Little Rockin'

The "UCLA Civil Rights Project" (who?) has taken a look at student composition in CA charter schools and concluded that they are racially segregated. Commence brow furrowing: Study: Segregation Rife At Charter Schools

De facto segregation is alive and well in public schools in virtually every state, but is more common in charter schools - an educational option increasingly endorsed in state and national reform efforts, according to a national study released Thursday.

The trend is particularly severe for African American students, the UCLA researchers found.

Nearly 3 out of 4 black students who attend charters are in "intensely segregated" schools with student populations that are at least 90 percent minority, according to the study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project. That's twice the rate of regular public schools.

Almost a third of those black students are in what the researchers called "apartheid schools," where 0 to 1 percent of their classmates are white. Charter schools in the Bay Area and California have similar rates of racial isolation.

These are "the very kind of schools that decades of civil rights struggles fought to abolish in the South," researchers said.

Researchers like these really are a curse. The whole point of the charter school movement has been to give inner-city kids a reasonable alternative for their appalling public schools. As this is a largely urban movement, the kids are - surprise - mostly minorities. "Segregation," if that's what you really want to call it, is a predictable outcome. But, these kids aren't segregated by race per se; they are segregated by ambition and opportunity. They, or at least their parents, want to find a good learning environment, so they can have a chance at succeeding in life. Real "separate but equal" segregation was all about keeping kids in poorly functioning and poorly financed schools based on their race, which is the situation we have even today in many urban school systems; talk about de facto segregation!

The UCLA "researchers" know all this (how can they not?), but for them it's all about generating scare headlines about "segregation." The public debate over this sort of thing really is wizened.

Here, by the way, is the picture of the poor "segregated" kids, that illustrated the article:

Kids, you need to work on your "oppression" faces. No one writing about segregation wants to see smiles, clean clothes, and backpacks.