Genevieve Siegel-Hawley column: Lawmakers ought to maintain the road on privatizing public schooling | Columnists
Studies show, for instance, that charter schools cherry-pick their students. Even in charter schools with lottery-based admissions, required under Virginia law, barriers like family involvement stipulations or attendance minimums screen out students who regular public schools must serve. These forms of selective admissions practices in publicly funded schools undermine educational equity, with disproportionate impact on students of color and students with special needs.
About 4 million kids, or 7% of the public school enrollment, attend charters, up from zero in 1990. Charters are disproportionately located in large urban systems like Washington, DC, Detroit and New Orleans, and serve high concentrations of Black, Latinx and lower income students.
But charter schools are increasingly serving suburban students. Research from North Carolina, an often-cited model for Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s push to expand charter schools, shows a recent proliferation of charters serving primarily white, Asian and middle-class students in the suburbs of large metro areas.
Effectively recreating dual systems of schooling — a hallmark of the pre-Brown era — by increasing neovouchers and charter schools in Virginia is problematic for all of us. Siphoning substantial funding away from our woefully underresourced, overstretched regular public schools doubles down on separate and unequal schooling for the students left behind. And white, segregated charter and private schools will receive government support to ill-educate future citizens for a multiracial society.
