At Waterstone, about 32 percent of students in 2010 qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. At Campbell Drive, about two miles away, 93 percent of the students qualified.
The trend is evident across Miami-Dade County, where overall, the number of poor children enrolled in charter schools is disproportionately low compared to traditional public schools — an advantage for the charter schools, given that poverty correlates with poor academic performance. Charter schools in Miami-Dade also enroll a smaller share of black students than traditional public schools, according to federal data. In traditional public schools, one-third of children are black, compared to one-fifth of children in charter schools.
Read those two paragraphs carefully. In Miami-Dade County, charter schools serve a different population than traditional schools, and thus are not comparable. So begins the third and final installment of the Miami Herald's 3-part series examining local charter schools.
The rules under which charter schools operate - Federal, state and local - are supposed to ensure equal access to charters and to prevent discrimination. In theory preference should be given to those in the local area, which then in theory should provide a student body with demographics very much like those of surrounding neighborhood schools from which their students are drawn. The Herald found such comparable demographics in nearby Broward County. Local school districts are not required by law to closely monitor this aspect of charter schools nor their marketing methods, and few districts do, although several researchers in Miami did do an examination whose data is used in the Herald story.
The paper also notes that the expansion of charters have been in parts of the country that have been growing more rapidly, which means that they are not serving students in the older inner city and that also creates a situation of different demographics by socioeconomics and by race.
There is a slight imbalance on income and race in Broward schools, but a real imbalance in Miami Schools:
In the largest charter school networks — the Mater, Doral, Somerset and Pinecrest academies — 90 percent of the students enrolled in 2010 were Hispanic, federal records show, compared to 58 percent in the public school system. These school networks are all managed by Academica, Florida’s largest charter school operator.
Miami-Dade charter schools also enrolled a smaller share of poor students: 54 percent, compared to 74 percent in traditional public schools.
(I note that the 2nd of the three articles of this series, about which I did not write, focused on the operation of Academica and its political connections.)
There is more.
The data is stark:
In 2010, of the 83 charter schools open in Miami-Dade, more than two dozen had poverty rates more than 30 percentage points lower than the closest traditional public school, a Herald analysis found. The poverty gap was particularly noticeable in South Dade, where the Charter School at Waterstone is located
The company operating the school claims the Federal data is wrong, that 73% of their students receive free and reduced lunch, but the school district distributes the funds from the lunch program (which is from Department of Agriculture) separately from the general funds used to educate students, and says their data shows the school only having 35% of current students receiving such benefits.
The story also notes deliberate recruitment of students from higher income neighborhoods - holding an event in the Biltmore hotel is not likely to be attracting students from low-income neighborhoods that are far more heavily people of color. The schools may claim they admit based on lotteries, but that is only from those who apply, and if you distort the pool by how you market, then it is not surprising how many schools in Miami-Dade wind up with very different demographics than nearby neighborhood schools, or of the district as a whole.
If schools are evaluated y student performance on Florida's FCAT tests, the difference in demographics is likely to account for almost all the difference in performance, given high strongly performance on those tests has been shown to be correlated with socioeconomics.
The problem is not limited to Miami-Dade County: the paper mentions an operator in NY cited by the state recently. Some operators attempt to increase the number of low-income students they serve. The key is that the chartering laws do not require the local districts nor the state to sufficiently oversee charter school operators to ensure that they are abiding by the stated intend of the law, which should result in demographics more reflective of the district as a whole. After all, these schools are operated with money from taxpayers across the district and across the state.
The Obama administration demanded lifting caps on charters as a condition for receiving funds under Race to the Top. There were no requirements for oversight either as to the quality of the schools or as to how the schools were operated. Meanwhile some states which were already friendly to charters have continued to allow expansion even before Race to the Top without sufficient oversight. The kinds of discrepancies the Miami Herald found are not unique to Miami-Dade County. The different student bodies will account for most of the variance in performance between those charters and the schools serving the students in traditional public settings, more heavily low income, black, harder to educate (special education and English-Language learners), even as those scores are used by charter advocates to argue that they are performing better.
We are seeing public education being undercut and dismantled before our eyes. We are losing something we fought hard to obtain - the idea that ALL children are entitled to a free and adequate public education, to level the playing field so that the conditions of one's birth do not serve as a permanent disadvantage in the rest of one's life. Absent such a commitment, it is hard to see how we can continue to maintain the notion of a democratic republic committed to equal opportunity. If in fact we are reverting to a society in which discrimination is acceptable, it is hard to argue that we are the greatest nation on earth, at least not for those Americans who are increasingly denied access to the benefits of this society even as children.