Access and Opportunity for African American Communities

• In Event: The Centrality of Access in Charter School Debates

Abstract

Scrutinizing the Charter School Equity Ethos for Parents: Does Market-Based School Choice Embody Educational Access and Opportunity for African American Communities?
During the last decade, the number of charter schools in the United States has doubled and the number of students in charter schools has nearly tripled, with approximately 3.1 million enrolled in 2016-17 (NAACP, 2017). In fact, one in eight black students in the United States now attends a charter school (NAACP, 2017). Charter schools went from being a small-scale approach to being a rapidly growing segment of schooling in the United States.
Location and funding are among the reasons for the rapid growth of charter schools in African American communities. That is, charters are more often opened in urban areas where African American families are concentrated and can “choose” them (Author, 2019a). And resources in the U.S. are unequally allocated between majority Black and majority White school districts by about $23,000,000,000 (EdBuild, 2019). When neighborhood schools are underfunded, African American parents and communities often turn to charter schools in hopes that they offer a better educational opportunity, comparable to what White and wealthy students receive (Author, 2019).
But do charters provide equitable access to educational opportunity for African American communities? During the last decade, charter school advocates, supportive foundations (e.g., Gates, Walton, Broad, and Arnold), think tanks (e.g., EdChoice) and policymakers (e.g., Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos) have framed an equity discourse around charters and school choice more generally, touting the benefits of private management within a market-based system (Blume, 2015; Author, 2019). Charter skeptics, including the nation’s two major teachers unions, grassroots organizations and civil rights organizations—such as the NAACP—have critiqued these equity contentions, focusing on concerns about access, accountability and segregation, as well as the threat posed by privatization to public schools as a democratic institution garnering public financial and political support (Scott, 2011).
To inform the public discourse and the literature, this paper seeks to create a primer of charter school research relevant to African Americans that will be accessibly written and seek to be widely distributed to parents and communities to scrutinize the charter school ethos of equity. We use the specific concerns raised in the NAACP’s statements and actions as our starting point, connecting those concerns to the central issue of access to opportunity. The paper then uses a synthesis of peer reviewed research to examine the charter school equity ethos in a way that brings access to the fore presents, with the specific audience of African American parents and communities in mind, with the goal of providing a breadth of information about charter schools and equitable educational access and opportunity.

Authors

• Julian Vasquez Heilig, University of Kentucky

• Dana Thompson Dorsey, University of South Florida - Tampa