New Jersey’s school segregation is among the worst in America, in large part because the state is divided into so many districts – roughly 600, as compared to 180 in a more populated state like Georgia.
Those partitions magnify residential segregation because students are required to attend school where they live. The core challenge is to get students out of their home neighborhoods, the plaintiffs in a desegregation lawsuit against New Jersey say.
And one surprising solution now under discussion is a new fleet of charter schools that would draw racially diverse students from across school district lines.
Unlike traditional district schools, charters have the ability to recruit over these boundaries. That makes them “very, very powerful engines for diversifying schools,” according to Lawrence Lustberg, the lead lawyer for these plaintiffs…
Expect “huge political pushback,” says Rutgers education policy expert Julia Sass Rubin, who co-founded a grassroots group that opposes the expansion of charter schools without approval from the local school board and voters. Former Republican Gov. Chris Christie expanded charters dramatically in Newark and Camden but was blocked from a similar push in the suburbs.
“It was war,” she recalled. “He publicly had to say, we’re going to focus essentially on urban areas, because the political power of New Jersey is in the suburbs.”
It is an irony that charters are now being looked at as a remedy, their critics say, since many of the urban charter schools are severely segregated themselves, with student bodies that are overwhelmingly of color. How can we turn to them, critics ask, when they are part of the problem? …
But the settlement talks as part of the segregation lawsuit in state court have flipped that script, with charters now suggested in court papers as part of the remedy. Critics don’t think it could work and point to cases where charters can exacerbate segregation: In Red Bank, for instance, a charter school has long attracted more white kids than the mostly Latino district. “Here it definitely has resulted in disparity as opposed to helping or supporting diversity,” says Superintendent Jared Rumage.
Rubin, of Rutgers, argues that charters exacerbate segregation in other ways as well, because they are less likely to take students who don’t speak English or students with disabilities, for instance. “This lawsuit is very narrowly focused, but segregation is not just race,” she says.
Urban charters say their student populations reflect the neighborhoods where they are and that they’re less likely to classify their students as special ed in the first place, and more likely to integrate them into regular classrooms.