‘Desperately afraid of losing white parents’: charter schools and segregation

Giersch, Jason

doi:10.1080/13613324.2019.1631780

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Overall, though some school leaders feel they are not able to influence student diversity (Giersch, 2019), our findings illustrate that schools have significant agency and can establish diverse schools if they are responsive to local context and devote considerable efforts toward making diversity a priority. Although our findings are based on a sample of charter schools, because school segregation remains an issue across all school types, our study suggests promising practices for any school system working to establish diverse schools.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Pursuing Diversity: The Context, Practices, and Diversity Outcomes of Intentionally Diverse Charter Schools

Seifert

Porter

Cordes

et al. 2022

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background: In the United States, students’ experiences are shaped by racioethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic segregation. School choice, and especially charter schools, generally exacerbate existing levels of school segregation. Counter to this trend, hundreds of intentionally diverse charter schools (IDCS), with a mission to promote school diversity, have opened across the country. Purpose: This study aims to clarify how IDCS operationalize their mission to serve diverse populations. To do so, we examine contextual factors that influence diversification efforts, the strategies that IDCS use to pursue diverse enrollments, and whether sample IDCS are more diverse than comparison schools. Research Design: This study uses a convergent mixed-methods design, in which qualitative and quantitative data were independently collected and analyzed, then merged for final analysis. The qualitative phase included thematic analyses of 101 interviews and 40 focus groups with IDCS staff and leaders to identify key contextual factors and practices that shape diversification efforts. For quantitative analyses, we used student and school-level administrative data from sample and comparison schools in New York, Colorado, and California. We explored researcher-created diversity outcomes for sample and comparison schools, including a racioethnic diversity index representing the probability that any two students chosen at random will be of a different race/ethnicity, and locally created diversity goals of having 40%–50% of enrolled students qualify for free/reduced price lunch (FRL) and no racial majority group among enrolled students. Conclusions/Recommendations: We found that local context, including race-neutral state policies and local housing patterns, created barriers to recruiting and enrolling diverse students. To overcome these barriers, IDCS staff developed data-driven recruitment and enrollment practices that were differentiated by the target group. Practices focused on increasing awareness of the school, building trust, and investing parents in the schools’ diversity mission. Enrollment data show that sample IDCS are more diverse than a set of comparison schools, with mixed results when analyzing diversity outcomes with locally defined goals. We conclude that, despite contextual barriers, choice schools have considerable agency in fostering school diversity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Pursuing Diversity: The Context, Practices, and Diversity Outcomes of Intentionally Diverse Charter Schools

Seifert

Porter

Cordes

et al. 2022

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, this research has yet to consider how Black stakeholders experience charter school closure. Research has documented how charter schools and charter policy might reproduce racial inequities through processes such as segregation (e.g., Giersch, 2019), reduced student services (e.g., Lacireno-Paquet et al, 2002), and high staff turnover (e.g., Stuit & Smith, 2012). High rates of charter school closure might be another way charter policy perpetuates racial inequity.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accountability Battle: A Critical Analysis of a Charter Renewal Decision

et al. 2022

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Charter school policy represents two simultaneous forms of accountability, in which schools are accountable to both parents and authorizers. This study of a K-8 charter renewal decision interrogates these accountability relationships and the role of race and power in privileging the interests of particular stakeholders over others. Using counternarrative methodology and qualitative interviews and observations, we draw on critical race theory and new managerialism to make sense of the competing accounts surrounding a non-renewal process. We find four areas of tension, in which district officials subscribe to new managerialist authorizing styles that leave little room for participation from the Black and low-income school community. We conclude with recommendations for how districts can partner with communities to work toward frameworks of accountability that value the goals of multiple stakeholder groups.

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“…Charter schools can weaken the neighborhood-school connection, potentially decoupling where students live from where they attend school (Ayscue and Frankenberg 2018;Giersch Forthcoming). As Henig (2018:6) explains, "charters were seen by early proponents as a way to loosen that tie between where one lived and where one's children went to school."…”

Section: The Charter Schoolmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While states have varied attendance restrictions, applications to attend charters in North Carolina are open to any students living in the state. By decoupling where families live from where they send their children to school, charters have the potential to weaken the neighborhood-school connection (Ayscue and Frankenberg 2018;Giersch Forthcoming;Henig 2018;Wells et al 2019). This decoupling is significant because segregation between schools can be attributed to pervasive residential segregation (Lareau 2014;Rhodes and Warkentien 2017;Siegel-Hawley et al 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Siting Schools, Choosing Students? Protecting White Habitus Through Charter School Recruitment

Riel

2021

Sociological Forum

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While many scholars agree that charter school enrollment contributes to segregation between schools, the role of siting decisions in recruitment to non-urban charters has been overlooked. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork to examine student recruitment in three charter schools, this article demonstrates how personnel used intentional site selection, geographic lottery priorities, tailored programs, and other recruitment strategies that catered to local communities and created predominantly white spaces. This study builds on existing knowledge about white flight between schools but from an organizational perspective, illustrating how school personnel can work to create and sustain white habitus to recruit families. These findings also contradict ideals about school choice; while charter schools are ostensibly available to families regardless of where they live, I find that charter school personnel targeted, sited in, and tailored recruitment to the pool of prospective families they wished to attract-predominantly white areas. The article contributes to the literature by demonstrating the importance of charter school organizational practices to school segregation.

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‘Desperately afraid of losing white parents’: charter schools and segregation

Cited by 9 publications

References 61 publications

Pursuing Diversity: The Context, Practices, and Diversity Outcomes of Intentionally Diverse Charter Schools

Pursuing Diversity: The Context, Practices, and Diversity Outcomes of Intentionally Diverse Charter Schools

Accountability Battle: A Critical Analysis of a Charter Renewal Decision

Siting Schools, Choosing Students? Protecting White Habitus Through Charter School Recruitment

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