July 10, 2002

Charter Schools And Race:
A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education

By Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee

Foreword

By Gary Orfield

Charter schools are one of the most important educational innovations of this generation. They have spread rapidly across the country and are often supported with fervent assurances that they can solve problems attributed to school bureaucracies. They are usually small, deregulated, run, at first, by a founder with a vision or a private company, and with faculties that are not supposed to be afflicted with the burnout and cynicism found in some high poverty schools with aging teachers. Embraced by both political parties, funded from federal, state, and local budgets, approved by most state legislatures, featured in countless newspaper stories, hailed as the potential antidote to all that is pathological in weak public schools, charter schools were put forward as something that combined the independence and autonomy of the private schools with public support and free tuition of the public schools. Many communities have been willing to try the experiment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 2,348 charter schools during the 2001-02 school year. Although there was an early concern that charter schools would serve as a haven for white students to escape diverse public schools, many minority parents have also expressed strong interest in alternatives to their local public schools and some minority led civil rights organizations run charter schools.

This report looks at only one aspect of the charter school story—whether or not these schools offer a less segregated experience than the public schools to the increasing numbers of students they serve. Obviously, this is but one of a number of dimensions on which these schools should be examined. Public schools have struggled with the issue of racial segregation for the past 50 years. We are now 15 years into an era of resegregation of our nation’s schools, and black and Latino students are more isolated than they have been for three decades. This increasing isolation is not just isolation by race but also by poverty and, increasingly for Latinos and some Asian groups, by language. As reported in our latest study on national segregation trends, nearly nine-tenths of intensely segregated black and Latino schools have student bodies with concentrated poverty. The inequalities inherent in schools that serve children with worse health care, weaker nutrition, less educated parents, more frequent moves, weaker preschool skills, and often more non-English speakers are exacerbated by the fact that these schools are also less likely to have credentialed and experienced teachers. Since there is a very strong general relationship between segregation by race and poverty and educational inequality on many dimensions, this isolation can have serious consequences for students.

This report details a disappointing set of findings regarding its central question— charter schools are largely more segregated than public schools. Segregation is worse for African American than for Latino students, but is very high for both. In some states, white student isolation in charter schools is as high as that of African Americans. The problems reported here may not be due either to the intent or the desires and values of charter school leaders. They may reflect flaws in state policies, in enforcement, or in methods of approving schools for charters.

The justification for segregated schools as places of opportunity is basically a
“separate but equal” justification, an argument that there is something about the schools that can and does overcome the normal pattern of educational inequality that afflicts many of these schools. Charter school advocates continually assert such advantages and often point to the strong demand for the schools by minority parents in minority communities, including schools that are designed specifically to serve a minority population. It is certainly true that minority parents are actively seeking alternatives to segregated, concentrated poverty, and low-achieving public schools. White parents have also shown strong interest in educational alternatives as evidenced by the strong demand for magnet schools.

Unfortunately, despite claims by charter advocates, there is no systematic research or data that show that charter schools perform better than public schools. Since charter schools embody wildly different educational approaches and since charter and public schools obtain their enrollment in very different ways, evaluation and comparisons between the two require very careful analysis. At a minimum, it is certainly safe to say that there is little convincing evidence for the superiority of charter schools over public schools in the same areas. In fact, some of the studies suggest that charter schools are, on average, even weaker.

Authorization of charter schools is different in each state that has approved them. Charters permit and even welcome an enormous variety of innovative educational approaches, though they support very traditional approaches as well. Some of the charter founders are idealistic education leaders with a great new idea, strong imagination and inexhaustible energy, while some are committed community activists who have longed to run their own schools, or to serve only one group in a community, and many are managed by corporations that hope to profit from their operation. For many charter school founders, there is an implicit assumption that less government control and oversight will produce positive educational benefits.

One of the problems in evaluating the academic effectiveness of charter schools is that their effect is normally examined by comparing them to regular public schools, but their student body and parent groups are not the same, which makes the comparison of academic achievement inaccurate. Even if one were able to control for income, parent education, and other relevant, easily measurable family resources, there are several kinds of selection bias that make such comparisons virtually impossible. First, the families who are informed enough to choose a school and make the effort to get their child to a more distant school every day are not the same as the families who do not. Second, charter schools commonly lack the expertise and programs to serve students who are English Language Learners or severely disadvantaged children such as those in Special Education. As these students tend to score lower on standardized tests, if students from lower achieving groups do not enroll, the school’s average scores will tend to rise. Third, many charters seek applications from students they believe would succeed, or who would respond to their approach, while not recruiting others. Some schools have screening procedures that public schools are prohibited from using because the public schools are required to serve all students. These biases mean that even if there were higher test scores or lower dropout rates for charter schools it might well be because of selective recruitment—students from families with more resources and/or fewer students with special needs—than because of the school’s superior educational approach.

Curiously, in an era in which tests and accountability have been the hallmark of education policy, there has been little serious accountability for charter schools. Theoretically charter schools must meet the terms of their charter or they will be terminated. In most states, however, there are few resources for oversight of schools and revocations of charters for educational failure, as opposed to financial problems, are rare. Often their impact on racial segregation is simply ignored. If there is no real evidence linking superior performance to educational program rather than admissions selectivity, looking at general characteristics of the student body that are usually linked to educational inequality, such as levels of segregation, certainly deserves attention. On this front, there is little positive to say about these schools.

One might well think that charter schools would have a better chance to be integrated than public schools. Like magnet schools a generation earlier, charter schools offer distinctive curricula and the opportunity to create and manage schools with freedom from many normal constraints in large districts. Unlike magnet schools, charter schools have the added advantages of even greater freedom to innovate and for the most part, are not tied to geographically fixed attendance boundaries in residentially segregated communities as are neighborhood public schools but can draw from wherever interested students can be found (in some places where school districts grant charters, they are limited to the school district boundaries). However, because charter schools are created under state law and are, or could easily be made, independent of district boundaries and because state policy and state organizations determine where and how charter schools can be formed, it seems appropriate to compare them with other schools in the state rather than just the schools in the particular community where they are physically located.

The high level of racial segregation in charter schools is not a surprise when viewed in light of segregation in many aspects of American life. Those who think that charter schools are inherently likely to be free of racial inequality need to reflect on the racial consequences of other markets operating in areas of housing, employment, health care, etc., where the markets have worked more to perpetuate and spread racial inequality than to cure it. One could accurately say that the normal outcome of markets when applied to a racially stratified society is a perpetuation of racial stratification. This is why early educational choice programs were often found to produce white flight from integrated schools and to contribute to segregation in many school desegregation trials. Those experiences were apparently unknown or overlooked by designers and supporters of many charter school policies.

In looking at the data presented here it is worth considering the experience of magnet schools. There have been a handful of highly selective schools in American public school systems, such as Boston Latin, San Francisco’s Lowell High, New York City’s Stuyvestant High, which have produced remarkable students for generations. Overall, however, choice of schools and specialized curriculum for schools (except for vocational schools) were very rare in the U.S. until desegregation policies produced the magnet school movement in the mid-1970s. Magnet schools, like charter schools, grew rapidly in response to federal grant programs. The magnet school programs funded by the Emergency School Aid Act, however, had desegregation policies while the federal charter school law did not. The charter school law was a movement backward to the unregulated choice policies common 40 years ago across the South and in many big cities. Those did not work to produce integration and charter school policies do not either.

Racial segregation in charter schools needs to be considered as both a critical problem and a lost opportunity. Experience shows, that segregation is not inevitable and that it is possible to produce quite different outcomes with appropriate civil rights policies. As we approach the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, this issue should be addressed and resolved. If we are to be serious about the impact of charters on minority opportunity in American schools, we need to look with considerable suspicion on unfounded claims of sweeping benefits, insist that accountability be extended fully to this sector, and not reach conclusions on the basis of assumptions rather than evidence.

This report should broaden the discussion of the future development of charter schools. Certainly any publicly funded schools should not be run in ways that either intensify racial isolation or undermine integrated schools in integrated neighborhoods. Charter schools offer opportunities, like good magnet schools, to create successful and voluntary diversity. Clearly there are some very ambitious and attractive schools being created under these policies. But too many are separate and unequal. We hope that this report will stir discussion and action to help develop the positive aspects of this innovation and to build into the charter school movement a commitment to offering school opportunities to all students that better reflect the diversity in our society as well as the demands of colleges and workplaces where they must eventually succeed.

To view the COMPLETE REPORT and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:

Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education (in PDF Format)