-charter side, of course, is that market competition in education will be like that for toothpaste -- providing an array of appealing options. But education, like healthcare, is not a typical consumer market. Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain "clients" who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes -- in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the "good risks," while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.



Charter school operators (like health insurers who exclude potentially costly applicants) have developed methods to screen out applicants who are likely to depress overall test scores. Sifting mechanisms may include interviews with parents (since parents of low-performing students are less likely to show up for the interview), essays by students, letters of recommendation and scrutiny of attendance records. Low-achieving students enrolled in charters can, for example, be recommended for special education programs that the school lacks, thus forcing their transfer to a traditional public school. (More brazenly, some schools have experienced, and perhaps even encouraged, rampant cheating on standardized tests.)



Operators have clear motives to avoid students who require special services (i.e., English-language learners, "special needs" children and so on) and those who are unlikely to produce the high achievement test scores that form the basis of school evaluations. Whether intended or otherwise, these sifting mechanisms have the ultimate effect of reinscribing racial and economic segregation among the students they educate -- as the research on this topic is increasingly bearing out.



A 2010 report by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, "Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards," uncovers some troublesome facts in this regard. "While segregation for blacks among all public schools has been increasing for nearly two decades, black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools."



In the first decade of the 2000s, charter school enrollment nearly tripled; today around 2.5 percent of public school students are enrolled in charters. Blacks are overrepresented in charter schools (32 percent vs. 16 percent in the entire public-school population), whites are underrepresented (39 percent versus 56 percent), and Latinos, Asians and American Indians are enrolled in roughly equal proportions in charters and traditional public schools. These snapshots mask considerable variation. In the West and some areas of the South, it appears that charter schools "serve as havens for white flight from public schools," according to the Civil Rights Project.



There are also preliminary indications that some charter schools under-enroll students qualifying for free lunch and English-language learners, thereby reducing the enrollment of low-income and Latino students, but data is limited in these areas, as it is on non-test-related factors such as graduation rates and college enrollment. How can we compare the performance of charters versus traditional public schools if we don't know whether they are enrolling the same types of students? At the national and state levels, policymakers are pushing for the rapid expansion of charter schools on the basis of hope rather than evidence.



This points to a larger historical issue. The widespread enthusiasm for and rapid proliferation of charter schools also appears to mirror a persistent issue in American education: expanding new programs before we know if they work, and how successes might be replicated on a larger scale. As the historian Charles M. Payne observed, "Perhaps the safest generalization one can make about urban schools or school districts is that most of them are trying to do too much too fast, initiating programs on the basis of what's needed rather than on the basis of what they are capable of." As charter schools face the uncertainty of contract renewal (which occurs typically at the three- to five-year mark), they may be tempted to overlay a multitude of seemingly innovative instructional strategies without sufficient monitoring of effectiveness.



Some schools do adopt approaches that seem to help students make demonstrable gains in achievement tests. (There are ongoing debates about the extent to which increases in test scores reflect authentic hikes in skills and knowledge, as opposed to a mastery of test-taking techniques.) But even when we identify charter schools that appear to improve performance in relation to students with similar characteristics in the public schools, the question becomes one of scaling up. The concept of charter schools is that they will all be distinctive, with different mixes of students, teaching philosophies, school environments and so on. In theory, other schools -- traditional public and other charters -- will learn what works, and replicate these innovations.



This has proven terribly difficult to do with successful public schools; doing so with a small, idiosyncratic charter school geared toward students who love the cello poses even greater hurdles. When researchers from the RAND Corporation studied charter schools in Philadelphia, they noted that "with so many interventions under way simultaneously…there is no way to determine exactly which components of the reform plan are responsible for [any] improvement" -- though ultimately they found that privately operated schools produced no more successful outcomes than their traditional public counterparts.



As important as applying successful techniques to other schools is an issue at the other end of the spectrum: when to conclude that a charter has failed. Policymakers such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who have sold charters as the route to educational salvation may be reluctant to pull the plug on failures. The Big Apple has closed roughly 4 percent of charters since its first one opened in 1999, well below the national closing rate of 15 percent. The appropriate rate of charter revocation is anyone's guess.



By all appearances, charters will remain on the educational landscape for the foreseeable future. While charter skeptics can't merely wish them away, they can push for greater accountability -- after all, isn't this the whole point of charters? Anyone who blindly accepts that competition will improve education for students in charters and traditional public schools alike should remember that other articles of faith about the market -- like cutting taxes on the rich will make all of our yachts and rafts rise -- have proven illusory.



The market is not a self-regulating mechanism: players need rules to guide their behavior. Educational history offers some valuable lessons to keep in mind. First, when public schools have great influence in selecting their student body, this can either lead to greater diversity and opportunity while retaining choice (as in some magnet schools), or it can exacerbate persistent problems of racial and economic segregation. Businesspeople respond to incentives, and the impetus for charter-school operators is to "skim the cream" and avoid undesirables. Tangible rewards for charter schools to offer free transportation and lunches, and to craft racially and economically diverse student bodies, could be a step in the right direction.



Educational history also teaches us to be wary of the deep and authentic desire to find the "secret sauce" that produces hard-working, high-achieving students and committed teachers. It is not easy to identify the factors that make a school great, and it is even harder to disseminate these reforms widely. If, for example, we discover that Charter School X produces exemplary outcomes because of exceptionally talented, committed teachers and unusually industrious students, how do we go about replicating that -- and at what cost? Are all teachers and students capable of reaching these heights, or is there a limited pool? It would be nice to think the former, but evidence for such optimism is scarce.



There is no magic elixir that will fix our educational system. Of course, we should continue to be open to fresh ideas about improving school organization, teaching and learning. But if we continue to ignore important historical lessons about the dangerous consequences of educational privatization and fail to harness our desire to plunge headlong into unproven reform initiatives, we may discover that the cure we so lovingly embraced has made the patient sicker.



Christopher Bonastia is associate professor of sociology at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of "Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia" (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

[NitaX]

Shoot, what else needs to be said? The writer said it all! LOL

I will add this - the reason that public education is so highly segregated is that white folks moved out during integration. I'll use my own city as that shining example. Memphis saw an uptick in the number of private school enrollments during desegregation mandates. Those who couldn't pay for private school moved to the County school system. Those that did stay in the city school system did so because the city created "optional school" (aka magnet) programs to keep whites in the system.

What bugs the absolute shit out of me locally is that NO ONE refuses to see how that cycle kept repeating itself. White folks who had no kids would continue to stay in Memphis neighborhoods UNTIL their kid started grade school, and then they'd move into county (suburban) neighborhoods. If schools mirror the education of the neighborhood, then it stands to reason that those neighborhood schools would be just fine. But, we don't talk about passed down racially tinged motives because it doesn't look like the KKK burning crosses in your yard. This reminds me that I should post a local columnist's article "Does No One Care That The Municipal School Boards Are All White?" as it relates to the separatist school district saga.

Enough of that - back to charter schools. Here, the charters are pretty much all black. But, I think that may be largely a function of how the act was created. You had to be a failing student or in a failing school. That means that all the majority white schools or schools in middle/upper class neighborhoods were never targeted for charters. I know Nashville was fighting to keep a charter out of one its more affluent neighborhoods. So, in Memphis the talk is always around accountability, Nashville didn't feel like that was an issue for that proposed school because it would siphon off good (white) students.


And with all of this, again I say - kids aren't widgets. Market forces don't work in education because there are too many variables. There isn't an even playing field and you can't really level it because each child has a different set of needs. When you create charters and allow bad funding to go with it, you doom public school systems. They are mandated to do all of programs, staffing ratios, textbooks, technology, student services that charter schools can ask states for waivers from. The playing field isn't equal. The game is rigged for public schools to shutter and end up like - sorry IIOY - Philadelphia. Philly can struggle, but there's nothing happening to charters. Just the school district. So, what happens to the kids left in that system? Nothing. Not a single damn thing because nobody cares about little poor kids anyway.  

[NewOrleans]

I would also add that among their many powers to kick out undesirable students, charter schools have these "No Excuses" policies and can kick out students who don't conform to them. "No Excuses" violations have included things like not making eye contact with teachers and not complying with gimmicks like congratulating yourself on right answers by doing these "sizzle sizzle pop" things with your hands. Minority students end up disproportionately disciplined [ie expelled] by these policies.

eta: and unsurprisingly, "reformers" (corporations and politicians) don't care about this imbalance!  <) 

[NitaX]

Dec 17, 2013 21:10:56 GMT -5 mockingbird said:

This is fascinating to me. I'm sure it's rare, but I find our charter school to be more diverse than our feeder school. It's one of the appeals.

I think ideally that is what it should look like. I appreciated my public school experience - I did attend the optional program - because at least I could interact with every walk of life. I had friends of all races, so it never felt odd being the only black person at my office. The world and workplace is diverse, so to me, education should reflect that. I know I picked my daughters' daycare centers based on the diversity of the school. 

[downtoearth]

Dec 17, 2013 21:10:56 GMT -5 mockingbird said:

This is fascinating to me. I'm sure it's rare, but I find our charter school to be more diverse than our feeder school. It's one of the appeals.

Our feeder school has a very cookie cutter stepford feel. The charters draw from a much wider area and have a fat more diverse crowd.

When our first started school we lived in a more metropolitan area and had him in a charter school, I found that same - more diversity in charters vs. other neighborhood schools.  But I will add that the majority of the diversity we saw in the charter school for our son, were adopted kids.  Yup, white parents with kids from Asian or Black backgrounds.  We had very few Hispanic kids in the school and they are the primary minority in that area of the country. 

Our closest neighborhood school was more homogenous...about 70% white, Hispanic, but also was a school with 30% literacy at 5th grade.  All the affluent, white, non-Hispanic kids in the neighbor, which were a lot, would choice into Charter schools or another school the next neighborhood over.  School choice is the still racist/classist IMO.

[soontobeka]

Dec 17, 2013 21:10:56 GMT -5 mockingbird said:

This is fascinating to me. I'm sure it's rare, but I find our charter school to be more diverse than our feeder school. It's one of the appeals.

Our feeder school has a very cookie cutter stepford feel. The charters draw from a much wider area and have a fat more diverse crowd.

This is exactly how it is here.  The draw to the charter school B is in is that it is multilingual and the student/teacher population is very diverse. (Well and no HFCS in the school lunches