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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Aug. 10, 2016
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Charter schools & urban communities NAACP decries ‘predatory’ qualities In Virginia Virginia’s law does not contain a cap on charter public school growth, it allows only local school district authorizers and provides little autonomy, insufficient accountability, and inequitable funding. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools notes that Virginia’s law needs improvement across the board. Potential starting points include expanding authorizing options, beefing up the law in relation to increasing operational autonomy, and ensuring equitable operational funding and equitable access to capital funding and facilities.
STAFF & WIRE Don’t. That’s the NAACP’s message for state, local governments and others looking to expand charter schools in urban communities. During its 2016 National Convention last month, the group’s delegates passed a resolution that reaffirmed the association’s opposition to spending public money on charter schools but went a step further by calling for a full moratorium on their “rapid proliferation,” confirmed NAACP interim education director Victor Goode last week. The NAACP called charter schools the educational equivalent of “predatory lending practices” responsible for issues ranging from unequal discipline to school resegregation. Education Secretary John King pushed back on the NAACP’s declaration in Washington last week, insisting there shouldn’t be
“artificial barriers” to the growth of quality, taxpayer-funded, locally controlled schools that are “drivers of opportunity for kids.” There are “places around the country that you will find characters that are closing the achievement gap, charters that are sending all of their students on to college when the local neighborhood school is sending hardly any students on to college,” King told reporters at the annual National Association of Black Journalists–National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention, just hours after the NAACP approved its resolution in Baltimore. Still, “there are charters that are not good, and states need to act to improve those schools or close those schools,” King said in a oneon-one interview with journalist Maria Hinojosa. “So our role at the federal level is to both encourage the creation of schools that are good and also encourage charter operators to take their responsibility to act” when schools come up short.
The one-day, long-distance debate between King, the top education official in the country, and the NAACP, arguably the nation’s most august civil rights organization, mirrors the national controversy around charter schools. As cash-strapped states and school districts struggle to adequately fund public schools, particularly in urban areas, the appetite for charters has grown among policy makers and education reformers (and likeminded conservative politicians). Supporters point to charters as a way for communities, parents, and educators to work together, creating a coherent, tailored plan to teach kids based on where they live and what they need. They argue that charters offer parents in struggling neighborhoods a choice, increasing competition for failing traditional public schools. Opponents, however, say the charter school system sacrifices accountability—and the fight between affluent and poor districts
for equitable school funding—on the altar of local control. With less accountability, they say, those schools have a reputation of shortchanging students, mismanaging publicly funded budgets, and overworking teachers, with little government oversight. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of charter schools nationwide has more than tripled since 2000, from 1.7 percent to 6.2 percent, with the total number of public charter schools increasing from 1,500 to 6,100. They also got bigger over the same time. The number of schools that have between 500 and 1,000 students doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. A series of studies has revealed that, propelled by housing trends and income inequality, an eyebrowraising number of charter schools and public schools are more likely to be separate and unequal. Schools and districts that are predominantly black or Latino are less likely to
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