Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement is Never Discussed
	Touted as the cure for what ails public education, charter schools have historical roots that are rarely discussed. 

by Christopher Bonastia

AlterNet
March 9, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/154425/why_the_racist_history_of_the_charter_school_movement_is_never_discussed

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).]

==========

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate