By Rachel Scott, The Finance Project

I grew up attending public magnet schools in Indianapolis in the 1980’s, and it never occurred to me that the student body of other schools was any different from mine: about half black and half white with smaller numbers of Latino and Asian students. What I didn’t know at that time was that the magnet schools I attended, in addition to providing innovative programming not offered by my neighborhood schools, were part of an intentional national policy effort to ensure students were learning in diverse environments that reflected the richness of their communities.

Thirty years later, charter schools around the country now find themselves at the center of the “school choice” movement and there are fewer magnet schools. Charter schools most certainly are serving a broad array of children in all types of settings. In the aggregate, we can say “charter schools are diverse” and “families in all kinds of neighborhoods now have ‘school choice.’” However, a number of studies show that, intentionally or unintentionally, many families are choosing to send their children to schools where the majority of the students are just like them—resulting in what some call a “resegregation” of public schools. In fact, a high school friend of mine who is a school librarian in a major city recently told me, “We have two kinds of charter schools here: the white ones and the black ones.”

Is “resegregation” really a problem?

Among other researchers, The Urban Institute and The Century Foundation have highlighted the fact that school choice tends to lead to racial and socioeconomic segregation. Adverse effects of this segregation are felt by students in both high-income and low-income schools. Schools with a majority of low-income students tend to have fewer resources to expend on the students and more difficulty attracting the most qualified teachers. Schools with a majority of higher-income students tend to produce students who have more difficulty working with and communicating with people who are different from them.

Particular to charter schools, Miron, et al found in a study of demographic patterns in 968 largely Education Management Organization (EMO)-run schools that only a quarter had enrollment demographics similar to those of the sending district, with concentrations of either majority or minority students dominating enrollment at most schools. Not only that, Miron and his team found that these EMO-run schools enrolled smaller percentages of both special education and ELL students, and that:

Most charter schools were divided into either very segregative high-income schools or very segregative low-income schools. Between 70% and 73% of the schools were in the extreme categories of the scale, depending on the comparison.

Of course, a high concentration of minority students in a charter school can be precisely what some charter school leaders have in mind. A two-part series of articles in the Orlando Sentinel last year includes discussion by some charter school proponents who say that achieving higher scores for minority students is their purpose entirely. While this goal is laudable, any achievement for a group of students in an artificially isolated environment that even unintentionally "shields" them from the real climate of their community is a hollow one—a sentiment echoed by groups like AAUW who oppose single-sex education environments.

Leaders of independent charter schools are in a good position to learn from these troubling trends seen with many larger charter organizations, and are more likely to have the flexibility to change policies or practices that may be resulting in a lack of diversity in their schools.

“Not Discriminating” is Not Enough

In some ways, it would be easy for charter schools to solve the problem of over-concentrations of some student populations in schools if the problem were caused by simple discrimination. However, more likely, at the roots of ‘school choice’ (that we have seen more often results in segregation) are a number of very complex, deep-seated, and interrelated factors like culture, family attitudes and expectations, and what “feels comfortable” to any of us.

Socialization is a powerful and often invisible force, and knowing how difficult it can be to make people revisit their attitudes may make some charter school leaders wonder if it’s worth the effort. Is it the job of charter schools, in addition to meeting students’ educational needs, to provide students with diverse classroom settings? I would argue, yes. Further, there has been an increased focus on Civil Rights Office at the U.S. Department of Education, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has identified education “as a key civil right.” The Department recently released guidelines on voluntary ways schools can make reasonable, fair, and legal efforts to encourage diverse enrollment, summarized here by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

I look forward to your feedback and plan to revisit this topic in the near future, especially as it relates to special education, English Language Learners, and successful strategies independent charter schools have used to ensure their schools are true reflections of their communities.

What are you seeing that works, or doesn’t work, in your school or community?

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.