by Kelly Amis
Tomorrow is the 60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that required public schools to integrate. Despite the ruling, districts by and large didn't make it happen and by the 70s were ordered by courts to create complicated busing schemes.
We know now that this did not work. White parents fled in huge numbers to the suburbs to avoid busing/integration for their children, leaving many cities with high percentages of minority communities.
The public school system has mostly failed to provide those urban minority communities with the same quality of educational opportunities as their white peers, and in the early 90s policy leaders of both parties said enough was enough and began to support the charter school concept: public schools that would be independent from school district bureaucracies, free to innovate and more accountable for results.
When you hear the charge today that charter schools are responsible for *segregating* students, please question that logic. Charter schools are serving more minority students because that is their mission: to open in under-served neighborhoods to provide a better education for kids that are not being served well by traditional public schools. Our cities are still remarkably segregated; charter schools reflect, but did not create, that truth.
See what some of the best urban charter school leaders have to say about why they do what they do (and how they achieve such great results in their inner-city schools) in our short film Unchartered Territory; click on the photo to watch this short film on SnagFilms.com for free. And join us in supporting schools that know and believe every child deserves the opportunity to achieve their full potential, regardless of where they live or the color of their skin.
