A Road Map to Diversifying Newark Charter School?

By Elizabeth Scheinberg

“Charters could be more integrated than traditional public schools. The great tragedy is that they’re more segregated,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Washington think tank. “The charter school community is recognizing that to the extent that it’s seen as segregated, that’s a negative thing...” - Edweek, Studies Spotlight Charters Designed for Diversity

(Shades of Purple are from Edweek, black is my comment)

Last week, Edweek.org published a story about integration in charter schools. The story actually speaks volumes to the recent debate over the Newark Charter School Expansion. Opponents of the expansion spoke passionately about the perception that NCS is not diversified - an assertion that NCS supporters deny. Ultimately, then-Delaware Secretary of Education, Lillian Lowery, recommended that the State Board of Education approve the NCS expansion - with two conditions:

1) Since the lack of access to the federal free and reduced lunch program is a barrier to low income families who would otherwise seek to enroll their student at NCS, the Department of Education, as the authorizer, required the school to implement the lunch program commencing in the 2012-13 school year.

2) The NCS modification was also conditioned upon the development and implementation of significant outreach effort to those underrepresented populations. Prior to implementation, the DOE must approve the outreach plan.

Excerpts From Edweek.org:

"Two new reports—one from the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, another from the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council—examine charter schools that have racially and socioeconomically diverse enrollments as part of their school missions. Researchers and advocates say that there is increasing demand for such schools, but that national educational priorities and policies are not necessarily stacked in their favor..."

"But research from the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, based at the University of California, Los Angeles, indicates that many charter schools are more racially segregated than regular public schools, many of which have also become less diverse in recent decades..."

"The NAPCS brief, “A Mission to Serve: How Public Charter Schools are Designed to Meet the Diverse Demands of Our Communities,” presents both approaches as potentially successful school models, but says that “the past decade or so ... has seen a noteworthy rise in high-performing public charter schools with missions intentionally designed to serve racially and economically integrated student populations.” These schools differ from charter schools that are required to be diverse in order to meet targets set by districts or authorizers..."

"Both reports also include recommendations for federal and state policymakers, including suggestions that charter schools be permitted to receive federal startup funding even if they use a weighted lottery—rather than a random drawing—in order to create an integrated student population."

Under current federal law - Charters that employ a weighted lottery are excluded from elibility to receive federal startup funding.

"Even before charters host a lottery, and especially if the lottery is unweighted, school staff members and founders must recruit students from each community they hope to educate. The schools highlighted in the two reports hosted meetings, sent representatives door to door, and advertised in local newspapers until they built reputations strong enough to ensure full lotteries that yield a school with students from a variety of backgrounds."

"Intentional efforts to recruit minority and disadvantaged students actually make the resemblance between charters and private schools stronger, added Ms. Wells, as many private schools have long reached out to lower-income students. She also expressed concern that charter schools may achieve racial diversity without serving students with learning or physical disabilities, though some states require charter schools to have targets for these populations; New York state, for instance, recently prominently re-emphasized its intention to enforce such targets."