That an achievement gap exists in the United States across racial and socio-economic lines is undeniable. This gap can be seen in “standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college-enrollment and -completion rates.” Few would deny the connection between race and poverty in the United States. According to a recent study published by Kansas State University, this poverty in America is rooted in our education system. According to Kay Ann Taylor, associate professor of secondary education,

Because public school funding relies, in part, on property taxes, in communities with little property ownership in the way of a tax base, schools and children suffer.

Even more frightening is the fact that our leaders seem to be well aware of these problems … and completely ineffectual at confronting them. The only education reform act passed by congress in the last 40 years, the No Child Left Behind Act, has as one of its stated goals, the narrowing of the Achievement Gap. But according to a recent New York Times article, NCLB is not closing this gap: “Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students.” The article continues,

Perhaps the question we need to ask ourselves is, what are education reformers doing to tackle the problems of Racial and Socio-Economic Segregation?

Thus far in my writings for the Edurati Review, I have been focusing on the burgeoning Charter School movement. I would prioritize my perspective on this movement as such: 1) an urban, mathematics educator, 2) a school reform advocate teaching for an high-profile Charter Management Organization (CMO) and 3) a Master’s Candidate in Public School Administration. In this column, I hope to delve deeper into the issues of Poverty and Race as they effect and are effected by Charter Schools.

I have written about this issue previously in a post on Criticisms of Charter Schools. In this post, I wrote

Indeed, much of the research on segregation and charter schooling points to this sort of pattern. As education reform advocate, Derrell Bradford, commented on the post,

These schools serve residential assignment patterns that already mirror segregated housing patterns created to send kids to traditional district schools. These concentrations, particularly of black parents, in charter schools are less about housing and assignment, patterns, which predate charters, as they currently exist (and school segregation that is endemic of that) and more about the ethnicity of the people who feel the most urgent need for an alternative. Harlem is full of black people. The traditional public schools in that area are terrible overall. So this is a natural response from the most put-upon sector of students who attend those schools.

While Charter Schools are segregated, this is most likely no fault of their own, but reflective of historical trends. Bradford is, in essence, asking, If Charter Schools are largely segregated, but they are performing, is segregation a problem? Conventional wisdom would point to research that connects segregation to the achievement gap, and answer “yes.” The standards-based education reform movement attempted to tackle this problem head-on and has been marginally successful.

Now, consider the fact that segregated Charter Schools are performing.

The Charter Practice Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently published Inside Urban Charter Schools, an analysis of the five high performing Charter Schools with whom the project works closely. While the crux of the Charter School movement is in what these five schools are doing with their freedom, it is important to this post that these five schools are “serving predominantly low-income, minority youth.” The CMO I work for recently had three of its schools selected as California Distinguished Schools. All three of these schools serve overwhelmingly low-income and minority students. Does this mean that the research was wrong and that segregation does not breed an achievement gap or does this mean that with the freedom that a Charter provides, a new breed of pioneering and innovative educators have found a solution to Poverty and Race?