Critics of charter schools often point out their lack of diversity, as the majority serve inner-city, minority students. Most notably, American Federation for Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently called charter schools “the polite cousin of segregation.”
Critiques such as this, levied mainly by teachers unions and politicians dependent on union donations, are flawed in two ways.
The first flaw is the failure to recognize that the district schools Weingarten extols are segregated as well. Schools reflect their neighborhoods. As neighborhoods become more segregated by income, race, and class, the schools they contain do the same. Suburban district schools look far different than their inner-city counterparts.
Yet, students living in states without school choice programs are consigned to the schools they attend simply because of their zip code. This more closely resembles segregation, insofar as it is mandated by the legislators drawing district boundaries and poor, minority children are powerless to escape it.
The second flaw in such an argument is that charter schools are actually employing specific practices to integrate their schools, but detractors fail to recognize this.
A new report produced by the Century Foundation finds that a number of charter schools are seeking intentional integration. Though the number of diverse-by-design charter schools is only 2 percent, that figure amounts to 125 schools.
Moreover, 1 in 5 charter schools showed consideration of diversity in their school model, while 1 in 4 schools had medium to high diversity in enrollment.
Traditional public schools, because they automatically enroll students based on the zip code where they are located, by nature cannot have these intentional initiatives to increase student diversity.
Halley Potter, senior fellow at the Century Foundation writes that “we must move past simplistic debates about whether charter schools contribute to the problem of school segregation, and begin to see them as a critical part of the solution … the flexibility of the charter model means that charter schools … can be an effective tool to give more students access to diverse classrooms.”
