Description

It seems like charter schools will only be beneficial to African-American students if they have access to schools with racially balanced profiles. Any school that has a concentration of poverty-issues (malnutrition, parents that are not well-educated, social development issues, etc) is going to have too many problems to address with the limited resources that schools have. Balancing the racial profile of schools may create better outcomes for marginalized groups because the quality of the education environment increases. Data to support this idea comes from school outcomes for African-Americans while the courts were legislating racial quotas (from the mid 1960s until the late 1980s) and outcomes after courts began to relax race regulations (the early 1990s). The achievement gap narrowed considerably between the late 1960s and late 1980s and began to widen in the late 1980s. Analysis of private partial voucher programs in New York City, Datyon, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., found that African-American students had large gains (an average of 6.6 percentile ranking points over 3 years (with a standard deviation of .3) on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) when they switched from public schools to private schools (Peterson, Wolf, Howell, and Campbell 2002). Since the scope of these programs were small and did not change the socioeconomic or racial make-up of the private schools involved, at-risk students were able to reap the benefits of the stable education environment. Maybe courts should increase school choice but establish racial quotas for schools.