Exploring Progressive and Regressive Dimensions of Community-­Based Charter Schools in a Segregated City

• In Event: 51.044 - Separate and Equitable: Can Community Schools Offer Equitable but Racially Segregated Educational Opportunities?

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the practical and political function of community-based charter schools for broader discussions about the role of public schools in promoting democratic localism and community control, particularly in light of the fact that the charter movement is increasingly gripped by market‐oriented visions of choice and competition. Indeed, in the early years of the charter school movement, advocates consisted of a diverse set of actors with varied ideas about the purposes these schools would serve, including educators and union leaders vying for needed autonomy to innovate curriculum and instruction (Kahlenberg & Potter, 2014), local control advocates seeking to challenge the inertia of large urban bureaucratic school districts often unresponsive to families and the varied needs of their children (Stulberg, 2005; Wells et. al., as well as market advocates interested in models of schooling based on choice and competition in a quasi‐market of schools autonomous from of traditional, centrally planned and democratically governed schools. But while charter school advocates were a heterogeneous group in the 1990s, the decades that have followed have witnessed the dominance of a market-oriented vision of charter schools as vehicles of choice and competition. Indeed, these schools increasingly represent an industry of franchised and replicated schools subsidized by a small but powerful bloc of largely White venture philanthropists and private foundation leaders (Scott, 2009).

In New York City, for example, three neighborhoods have been the centers for charter experiment: Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. The racial composition of each neighborhood, with the exception of those affected by recent gentrification trends, is predominantly black and Latino/a. The neighborhoods have rates of poverty almost twice the city average, and White and affluent communities reside only blocks away. Amid entrenched segregation by race and class, families, residents, and activists have launched historic struggles for educational equity and local control. Many of those efforts were part of broader struggles for political and economic rights and for social and cultural recognition. Indeed, in the face of an often indifferent or hostile establishment of city leaders, business elites, and residents in affluent neighborhoods, Harlemites, Brooklynites, and South Bronx residents have fought bitter battles for inclusion and empowerment. There were integration efforts in the early‐to‐mid-twentieth century, local and community control movements in the mid‐twentieth century, and legal battles in the late‐twentieth century challenging the city’s unequal school finance system. In the aftermath of each struggle, sometimes seemingly before the ink was dry on legal contracts and fragile bargains struck with city and state officials, promises for systemic change and educational equity in New York City were broken.

Using a critical qualitative case study of four charter schools in NYC, I consider the ways that community‐based charter schools advance community visions of local control and/or serve as anti‐democratic, market‐based appeals to community empowerment while serving hegemonic projects of privatization and White capitalist accumulation. The significance of the study raises important questions about the paradoxical (progressive and regressive) elements reform in a segregated community.

Author

• Terrenda Corisa White, University of Colorado-Boulder