Thanks to Marty Solomon for posting this link at EDDRA. Marty suggests that charters, with their inherent capacity to exclude minorities, may, indeed, vie with vouchers as the preferred privatization mode. From the Salt Lake City Tribune:Charter schools in Utah increasingly are serving wealthy, white students and leaving poorer and minority children behind in traditional public schools, a Salt Lake Tribune analysis shows.
Although charter schools by law are open to every student because taxpayers fund them, in practice many educate only a narrow slice of the population. Some Utah school districts with high minority student populations are home to charter schools with significantly smaller percentages of ethnic minorities, and many of the newest charter schools will open this fall in affluent communities with little diversity . . . .
In New Jersey and in Texas, charter schools are required to take students on a first-come, first-serve basis. Can you explain how charter schools have an "inherent capacity to exclude minorities"?
ReplyDeleteWoah woah woah!
ReplyDeleteI work at a charter school of 250 students, only one of whom is white and the vast majority of others are black (around 210 of them). There are laws and regulations in place that do not allow us to decriminate, in any way, who we accept to the school.
If you want to talk about school segregation, don't go after charter schools. We just get paid the same (or less) amount of money per student that the district spends.
Look, instead, to the money gobbling magnet schools, especially those who are allowed to accept by audition.
I worked in an urban district in Connecticut that had several magent schools that served both the city and the surrounding suburbs. Because of this, funding from state and local levels were poured into these schools, giving them state of the art facilities and well trained staff.
Meanwhile, Joe-Public-School down the street that served only the city kids should have been condemned.
These money-sucking magnet schools are run by the public schools districts.
Do not be so quick to blame the charter movement for segregation when it is prevalent within school districts. Not all charter schools are good, for certain, but as a movement they are hardly advocates of segregation and to suggest that is utterly ridiculous.