Josh and I, along with our colleagues Gary Ritter and Nate Jensen, have a forthcoming article in the summer issue of EdNext, which has been released early on their website.  The article, A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation,  checks the facts related to a charter school study released in February by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) at UCLA.  The CRP article calls charter schools a “civil rights failure,” and they support their assertion with a slew of improperly generated statistics.  Upon a proper re-analysis using the same data, we show that their flawed comparison led to improper conclusions.  We also have a guest entry on EdNext’s blog today.  Here’s an exceprt from the conclusion of our article:

Our analysis suggests that these claims are certainly overstated. Furthermore, the authors fail to acknowledge two significant truths.

First, the majority of students in central cities, in both the public charter sector and in the traditional public sector, attend intensely segregated minority schools. Neither sector has cause to brag about racial diversity, but it seems clear that the CRP report points its lens in the wrong direction by focusing on the failings of charter schools. As the authors themselves note, across the country only 2.5 percent of public school children roam the halls in charter schools each day; the remaining 97.5 percent are compelled to attend traditional public schools. And we know that, more often than not, the students attending traditional public schools in cities are in intensely segregated schools. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then this is where we should look to address the problem.

Second, and perhaps more important, the fact that poor and minority students flee segregated traditional public schools for similarly segregated charters does not imply that charter school policy is imposing segregation upon these students. Rather, the racial patterns we observe in charter schools are the result of the choices students and families make as they seek more attractive schooling options. To compare these active parental choices to the forced segregation of our nation’s past (the authors of the report actually call some charter schools “apartheid” schools) trivializes the true oppression that was imposed on the grandparents and great-grandparents of many of the students seeking charter options today.

Update: Here is a link to an NPR interview with one of the authors of the CRP study, Gary Orfield.  NPR’s Michel Martin asks some tough questions, and clearly gets annoyed as Orfield repeatedly dodges them.