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2-5-10 In the News
'Study: Charter school growth accompanied by racial imbalance', Washington Post 'Change aid plan to treat school districts more equally' My Central Jersey

Study: Charter school growth accompanied by racial imbalance

By Nick Anderson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 4, 2010

Seven out of 10 black charter school students are on campuses with extremely few white students, according to a new study of enrollment trends that shows the independent public schools are less racially diverse than their traditional counterparts.

The findings from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which are being released Thursday, reflect the proliferation of charter schools in the District of Columbia and other major cities with struggling school systems and high minority populations.

To the authors of the study, the findings point to a civil rights issue: "As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates," the study concludes, "the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools."

Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor who oversaw the study, said that racially segregated schools tend to face more problems than integrated schools in teacher retention, graduation rates and other areas. He also said charter schools have not been proven to be better academically than regular public schools -- a conclusion some researchers debate.

Charter school proponents say that their movement is giving families options they would otherwise lack.

"I'm less concerned about the comparison of the racial composition of the charter schools to public schools generally, than I am in looking at whether charter schools are getting the job done in providing a viable, meaningful alternative to the regular public schools," said Brian W. Jones, vice chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board.

In the District, about 28,000 students attend charter schools; the school system has about 46,000 students. Recent data show that 84 percent of the city's charter school students are African American, compared with 78 percent in regular public schools.

Nationally, according to 2007-08 federal data that the study cited, black students account for 32 percent of charter school enrollment. That is roughly twice their share of enrollment in regular public schools.

The study also found that 70 percent of black charter students are in schools in which at least 90 percent of the student population is nonwhite, and 43 percent of black charter students are in schools with virtually all-minority enrollment. For black students in regular public schools, the comparable shares were 36 percent (in the high-minority enrollment schools) and 15 percent (in virtually all-minority schools).

The study recommended that federal and state governments push for racial diversification of charter schools.

"We actually are very proud of the fact that charter schools enroll more low-income kids and more kids of color than do other public schools," said Nelson Smith, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, based in Washington. "We're happy to talk about those demographic issues. We're also happy to talk about how to increase diversity overall in all facets of public education. The real civil rights issue for many of these kids is being trapped in dysfunctional schools."

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February 5, 2010

Change aid plan to treat school districts more equally

When Gov. Chris Christie talks about reforming state government spending, the emphasis is typically on reducing it in responsible ways, and rightly so.

But there's another important part to reform, and that's assuring that the money that is spent is distributed wisely and fairly.

That's not happening with the current school aid formula. And that has to change, immediately.

One of Gov. Jon Corzine's few accomplishments was his administration's overhaul of school aid funding that better recognized the reality that special-needs students live all across New Jersey — not just in the 31 former "Abbott" districts that for years received a wildly disproportionate amount of state aid. The end result was to increase aid to hundreds of suburban districts by redeploying funds more evenly among them.

It was a step in the right direction. The problem is that "more evenly" wasn't very even at all. With the amount of one-year hikes capped at 20 percent, some districts were looking at years of such increases before catching up to full funding under the formula's own calculations. Meanwhile, however, many districts that also received that same 20 percent increase would have reached their full funding level far more quickly, in some cases within a year or two. And still others receiving hikes have already reached their maximum formula figure.

So what New Jersey's left with are some districts receiving all of the aid their "supposed" to receive — or nearly the full amount — while others aren't even close, getting less than half.

That doesn't make sense, and don't try looking for a reasonable explanation in the numbers, because it isn't there. Among the formula's key elements was to establish what the state considered to be an "adequate" level of per-pupil spending. But while many districts getting their full amount of aid in the current school year were well over that adequacy level, others getting far less of a percentage of their aid were well under that adequacy level.

So why the illogical disparity between the fully funded districts and those not even close?

Blame it on politics.

There's no common thread connecting the districts on either end of the scale. They come in all sizes and degrees of affluence, dotted across the state. But the process has left a cluster of Central Jersey districts being treated particularly poorly, 3including Piscataway, Woodbridge, Edison and North Brunswick in Middlesex County and Montgomery in Somerset County.

While the Corzine formula was an improvement, it was deeply flawed because the administration was too anxious to keep too many districts at least somewhat happy as Corzine kept an eye on re-election possibilities. Spread the money as widely as possible, give everyone at least something, and the potential is there for more votes.

Well it's time for the tough-talking Christie to correct that blunder. If a fairer formula means "taking money away" from some districts to give it to others, so what? That's already happening. The goal here should be fairness independent of politics. That's a hard sell, of course, but then that's what the Christie administration is supposed to be all about, doing the things that need to be done that others haven't had the courage to do.

It would be nice to see Christie deliver on those promises when it comes to school aid. School officials aren't stupid; they understand the budget crisis at hand, and how silly and counterproductive it would be to advocate for aid hikes across the board. Everyone's going to be feeling the pain.

But Piscataway Superintendent Robert Copeland and Woodbridge Superintendent John Crowe offered a simple idea to the Courier News editorial board this week: If the state has available only 85 percent of the money needed to fully fund the formula, for instance, then fine — every school district should receive 85 percent of their formula-established full funding. Not 100 percent over here and 50 percent over there. Or if that's too dramatic a correction in one stroke, then at least start phasing it in immediately.

Copeland's right, and even if that's not the specific approach to reform taken by state officials, there is nonetheless an urgent need to treat all school districts more equally. We urge Christie and education officials, along with lawmakers, to craft a fairer process, the sooner the better.