One of the rallying cries behind the charter school movement is the hope of freeing underprivileged children from the trap of low-performing traditional schools.
Try saying that with a straight face in Idaho.
As Idaho Education News' Devin Bodkin reported this week, the network of schools governed by the Public Charter School Commission conceded their student bodies are more white, more affluent and require fewer special services than the state as a whole.
Presented to the State Board of Education more than a year ago, the PCSC's findings showed:
- 83 percent of charters enroll no students with Limited English Proficiency.
- 94 percent of the charters have a lower proportion of ethnic minority students than their surrounding communities.
- 89 percent of these schools educate a smaller percentage of special needs students than are found in the local traditional school districts.
- 66 percent have significantly fewer low-income students, defined as those who qualify for free and reduced lunches. PCSC defines that deficit as being at least 3 percentage points lower than in the surrounding traditional school district.
How does that happen?
Some charters don't offer free and reduced lunches.
Others expect parents to provide transportation to and from school.
Often it's a matter of not recruiting low-income, minority, special needs or non-English-speaking students.
In any event, it leads toward funneling a self-selected student body into publicly funded schools of privilege.
Some charters do a better job than others.
For instance, Palouse Prairie Charter in Moscow reported a higher percentage of non-whites among its student body than the community at large - and virtually matched the proportion of low-income children found in Moscow.
But more times than not, the numbers looked like those documented in Nampa's Liberty Charter, Victory Charter and Legacy Charter schools - substantially fewer non-whites, LEP, special needs and low-income kids.
As these charters are formed, they drain money from the traditional schools, which then are expected to educate the very children charter schools leave behind.
You'd think by now Idaho's charter schools would be making more gains toward equality. After all, it was nearly a decade ago that the Idaho State University Center for Policy Studies, Education Research and Community Development detected a pattern of de facto segregation. At the time, ISU found:
- Whites were 12 percent more likely to attend a charter.
- Traditional schools had 78 percent more economically disadvantaged students.
- Special needs students were 41 percent more likely to attend traditional schools.
Then in 2015, PCSC disclosed the pattern was ongoing:
- 90 percent of its schools were less racially diverse than the state as a whole.
- 87 percent had fewer non-English- speaking students than the state average.
- 55 percent had fewer special education students.
- 77 percent had a smaller group of low-income kids.
If Idaho's charters are making any progress at all, it's barely visible.
But aside from a handful of critics, including Madison School Superintendent Geoff Thomas, who calls it "clear discrimination," you don't hear a lot of grumbling about this. Certainly the politicians and education leaders who promoted charter schools from the start are not complaining.
They seem to have accepted this disparity as Idaho's new normal.
Could it be this is what they had in mind all along? - M.T.
