Lawyer Does Math and More Charter Bashing
Posted by Josh McGee | Arkansas, Education | September 29, 2009
The Dem-Gaz has an article today about charter schools and their effect on the desegregation of the Little Rock School District. The article presents a summary of a study done by the the Office for Education Policy at the U of A. We had a post about this very subject about a week ago. Both the study and our post seek to debunk the assertion by LRSD attorney Chris Heller that charter schools are inhibiting desegregation efforts in Little Rock.
Attorney Chris Heller, while saying that the U of A should be embarassed by the OEP report, claims that the district’s six Magnet schools best exemplify desirable integration because they have an equally balanced (50/50) racial makeup. Of course, the population of students in LRSD is NOT equally balanced, so any attempt to bring one school to 50/50 necessarily means some other schools will look less like the population of LRSD. The proper test of integration should be whether or not a school’s racial makeup is similar to that of the community. The OEP report estimates that a properly integrated school would have a minority enrollment of around 78.6 %, based upon the district average of the students’ racial makeup. Therefore, every time an effort is made to bring any school up to a 50% level of white students, that necessarily means that other schools will suffer. There simply aren’t enough white students to achieve the 50% goal at every school: Every white student that is added to one school is a white student lost by another school. This is why the OEP report based its definition of integration on district-wide averages, not an arbitrary 50/50 ratio.
Max Brantley, on the Arkansas Times Blog, sides with Heller (surprise) in this debate. There’s not much to say about Max’s post, primarily because we’re not exactly sure what his point is ( but we’ll give a free cookie to anyone who can explain it!). He seems to argue that charter schools, by design, have “segregative effects.” I suppose it’s not long before Max turns Glenn Beckian on us all and calls President Obama a racist because he unashamedly supports charter schools.
In truth, residentially assigning students to attend schools has become a modern form of legally imposed segregation. All across this country, where a student attends school is dictated by where a student lives, and where a student lives is dictated by income and race. Those who have the means to choose a good school can move in order to attend one, those without the means are left behind.
For full details refer to the OEP study.
Update: Jay P. Greene’s Blog has a guest post by Greg Forster about charter schools and segregation.
School officials in Little Rock saying they know best how to integrate LR schools? It’s deja-vu all over again.
Why does the LRSD have such a strong opinion about charter schools? Could it be that charter schools aren’t really the issue? Might there actually be 67 million reasons, called dollars. The state has been paying for LRSD desegregation efforts. They are trying to say the the district is unitary, ie doing an adequate job of integrating the schools. If they are deemed unitary then the district stands to lose the $67 million dollars from the state.
The school district has a perverse incentive to not integrate. So the district must state that they aren’t making adequate progress towards integrating their school, but they can’t do this. How would it look one for one of the hallmark locations of the civil rights movement to say they aren’t integrating their schools? However, if they don’t say this very thing then they lose $67 million; so they blame charter schools for their own lack of integration.
Attorney Chris Heller says the U of A should be embarrassed by the OEP report, but the truth is the LRSD should be embarrassed for making excuses for failing to integrate so they can keep taking tax payer dollars away from other districts around the state.
I’m with Virgil on this one. And Heller is right, in a certain ironic sense. Charter schools in the Little Rock area ARE hindering the ability of the LRSD to achieve better integrated schools in the sense that they are doing it for them, whereas LRSD has demonstrated repeatedly that it couldn’t do it on its own.
If you have ever gone fishing with someone who absolutely cannot fish, then you know what I’m talking about. In the end, you stop trying to teach the other person how to fish, catch a bunch of fish yourself, and give them half of the fish just to be charitable. That is what charter schools are doing in and around Little Rock. Based on the data, they are better integrated then the average LRSD school and their presence has increased the integration of the average LRSD school. So, everyone gets to eat fish. Without the charter schools, we’d all starve.