In the brouhaha over last week's UCLA Civil Rights Project reporton charter school "segregation," one talking point seems unimpeachable: that it's??paternalistic or worse for Gary Orfield and his team at UCLA??to want to keep minority parents from choosing their preferred schools because??they serve??"too many" black or brown children. As my friend and??Education Next colleague Paul Peterson wrote,
Suspicious of parents, [Orfield] thinks either the courts or the federal government, or both, should force children to attend the school he and his elitist friends want them to attend...For parents to choose schools they find better and safer is something Orfield cannot tolerate.
That makes sense on the surface, but there's a problem: we in the charter school movement aren't so different. After all, we can't "tolerate" it when parents choose schools that are extremely low-performing, even if they find them "better and safer" than their other alternatives. Because, let's remember, a bedrock principle of the charter movement is to close down failing schools--even those that are popular with parents.
The only difference is that those of us in the charter movement place a high value on academic achievement, while folks like Orfield place a high value on racial integration. But here's another irony: I strongly suspect that many of the same schools that Gary wants to take off the table for minority parents (those that are extremely racially isolated) are the same ones that are candidates for closure for low academic performance.* Someone should do a study; I bet they will find that most of the charters that have closed had high concentrations of poor and minority kids. So here's more common ground (and good news): if we??aggressively close low-performing charter??schools, we'll probably get rid of most of the racially isolated ones at the same time.
Then again, does that make us elitist?
* February 10 at 10:15 a.m. As some readers (like Mike G. below)??have pointed out, many of the best charter schools (like the KIPPs, Amistad, etc.) are also racially isolated. That's true, but there are probably just a few hundred of them; I suspect the number of low-performing, racially isolated charter schools is much higher.
-Mike Petrilli
