As Andy reported, yesterday's release of a new UCLA Civil Rights Project report on charter school diversity (or the lack thereof) has sparked another spin cycle of heated rhetoric and recrimination. Maybe the snow headed toward the Northeast will tamper down the emotions.
To the Civil Rights Project: It's certainly appropriate for you to examine the degree of "racial isolation" in charter schools, and your basic assumption rests on good evidence: poor and minority kids generally do perform better in integrated schools than in all-minority or high-poverty ones. (Plus, for all kinds of societal reasons, we're better off if kids of different races and classes are going to school together.) But to then imply that high-performing charter school networks should stop serving poor, inner-city kids because their schools aren't integrated enough is way over the top. Let's face it: for the foreseeable future, lots and lots of poor and minority kids are going to be in racially isolated schools. We should cheer when such schools find a way to be high-performing.
To the charter community: Your frustration is certainly understandable; this feels like a pot shot, especially when the charge is that charters serve "too many" poor and minority kids. After all, many state laws allow charter schools to operate only in high-poverty and/or low-performing districts; to then blast charters for doing what they've been asked seems perverse. Still, let's not be afraid to admit that the world would be better off with a greater number of racially and socio-economically integrated charter schools. (I wrote about several such charters last December, including the Capital City Charter School in DC and High Tech High in San Diego.) Even "conservative" scholars like Rick Hanushek have found that minority kids do better in integrated schools. And let's not hide behind the rhetoric that racially isolated charter schools are doing a great job serving poor minority kids. A few hundred are. Most are not.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Holding hands, like Civil Rights and charter supporters should do"]
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Come on everybody, let's all hold hands. There's common ground here: Doing all we can to make racially isolated schools better, and doing lots more to reduce that racial isolation in the first place.
Image from J. McPherson on flickr.
-Mike Petrilli
