Equal Access for Whom? How Charter School Recruitment Obscures Inequality

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Education

Abstract

School choice has gained attention as the revolutionary idea that would transform public education, and one of the newest and trendiest school choice experiments is the charter school. In most states, families can apply to a charter school anywhere in their residing state, even if it exists outside of their district and county boundaries. However, this decision is not unidirectional. Charter schools must work to bolster their images in order to garner applications from prospective families, as they have no automatic population of students from which to draw. In this regard, charter schools play a role in the selection of a school through a myriad of decisions regarding recruitment, which send important messages to families about whether the school will fit with their own lives. This paper focuses on the messages about diversity that charter school leaders convey to prospective families in a predominantly white and high SES charter school. Specifically, it compares what charter school leaders say and do about diversity. I find that, by crafting and streamlining a message about equal access, charter school personnel obscure existing inequalities and reproduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in enrollment. I argue that using the language of markets and choice can distort views of charter schools because they presume access and rely on ideals of recruitment that can fail to match with practices. While the charter school conveys notions of fit through emphasis on parental involvement, transportation, and uniforms, its leaders do so through the guise of equal opportunity rather than exclusion. White school leaders construct a narrative promising equality in the abstract without recognition of differences between groups, and minority staff members at the school must also streamline their own message to prospective families in order to fit the school’s branding of diversity.

Author

• Virginia Riel, North Carolina State University