‘Desperately afraid of losing white parents’: charter schools and segregation

ABSTRACT

The tendency of charter schools to increase school segregation has been well established, but less is known about what school administrators perceive as the mechanisms causing segregation among charters and traditional public schools. Using the results of exploratory surveys of North Carolina charter school directors and district superintendents, this study finds that administrators in both sectors feel very little power over the racial and socioeconomic diversity of their schools for reasons largely inherent in the school choice model. In the case of charter school directors, applicant pools limit their efforts to balance their student populations. School districts are limited by families’ opportunities to exit provided by charters. These results suggest that lottery-based school choice policies will only increase segregation for two reasons: (1) few mechanisms governing charter school enrollments ensure diversity and (2) the charter school option weakens public support for district-based desegregation efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Segregation
• charter schools
• race
• school administrators
• education policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. More information about the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition is available at http://diversecharters.org/.

2. See http://educationopportunityindex.edreform.com/parent-power-index/NC/2017.

3. Find the bill here: https://ncleg.net/Sessions/1995/Bills/House/PDF/H955v4.pdf.

4. Because regions within North Carolina vary greatly in their mix of race and socioeconomic status, I avoided giving a specific definition of diversity. Instead, the placement of questions about socio-economic status and race and ethnicity of students in the school at the start of the survey communicated to participant what was intended by the term. Furthermore, using the slider bars to report student body demographics implied that diversity would mean more balance in these measures.

5. Charter schools that wish to use a weighted lottery need to declare their intention to do when they apply for their charter and doing so must align with their mission. See https://dashboard.ncleg.net/api/Services/BillSummary/2015/H334-SMTB-66(sl).

6. S.L. 2015–248 can be found here: https://dashboard.ncleg.net/api/Services/BillSummary/2015/H334-SMTB-66(sl).

7. See http://www.cpscnc.org/node/239.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted by the author without any funding.