Charter schools often promise to bring greater equity to education, but a new brief starts with the assumption that they fall short in delivery–and provides recommendations to fix the alleged injustice, the Huffington Post reports.
“Charter schools tend to be more racially segregated than traditional public schools,” said author and Penn State law professor Preston Green III, who sat on a board that considered charter-school applications in Pennsylvania. “What we tried to do is write ways to enable charter schools to promote desegregation rather exacerbate segregation.”
The brief, “Chartering Equity: Using Charter School Legislation and Policy to Advance Educational Opportunity,” from the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center features recommendations from both Green and University of Wisconsin, Madison education professor Julie Mead on how states and school districts can ensure that charters are integrated and helpful to disadvantaged populations…
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Scholar says ethnicity-targeted charter schools feel like ‘Jim Crow segregation’
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, director of the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty Myron Orfield said that charters schools who target specific ethnic groups actually work against diversity, the article stated, according to the Huffington Post.
“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” Orfield told Bloomberg. “When you see an all-white school and all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”
The report sites a Civil Rights Project report from the University of California, Los Angeles, which found that charter schools were more segregated than regular public schools in 2010. While, according to Bloomberg, a Minnesota charter school law report from 1988 recommended the schools remain diverse, in the 2009-2010 school year “three quarters of the Minneapolis and St. Paul region’s 127 charter schools were ‘highly segregated.'”…Read More
Are magnet schools perpetuating segregation?
The debate over segregation continues at one of the nation’s top schools after the principal received the following message: integrate or lose funding, reports the Huffington Post. According to CNN, Connecticut’s Capital Preparatory Magnet School, which boasts a 100 percent graduation rate, was at risk of being closed if they failed to increase the number of white students in their school…
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