Widespread Attacks on Voting Rights and Attempts to Privatize Public Schools Together Threaten Democracy

In Friday’s NY Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie reflected on Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor:

“Warnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction. His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.  It represents progress—and yet it is also evocative of the past. A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight in Congress over the Civil Rights Act of 1875.”

Bouie summarizes what was in this bill, proposed by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in a Reconstruction Congress right after the Civil War: “As originally written, Sumner’s bill would, ‘Secure equal rights in railroads, steamboats, public conveyances, hotels, licensed theaters, houses of public entertainment, common schools, and institutions of learning authorized by law, church institutions, and cemetery associations incorporated by national or State authority; also on juries in courts, national and State.'” In 1871, the bill was repeatedly blocked in committee, but Senator Sumner reintroduced it in modified form in 1873: “This revised bill added a clause that stated that ‘no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment’ of ‘common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.'”

School integration held up the bill’s passage, however, and when it finally passed in 1875, “It did so without the schools clause.” “It was the schools clause that proved especially controversial… (O)pponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights that would allow the government to invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”

Senator Raphael Warnock addressed his colleagues last week not about the denial of educational rights but about the attack on voting rights during the recent election and in a rash of new attempts to block legislation which would guarantee access to the ballot box: “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era… This is Jim Crow in new clothes.”

Here in Ohio right now, we are in the midst of a three part discussion of Derek Black’s book, Schoolhouse Burning. Black, a professor of constitutional law, views denial of the protection of each citizen’s right to vote and the denial of the protection of each child’s right to education as tightly woven threats to our democracy: “Two hundred years ago our founding fathers gave us two gifts. Both were relatively unknown to the world at the time. The first was democracy—what they called a republican form of government. The second was public education. These gifts were inextricably intertwined… Our founding ideas, though flawed in their initial implementation, were compelling enough to take root and bear fruit for generations to come. The contradiction between our democratic ideas and practical reality was also strong enough to spark a Civil War and then constitutional change. The post-war Constitution prohibited racial voting restrictions, and then later gender and wealth restrictions. Another century later, the nation doubled down on those ideas through the Voting Rights Act…. The story of public education goes hand in hand with democracy and voting. That story, however, is not as well told… This book mines that history to help us better see who we are and have been—for better and for worse.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 10-11)

Black devotes two chapters to the urgent demand for public schools from freed slaves and a few years later during Reconstruction constitutional conventions when African Americans represented their constituents across the South.  He quotes a resolution passed by an African American Freedman’s convention in Arkansas in 1865: “Clothe us with the power of self-protection, by giving us our equality before the law and the right of suffrage, so we may become bona fide citizens of the state…. That we are… the foundation on which the future power and wealth of the State of Arkansas must be built… we respectfully ask the Legislature to provide for the education of our children.” (Schoolhouse Burning, p. 99)

Just as Senator Warnick worries that attacks on voting rights in 2021 are reminiscent of the years after the collapse of Reconstruction as Jim Crow state legislatures undermined voting rights, Derek Black worries that today’s trends in public education threaten protection of the public educational system that has been central to preparing citizens for the responsibilities of democracy.  Black explains: “The last decade aligns better with the darker periods of our history than the brighter ones.  The trend is alarming not just for public education. It is alarming for democracy itself.”(Schoolhouse Burning, p.12)

Black examines what has happened to public schools across the states during the Great Recession which began in 2008 and in the years since: “The setbacks of the last decade are, in many respects, attempts to go straight at public education itself as the problem. Jim Crow and the civil rights backlash saw attacks on public education, too. But those attacking public education did not claim public education was the problem. Rather, black people and the cost and inconvenience of extending equality to black people were the problem. Many of today’s education policies and fads are premised on—and sometimes explicitly claim—that public education is fundamentally flawed and government ought to scrap it for something else. At the very least, government ought not be the primary provider of education. This idea permeates states’ decade-long disinvestment in public education and major new investment in private alternatives.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 225-226)

Black summarizes the trends that concern him: “Public education cuts initially looked like a response to the recession—overzealous and foolhardy, but understandable. In retrospect, the cuts look sinister. They came while states exponentially grew charters and vouchers—and remained in place well after the recession passed and state revenues were booming. To add insult to injury, various legislative mechanisms driving charter and voucher growth come at the direct expense of public schools. The contrasting reality of public schools and their private alternatives looks like a legislative preference for private school choice over public school guarantees… The most troubling thing is that it doesn’t take a constitutional scholar or education historian to recognize that something strange has happened. Politicians and advocates have taken on an unsettling aggressiveness toward public education.”  (Schoolhouse Burning, pp, 226-227)

Black concludes: “(W)hat those who push back against vouchers and charters have not fully articulated is that these measures also cross the Rubicon for our democracy. As new voucher and charter bills lock in the privatization of education, they lock in the underfunding of public education. As they do this they begin to roll back the democratic gains Congress sought during Reconstruction and then recommitted to during the civil rights movement.”  And the new trends are not race-neutral: “(S)tates with the highest percentages of minorities have twice the level of privatization as predominantly white states. Public school funding, or lack thereof, is the flipside of this privatization movement…. (W)hen it comes to districts serving primarily middle income students, most states provide those districts with the resources they need to achieve average outcomes… The average state provides districts serving predominantly poor students $6,239 less per pupil than they need… Today, race remains a powerful undercurrent fueling the notion that government spends too much money on other kids’ education. (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 238-243)

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Elizabeth Warren Releases Strong, Comprehensive Public Education Plan

The education plan Elizabeth Warren released on Monday is urgently important. Today, I am not going to focus on the math—whether Warren’s plan can be funded by the wealth tax she has also proposed. Neither am I going to speculate about whether, politically, she might be able to get Congress—and in the case of some of her proposals, the fifty state legislatures—to enact her ideas.

The paper she published on Monday matters, I believe, for a very different reason. Warren articulates a set of principles that turn away from three decades of neoliberal, corporate school reform—the idea, according to The American Prospect‘s Robert Kuttner, that “free markets really do work best… that government is inherently incompetent… and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market.”  Competition is at the heart of the system, all based on high-stakes tests, and punishments for the schools whose scores fall behind.

In her education plan, Warren endorses the civic and democratic principles which, from the nineteenth century until the late 1980s, defined our nation’s commitment to a comprehensive system of public education. Her plan incorporates the idea that while public schools are not perfect, they are the optimal way for our complex society to balance the needs of each particular child and family with a system that secures, by law, the rights and addresses the needs of all children. And she acknowledges the massive scale of the public commitment required to maintain an equitable education system that fairly serves approximately 50 million children and adolescents across cities and towns and sparsely populated rural areas.

I urge you to read Elizabeth Warren’s education plan.  Here I will highlight what I believe are her most important suggestions for overcoming the bipartisan, neoliberal, corporate reform agenda, formalized in 2002 in the No Child Left Behind Act, but dominating policy for more than a decade before that. Corporate education reform has driven federal policy in education during five recent administrations—Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump.

Warren emphatically demands that school privatization and the corruption that has accompanied the expansion of vouchers and charters be stopped.  This is an improvement from the position Warren advocated fifteen years ago. The NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein reminds readers that in a book she published in 2003, Warren suggested a universal voucher program to expand choices for parents, but in recent years, Goldstein points out, Warren seems to have paid more attention to the impact on public schools of the expansion of school choice: “(I)n 2016, Ms. Warren, then in her first term as a senator from Massachusetts, spoke out against a ballot referendum that would have raised the cap on the number of charters that could open each year in her home state.”

In the plan she released on Monday, Warren begins the section on school privatization by condemning the ways charter schools and vouchers damage public schools: “To keep our traditional public school systems strong, we must resist efforts to divert public funds out of traditional public schools. Efforts to expand the footprint of charter schools, often without even ensuring that charters are subject to the same transparency requirements and safeguards as traditional public schools, strain the resources of school districts and leave students behind, primarily students of color… More than half the states allow public schools to be run by for-profit companies, and corporations are leveraging their market power and schools’ desire to keep pace with rapidly changing technology to extract profits at the expense of vulnerable students. This is wrong. We have a responsibility to provide great neighborhood schools for every student. We should stop the diversion of public dollars from traditional public schools through vouchers or tuition tax credits—which are vouchers by another name. We should fight back against the privatization, corporatization, and profiteering in our nation’s schools.”

Warren names the reforms needed to rein in school privatization:

• She is the only candidate so far who explicitly advocates ending the federal Charter Schools Program, which has used tax dollars as a sort of venture capital fund to stimulate the expansion of charter schools with grants to states and charter management companies. Her declaration is emphatic: “End federal funding for the expansion of charter schools: The Federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), a series of federal grants established to promote new charter schools, has been an abject failure… As President, I would eliminate this charter school program and end federal funding for the expansion of charter schools.”
• Like other candidates, Warren proposes to ban for-profit charter schools, but she goes farther by opposing all the arrangements by which nonprofit charter schools are now, quite legally, managed by huge for-profit ventures: “Ban for-profit charter schools: Our public schools should benefit students, not the financial or ideological interests of wealthy patrons like the DeVos and Walton families. I will fight to ban for-profit charter schools and charter schools that outsource their operations to for-profit companies… Many so-called nonprofit schools—including charter schools—operate alongside closely held, for-profit service providers. Others are run by for-profit companies that siphon off profits from students and taxpayers… (M)y plan would ban self-dealing in nonprofit schools to prevent founders and administrators from funneling resources to service providers owned or managed by their family members.”

In her new plan, Warren also addresses the funding crisis in the public schools which serve our nation’s poorest children. She begins by acknowledging the efforts of schoolteachers—on strike this year from West Virginia to Kentucky to Oklahoma to Los Angeles to Oakland and ongoing right now in Chicago—to call attention to their underfunded schools that cannot afford to provide the basics that more privileged American public school students take for granted: “(O)ur country’s educators have taken matters into their own hands—not only in the classroom, but also in the fight for the future of our country. Teachers have been battling for public investment over privatization, and for shared prosperity over concentrated wealth and power. Educators… across the country have carried the #RedforEd movement from the streets to state capitol buildings, striking not just to get the compensation they deserve, but to condemn the diversion of funding from public schools to private ones, to increase funding to reduce class sizes and improve their schools, and to expand services that will make their students’ lives safer and more stable.”

Warren’s proposals for school funding equity are extensive.

• Warren would quadruple the federal investment in Title I to better support public school serving children in poverty.  And, in contrast to programs like Race to the Top which incentivized the expansion of charter schools, Warren would offer federal funding incentives to states if they would make their own school funding formulas more equitable.
• She would federally fund 40 percent of the cost for school districts of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Education Act. That is what Congress promised in 1975 when the law was passed. Last year, writes Warren, Congress funded the law at a paltry 15 percent.
• Warren endorses the goal of making 25,000 public schools into full-service, wraparound Community Schools by 2030. “Community Schools are the hubs of their community. Through school coordinators, they connect students and families with community partners to provide opportunities, support, and services inside and outside the school. These schools center around wraparound services,” incorporate medical and social services, and provide expanded learning time and after school programs.
• She commits to expanding the capacity of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to ensure that all students are treated fairly under the law.  She also commits to providing federal funding for the kind of magnet school and transportation programs which three decades ago enabled school districts to voluntarily integrate, both racially and economically.
• Warren commits to strengthening public school programs for the 10 percent of American students who are English language learners, to ensuring that the needs of immigrant students are fully addressed, and to supporting American Indian students in public schools.

As part of a section of the report devoted to, “providing a warm, safe, and nurturing school climate for all our kids,” Warren buries one of her most important principles: “As President, I’ll push to prohibit the use of standardized testing as a primary or significant factor in closing a school, firing a teacher, or making any other high-stakes decisions, and encourage schools to use authentic assessments that allow students to demonstrate learning in multiple ways.”

It is difficult to imagine how Warren would accomplish this goal, because high-stakes testing as the measure for school quality is, thanks to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, embedded to varying degrees in the fifty state laws. It is, however, refreshing to have a Presidential candidate strongly advocate for eliminating high stakes testing as the way we evaluate schools and schoolteachers across the United States. Half a century of academic research, most recently culminating in a new study by Stanford University professor, Sean Reardon, has demonstrated that a school’s or school district’s standardized test scores do not measure the quality of a school or the teachers in a school.  Instead standardized test scores correlate almost perfectly with the median income of families in the school or district. No Child Left Behind mandated that all public school children be tested in grades 3-8 and once in high school, that their scores be used to judge their schools, and that the schools unable quickly to raise scores be punished.  Race to the Top then demanded that states tie teachers’ evaluations to the same test scores. Although the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind, eased some of this, a test-and-punish regime based on mandated high-stakes testing still drives school accountability across the United States.

Warren is proposing to turn around decades of policy that punishes public schools and the nation’s poorest students and their teachers. None of the other Democratic candidates for President has released such a comprehensive plan. I hope the release of Warren’s new plan will stimulate discussion of these issues among Democrats running for President.  In the debates so far, none of the moderators has asked the candidates about their policies regarding  public education.  It’s time for some serious conversation about the public schools.

(This blog recently named seven important principles candidates for President ought to embrace to address the many ways charter schools damage our public schools.)

Trump Administration’s Rule Change on Affirmative Action Will Solidify Segregation in K-12 Public Schools

It seems unlikely that last week’s action by the Trump Justice Department—to rescind rules on affirmative action implemented by the Obama administration—will materially affect local school districts’ capacity to integrate K-12 schools by race. Although in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” a 2007 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts had already caused school districts to step significantly back from a commitment to racial integration in elementary and secondary schools.

Roberts’ decision in the 2007 case, Parents Involved, banned the use of race as a factor to be explicitly considered in school assignment plans unless, of course, the school district remained under court order to remedy government-imposed de jure segregation (purposely maintaining separate schools for black and white children). Now, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, fewer and fewer Southern school districts that explicitly maintained separate schools remain under court order.

Today, school districts attentive to school segregation have been more likely to try to create within-district, voluntary policies to mix children by race and income across the district’s schools. Like a number of school districts, Louisville (Jefferson County, Kentucky) and Seattle had been using racial balance as an explicit factor to balance school enrollment. In 2007, two lawsuits, one in Louisville and another in Seattle, were combined into the case we now know as Parents Involved.  Here is the essence of Chief Justice Roberts’s decision: “The Fourteenth Amendment prevents states from according differential treatment to American children on the basis of their color or race… The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination the basis of race.”

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: “These cases consider the longstanding efforts of two local school boards to integrate their public schools.  The school board plans before us resemble many others adopted in the last 50 years by primary and secondary schools throughout the Nation… We have approved ‘narrowly tailored’ plans that are no less race-conscious than the plans before us.  And we have understood that the Constitution permits local communities to adopt desegregation plans even when it does not require them to do so.” “Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves.  It was the promise of true racial equality—not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the Nation’s cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one Nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live.”

The 2007 Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved has already had a chilling effect on school districts’ voluntary efforts to integrate their schools.  Some school districts have continued to make the effort—using family income as a sort of proxy for race. Cambridge, Massachusetts is the example we read about most often.

The Washington Post‘s Nick Anderson and Moriah Balingit describe the history of race-based affirmative efforts to integrate K-12 schools since the 2007 decision. They also describe how the recent Trump Justice Department’s action to revoke Obama-era guidance may affect public school districts across the country: “Revoking the Obama-era guidance on affirmative action could affect elementary and secondary schools that have grappled with racial imbalances. In 2007, the high court sharply limited how school districts could use race in enrollment. The ruling struck down race-based policies in Seattle and Louisville. It confused school officials, who worried that their policies for assigning students ran afoul of the law. The following year, the Bush administration advised schools to use ‘race-neutral methods’ to determine where children go to school, suggesting that officials use socioeconomic status instead of race. The Obama administration in 2011 issued its guidance, which spelled out how schools could use race in enrollment policy to promote diversity and avoid isolating students of one race in a single school. The 2011 guidance sought to help school districts thread the needle when using race or other factors in enrollment policies. That guidance also cautioned school officials that they should be careful when using race and that they could do so only in limited circumstances.”

Anderson and Balingit describe the reaction of Rachel Kleinman, senior counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to last week’s withdrawal by the Trump administration of the Obama era guidance and its return to Bush-era rules: “Rachel Kleinman… said withdrawing the guidance could deter districts from implementing policies to increase diversity. Those districts will no longer be able to rely on the Education Department, she said, to help them craft a policy that complies with the Supreme Court’s decision (in Parents Involved). Kleinman is quoted, saying the recent action of the Trump Justice Department “might chill school districts from doing anything at all.”  She further explains that the reversion to the older Bush guidance “will have no impact on laws that govern school integration and admissions, nor will it affect the hundreds of schools under desegregation orders.”

Considering the current and future makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is unlikely that Parents Involved will be overturned any time soon.  It is therefore unlikely that school districts will be launching innovative school integration programs. That is a sad reality.  Reflecting on last week’s Trump administration action to rescind Obama-era guidance on school integration and affirmative action, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss quotes Richard Rothstein, whose recent book, The Color of Law, examines all sorts of government policies that have contributed over the decades to the racial segregation of our society.  Rothstein, who strongly supports racial integration, believes these actions—in the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, for example—have in reality segregated our society in ways that could, with another kind of Supreme Court, be remedied because they are examples of de jure segregation by government.

Strauss quotes a 2014 article by Rothstein in The American Prospect in which Rothstein explains why affirmative programs in public schools remain absolutely necessary to remedy the damage of slavery and Jim Crow: “Even for low-income families, other groups’ disadvantages—though serious—are not similar to those faced by African Americans. Although the number of high-poverty white communities is growing (many are rural)… poor whites are less likely to live in high poverty neighborhoods than poor blacks.  Nationwide, 7 percent of poor whites live in high-poverty neighborhoods, while 23 percent of poor blacks do so. Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place showed that multigenerational concentrated poverty remains an almost uniquely black phenomenon; white children in poor neighborhoods are likely to live in middle-class neighborhoods as adults, whereas black children in poor neighborhoods are likely to remain in such surroundings as adults.  In other words, poor whites are more likely to be temporarily poor, while poor blacks are more likely to be permanently so…. Certainly, Hispanics suffer discrimination, some of it severe… but the undeniable hardship faced by recent, non-English speaking, unskilled, low-wage immigrants is not equivalent to blacks’ centuries of lower-caste status. The problems are different, and the remedies must also be different….”

New Research: Economically Integrated Schools Have Higher Test Scores and Smaller Gaps

New research from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy points to the positive impact for children when school districts use family income to integrate schools economically—as a proxy for racial integration that has been no longer permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court (except in cases where districts are under the old court orders for de jure segregation).  The researchers explore academic results in the Wake County School District after an economic integration program was launched in 2000.  Wake County Schools serve metropolitan Raleigh, North Carolina.

Duke Today explains that school districts in North Carolina “stopped using race-based assignment plans in the late 1990s after a series of court cases struck down the practice in various settings around the country.”  In his 1997 decision in the Louisville-Seattle case called Parents Involved, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts declared, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” School districts could no longer balance school enrollments by assigning students based on their race. Although the decision made it very difficult for school districts to reduce racial segregation, a handful of school districts including Wake County have experimented with integration by family income as a proxy for race.

According to Duke Today‘s report on the new study which is published in an academic journal, Urban Education (and paywalled), “In 2000, Wake implemented a new assignment policy based on income and achievement, in which no school would consist of more than 40 percent students receiving free or reduced lunch, nor more than 25 percent of students performing below grade level.”  Duke Today adds, “In 2010, the Wake County school board voted to stop using an income-based policy.  However, income remains a component—albeit a smaller component—of the current assignment policy.”  The researchers compared Wake County’s school achievement from 1992 to 2009, during the period when the schools were integrated by race and then, after 2000, by family income.

Researchers discovered, “When Wake County Public Schools switched from a school assignment policy based on race to one based on socioeconomic status, schools became slightly more segregated…  However, segregation increased much more rapidly in four other large North Carolina school districts that simply dropped race-based strategies and did not attempt to pursue diversity in other ways.”  The other districts studied are Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Cumberland County, Guilford County and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County.

While the researchers caution the results are descriptive and cannot be interpreted to prove that, “the new school assignment policy alone caused Wake’s test score gains or reduced the achievement gap between white and black students,”  the results are stunning nonetheless: “(M)ath and reading scores rose slightly and the achievement gap between black and white students narrowed…. In the four other N.C. districts, scores fell among black students after race-based school assignment stopped.”

Monique McMillian, of Morgan State University, who led Duke’s research team, comments: “The main message is, we may not want to give up on using diversity-based policies to achieve integration and address opportunity gaps and achievement gaps.”  Here is, “tentative evidence that income-based assignment policies improve achievement and increase diversity.”

New Reports Confirm Charter Schools Promote Racial Segregation in CT and NC

For more than half a century since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, our society has believed we value policies that support racially integrated public schools.  In the past two decades, however, the rapid growth of the publicly funded but privately managed charter school sector has promoted racial segregation.  Reports released this month from Connecticut and North Carolina document that when parents choose schools in the charter marketplace, they tend to segregate their children in schools dominated by large majorities of children of their own race.

Gary Orfield and Jongyeon Ee, of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, describe Connecticut School Integration that has been accomplished in the public schools and intentionally diverse magnet schools that were the result of remedies in Sheff v. O’Neill, the 1989 school funding and desegregation lawsuit in Hartford.  “The Sheff case was a long struggle by a group of outstanding civil rights lawyers, plaintiffs and local residents who supported the change and those who worked with them… The efforts have not eliminated segregation or ended racial achievement gaps but it is the only state in the Northeast that is going in a positive direction and it has created voluntary processes that have clearly reduced severe segregation in a time devoid of national leadership.”

While the extraordinary inter-district magnet schools with specialty curricula and the inter-district enrollment program that Sheff created have increased the mixing of students from city and suburb and demonstrated that black, white and Hispanic students can happily and successfully learn together, Connecticut’s charter sector, by contrast, has become highly segregated.  Orfield and Ee explain: “A 2014 report by Connecticut Voices for Children concluded that ‘a majority of the magnet schools and technical schools were ‘integrated’… but only 18% of charter schools.’  In fact ‘the majority of charter schools were instead ‘hypersegregated’ with a student body composed of more than 90% minority students.'”  Orfield and Ee recommend that in Connecticut, where public and magnet schools have become more integrated, “Charters should come under the state’s diversity policies and requirements and should have goals, recruitment strategies, public information and transportation policies to foster diversity including diversity of language background.”

In a second paper, published last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, scholars from Duke University document that segregation of charters has been an accelerating trend in North Carolina.  The paper, “The Growing Segmentation of the Charter School Sector in North Carolina,” by Helen F. Ladd, Charles T. Clotfelter, and John B. Holbein, is behind a paywall, but an early draft, can be downloaded here from among the papers presented at the 40th annual conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy.  The Duke researchers describe a study conducted between 1999 and 2012 and conclude: “The state’s charter schools, which started out disproportionately serving minority students, have been serving an increasingly white student population over time.”  The authors also conclude that rising test scores in North Carolina’s charters are not the result of improved school quality—as has been suggested by promoters of charter schools—but are instead the result of a shift in population as many charters have come to enroll students with higher average family income: “Our analysis of the changing mix of students who enroll in charter schools over time… leads us to believe that a major factor contributing to the apparent improved performance of charter schools over the period (of the study) may have as much or more to do with the trends in the types of students they are attracting than improvements in the quality of the programs they offer…  Taken together, our findings imply that the charters schools in North Carolina have become segmented over time, with one segment increasingly serving the interests of middle class white families.”

Reporting on the Duke study for the Washington Post, Jeff Guo explains that North Carolina laws governing charter schools may be contributing to the diminishing number of minority students in North Carolina’s charter schools: “One problem is that disadvantaged students have less of a chance to attend a charter school.  First, they or their parents have to be plugged in enough to know which are the good charter schools and motivated enough to apply.  Then, they need to have the resources to actually attend the charter, because unlike regular public schools, charter schools in North Carolina do not have to offer transportation or lunch to students.  For poor students who rely on school buses and free meal programs, the costs associated with attending a charter school may discourage them from the opportunity.”

As school districts across the South have remedied de jure segregation and been released from their court orders and after the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 2007 that race cannot be the sole basis of voluntary desegregation plans to remedy segregation by race, neither the federal government nor the states have been proactively supporting school integration.  It is another thing altogether, however, when market-based charter schools, which are said by their promoters to be public schools, are freed from the existing civil rights policies that govern public schools and that our society still claims to value.

LynNell Hancock Re-Visits J. Anthony Lukas’s Powerful Book about Boston’s Busing

I have read hundreds of books on education, many of them about racial injustice and segregation.  But I confess that I have never read J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, the story of Boston’s violent and acrimonious fight from 1968 to 1978 about school desegregration and busing.

LynNell Hancock’s new review of Lukas’s book in the Columbia Journalism Review convinces me that I need to pull that 650 page book off my shelf as a reading project for this winter.  “Court-ordered busing that was meant to reverse stubborn de facto school segregation nearly ripped apart the social fabric of that historic city.  It exposed the raw residue of Yankee guilt, black anger, and Irish immigrant antipathy—the churning clash of cultures that defines America.  The country’s racial enmity showed its ugliest face not on the steps of an Arkansas high school this time, but in genteel Boston, the intellectual capital of the abolitionist movement, the ‘cradle of liberty.'”

Hancock is director of the Columbia School of Journalism’s Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism.  She describes Lukas’s respect for nuance and complexity as he tracked three Boston families in the years after Boston’s buses began to roll and the book’s original publication in 1985.

Hancock describes her own experience re-reading the book all these years later: “Reading it today is still as daunting as it is inspiring.  It feels in the end, close to an act of despair.  There is considerable evidence that creating district-wide diversity can be a powerful reform tool but few reformers now consider it seriously.” ” No federal incentives encourage districts to create equity across their populations. Today, about one-third of black and Latino children are attending racially isolated schools.  Child poverty inches up every year.  It’s not exactly the outcome the U.S. Supreme Court justices envisioned when they ruled in 1954 that separate schools were inherently unequal.”

“Yet the education reforms favored by the last two White House administrations have aggressively avoided any policies designed to remedy the disparities. Instead the most popular charter school networks champion a ‘no excuses’ curriculum, which is based on the belief that educators use poverty as an excuse to avoid offering rigorous teaching to minority children. President Obama’s signature Race to the Top policy places a premium on creating charters and ranking teachers based on student test scores.  No incentives are built in for districts that are raising achievement scores through large-scale integration.”

Hancock believes Lukas explores the deeper issues that will continue to defeat today’s technocratic fixes: “He wasn’t so much looking for truth in its purest sense, or the quaint satisfaction of solutions, as for something much bigger, much messier.  He was looking to understand the fundamental roots of America’s fears and tensions, where they originated, why they are so often about race…  It is also an ambitions tableau reaching back in time to the beginnings of Puritan America, through the civil rights era to the present, circling back to the origins of slavery, of Ireland’s turmoil, and of church history, legal history, the press, and urban politics.”

Hancock’s article is very much worth reading.