Last week we reported how charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional public schools.
This return to the dark days of our segregated past supposedly should be of concern to us even if it is not to the thousands of black parents who willingly enroll their children in the charter schools.
That would make the children victims of racism perpetrated by their parents, an interesting new twist on an old outrage.
Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run. They compete for students with public schools. Teachers' unions hate them because they take jobs from unionized teachers.
There are legitimate concerns. The schools lack the same oversight as public schools and, on average, do not perform better than public schools.
But last year the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, upped the ante by injecting racism into the debate.
It released a national study calling charters a "civil rights failure" because they "stratify students by race, class, and possibly language."
The folks at UCLA argue that concentrating low-income minority kids leads to their failure. And so we need to dilute them with kids from the middle and upper class.
This has led to calls for some form of mandatory diversification at charter schools.
The problem is that the lack of diversity is voluntary. The schools don't pick students. They must take them on a first-come, first-served basis. If there are more kids than slots, then a lottery is held.
So the reason some charters are almost completely black is that black parents are happy with that arrangement.
This leaves the civil-rights activists arguing that the parents don't know what is best for their own children.
Can you say "liberal elitists"?
The notion that black kids have to be diluted with white kids also smacks of racism.
Consider Tangelo Park Elementary, a minority school in a low-income neighborhood.
It has received a string of A grades from the state since 2005. This year the FCAT writing scores at Tangelo Park topped or equaled the scores at many high-performing, predominantly white elementary schools.
The charter Nap Ford Community School, featured in our story last week, serves the low-income children of Parramore. Principal Jennifer Porter-Smith says these kids have different needs and Nap Ford can target learning strategies to meet them. After our story ran, she was miffed that this somehow was made out to be a bad thing.
I've been to Nap Ford. I saw a group of administrators and teachers very much devoted to the mission.
This is a "civil rights failure"?
All that said, there also is no shortage of hypocrisy among school reformers. Some believe that charters and vouchers are a miracle cure that negates the need to invest more money in poor kids.
They are not.
Low-income students need quality pre-K programs. They need a longer school day. They need a much shorter summer vacation. They need highly qualified teachers and administrators.
These things cost money. The KIPP charter schools, championed by reformers and Gov. Rick Scott, have had great success with low-income middle-school students. But KIPP does it with the above formula, along with strict discipline and an hour of band every day.
KIPP spends more per student than do traditional public schools, making this an uneven competition.
The vast majority of charters don't have KIPP's resources. They struggle to survive. That makes it difficult for them to attract the best teachers and provide the right resources. And so it's not surprising they do no better than traditional public schools.
There is no magic pixie dust for closing the achievement gap. Cramming kids from completely different backgrounds into the same education model won't work. Neither will competition between two underfunded school systems.
The argument against spending more money is based on historical evidence that it doesn't produce better results.
But this is because the money has been poured into a broken system.
If spent wisely, more money matters a lot.
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