The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Resegregation of Public Schools Via Charter School Reform

ABSTRACT

This article examines charter school reform in the midst of gentrifying urban spaces and documents, through extant research and the findings from our research, the role of school choice in perpetuating school segregation in racially diverse neighborhoods. We argue that 65 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the more the specific mechanism—policies and contexts—of racial segregation in education change, the more solidified the hierarchies of status and prestige that perpetuate segregation remain the same. Racial segregation today, for instance, remains grounded in a belief system of black and Latinx inferiority—a racial hierarchy of valued knowledge and culture, and thus a racialized understanding of “good” schools and students. We organize our research findings on gentrifying neighborhoods and school choices within New York City into three levels to illustrate the current processes of racial segregation: 1) the macro-level neoliberal and free market reform context, 2) the meso-level terms of engagement as schools functions within that market, and 3) the micro-level of individual school choices of parents within this context defined by inequality and standardized test-based accountability. We conclude that the current school choice and market-based school reform education policies will lead to more, and not less racial, ethnic and cultural segregation as the segmented market does its job. The losers are the children and our democracy within a diverse and increasingly divided nation.

Notes

¹ In 2016, we launched an action research project, titled the Public Good, designed to support public schools in gentrifying urban neighborhoods in their efforts to become not only racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse, but also truly integrated schools. Focusing on the people connected to the public schools and whole community school districts we studied, located in the fastest-changing neighborhoods of New York City, we tell the story of gentrification in terms of the political and cultural dimensions of that change in public schools.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Stuart Wells

Amy Stuart Wells is a Professor and the Director of the Sociology and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she also directs the Reimagining Education Advanced Certificate Program and the Reimagining Education: Teaching and Learning in Racially Diverse Schools Summer Institute, a four-day professional development institute for K-12 educators. She also directs several research projects, including The Public Good, a Public School Support Organization (PSSO) that applies educational research to sustaining equitable and socially just integrated K-12 schools. She was the 2018-19 President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Abbey Keener

Abbey Keener is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and a research assistant with The Public Good. In her work she is interested in the relationship between changing neighborhoods, educational inequities, and school-and-neighborhood-based social networks. Her current research focuses on the geographic nature of schooling in the context of school choice and uses geospatial statistical methods to explore patterns of segregation and ties between neighborhoods and schools.

Leana Cabral

Leana Cabral is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology of Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University and a research assistant with The Public Good, a public school support organization. She is also affiliated with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at Teachers College. Her research interests include the racial politics of public education, educational inequality, and school segregation.

Diana Cordova-Cobo

Diana Cordova-Cobo is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University and a research associate with The Public Good. Her research centers on the relationship between residential and school demographic change- particularly as it relates to racial/ethnic stratification and the experiences of Communities of Color amid gentrification and segregation trends. Prior to working in research, Diana was a middle school teacher in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.