On the national front, the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a report today that claims to show that charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools. The report finds:

…that charter schools, particularly those in the western United States are havens for white re-segregation from public schools; requirements for providing essential equity data to the federal government go unmet across the nation; and magnet schools are overlooked, in spite of showing greater levels of integration and academic achievement than charters.

It looks like, based on a quick pass through the report, their main finding is based on demographic comparisons  between charter schools and traditional public schools at the state level. This method of comparison likely leads to inaccurate conclusions due to the fact that charter schools are overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon. The correct comparison is between charters and the demographics of their immediate geographic area. We have discussed this topic as it relates to Little Rock at length here.

The Economist’s take on this report is concise, to-the-point, and spot on.

In plain English, there are a lot of black kids in charter schools. This is because charter schools tend to get set up in neighbourhoods where the public schools are terrible, such as south-eastern Washington DC or the rougher parts of New Orleans. These neighbourhoods are disproportionately African-American. Charter schools are popular with poor black parents because their other choices are so awful. There are very few charter schools in rich white suburbs with nice public schools, because there is no call for them.

The important question about charter schools is: do they give kids a better education than they would otherwise have received? The answer is yes. Nothing else matters.

You can find information specific to Arkansas from the Civil Rights Project report here.

ADDITION: I had some additional thoughts that I wanted to add to this post, so , here goes.

First, to drive home the inappropriate nature of the report’s method of comparison, I would like to make an reductio ad absurdum argument. In any given state it is necessarily true that some traditional schools will have a higher percentage of black students than the state average and some will be lower . Take for example the West Memphis and the Little Rock here in Arkansas. Both have a very high percentage of black students compared to the state average, 80% and 68% respectively compared to the state average of 21%.  Would the authors of this report advocate regulating these districts, or perhaps, dictating where people live within the state so as to equalize the demographic makeup of all schools.  And, what happens when they realize that Arkansas is whiter than Mississippi and blacker than Oklahoma?

Second, I find it curious that opponents of choice see black kids choosing charter schools and blame the charters.  While it seems more likely to me that this represents a population of students being severely underserved by their traditional public schools who are making a choice to leave. Shouldn’t we be more concerned about those traditional districts that are failing to meet their student’s needs?

A little closer to home, Cynthia Howell of the Dem Gaz has an article today providing blow by blow coverage of the latest from the North Little Rock School District desegregation hearings. Some of the more interesting discussion focused on discipline.  Here are a couple of excerpts.

John Walker quizzed Bobby Acklin, assistant superintendent for desegregation,and Francical Jackson, director of student affairs, about why black students, particularly boys, are disciplined at greater rates than their white classmates and how students and parents are to know that the district will pay for field trips for students from poor families if those messages aren’t in writing.

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The district’s enrollment for the past several years has been 59 percent black. In 2006-07, 83 percent of 3,709 suspensions in the district were to black students. And 91 percent of the 1,079 out-of-school suspensions were given to black students.

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Jackson said she has not found racial bias in the discipline recommendations from schools but, in response to Walker, she said she has not prepared any written analyses on that matter.

She said that black students “misbehave more often than whites,” and that playful roughhousing among black students can be misinterpreted by district employees as fighting.

Walker noted that the district at times assigns students with behavior problems to privately operated day treatment programs at a cost of $232,000 per semester. He questioned whether Jackson had determined whether those students, most of whom are black, perform better upon their return to the North Little Rock schools.

“The culture in North Little Rock is to not put anything in writing and you don’t do anything to remediate students,” Walker told Jackson at one point.

“We may not have it in writing but we are making progress,” Jackson responded, noting that the district has increased the number of alternative education services for students who are not succeeding in the regular classrooms.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to education stakeholders last week touting the Presidents plans for the coming year.  I am encouraged to see continued support, at least lip service, for reform, but I am also a little disconcerted by the administration’s penchant for supporting programs based on political popularity/expediency rather than evidence and results.

In his letter, Secretary Duncan emphasizes two programs which have a rather shaky track record for results.  The first is increased student aid for higher ed.  While it is true that the cost of tuition has been rising quickly over the past decade, it is certainly not clear that more student aid will make college more affordable.  There is some evidence that universities soak up any increases in student aid through tuition increases, leaving the affordability of a college degree relatively unchanged. And, there is further evidence that student aid does not help low-income families to the extent that we would like. Navigating the complicated application process serves as a barrier to many of these needy students. Reforming the student loan process and simplifying the aid application could go a long way to mitigating the system’s deficiencies, but more money will mostly help college’s bottom lines.

It is also important to note that the returns to a college degree have also been rising at a rapid rate over the past decade. In other words the economy is placing greater and greater value on a college degree, and this has a direct positive  impact on lifetime earnings. The promise of greater lifetime earnings should not only induce more people to attend college, but should also increase their ability to pay for college by providing them with more income to repay student loans.

Evidence suggests that college readiness is a much larger problem than college affordability. In 2001 only about 32% of the nations high school students “leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges.”  This report also found that nearly all those who were qualified to attend a four-year institution did. Given this evidence, shouldn’t we be focusing our money and attention on college readiness rather than affordability?

Mr. Duncan also touts the administration’s commitment to early learning (preschool) programs, the most notable of which is Head Start. But, there is a growing body of evidence showing that early childhood education programs produce marginal results that fade out alarmingly fast (here is a review of the latest study of Head Start).  I am not making the claim that early childhood education is not important, but I am questioning whether we are getting the best bang for our education buck.  Head Start gets an increase in funding in spite of poor results while programs with a demonstrated record of success like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program get cut.

It’s time President Obama lived up to his claim of evidence based governance. Both the Race to the Top competition and the reauthorization of NCLB (now ESEA) will be great tests of the administration on this front.  We will be watching with our fingers crossed, but not holding our breath.

UPDATE: Rick Hess and Andy Rotherham have some interesting things to say about the President’s reauthorization strategy. Here is another article about ESEA from EdWeek.