Abstract
Through a discussion of the current race politics of charter schooling and a brief, empirical examination of a community-based charter school that I helped to found in California, the public school community control movement in New York City in the late 1960s, and the African American independent school movement and the Council of Independent Black Institutions in the 1970s, I argue that a full understanding of the race politics of charter schooling requires a look at the historical roots of African American school choice. I find that history helps us better understand the complex dynamics of race and school choice. We can understand that African American parent and educator commitment to desegregated schooling is complex and certainly not unwavering; that the distinction between public and private in public education is quite murky; and that the definition of community for purposes of building schools is complicated and that strange bedfellows in African American education are nothing new. I appeal to the history of African American school choice to complicate the current public and scholarly debate on race and charter schooling.
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Notes
For instance, in its study of 25 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City, a study of more than 95 % of all charter school students in the country, CREDO found that low-income African American students in charter schools make gains that are equivalent to 29 additional days of reading instruction and 36 days of math instruction when compared with their peers in traditional public schools (p. 65). For low-income Latino students in charter schools, the gains are the equivalent of 14 instructional days of reading and 22 days of math—though the pattern is reversed for non-low-income Latino students, whose academic performance seems to benefit from enrollment in traditional public schools (p. 68).
Ravitch (2014) asserts that charter schools made vouchers more politically palatable, writing: “The charter movement paved the way for the resurgence of the voucher movement, as its advocates insisted that ‘choice’ was far more important than investing in public education” (p. 316). I believe that it was primarily the other way around.
Others do not make an explicitly class- or race-focused argument about culture and charter schooling, but they, too, are taken with the idea that some charter schools focus so explicitly on the teaching of values and character (e.g., Tough 2012).
Empirical discussion in this section draws on my work in Stulberg (2008).
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Stulberg, L.M. African American School Choice and the Current Race Politics of Charter Schooling: Lessons from History. Race Soc Probl 7, 31–42 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-014-9133-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-014-9133-2