Charter Schools And Teacher Diversity

A new study of North Carolina public schools finds that black students in charter schools are more likely to have black teachers than their regular public school counterparts, and that the positive effect of “teacher/student racial match” on the test scores of black students is more pronounced in charter than in regular public schools.

Like most good analyses of charter and regular public schools, this report, written by economist Seth Gershenson and published by the Fordham Institute, is an opportunity to learn from the comparison between the charter and regular public school sectors. For instance, the fact that the “match effect,” which is fairly well-established in the literature (e.g., Dee 2005), is stronger in charter schools is fascinating, though a well-informed discussion of the reasons why this may be the case is well outside of my rather modest wheelhouse (there are some possibilities mentioned in the paper’s conclusion). 

I’d actually like to focus briefly on the first finding – that teacher/student racial match is more common for black charter school students. This is the descriptive and arguably less interesting part of the analysis, but it struck me because, like the paper's main finding about the magnitude of the "match effect," it too raises policy-relevant questions, in this case about why teacher diversity might vary between sectors.

Update On Teacher Diversity Data: Good News, Bad News, And Strange News

A couple of months ago, we released a report on the collection and availability of teacher race and ethnicity data, based on our late 2017 survey of all 51 state education agencies (SEAs) in the U.S. We asked them two simple questions: 1) Do you collect data (school- or district-level) on teacher race and ethnicity; and 2) Do you make the data public, and how (i.e., by request or on your website)?

Our findings, in brief, were that the majority of states both collected and made public school- and district-level data on teacher diversity, but that six states did not collect the data all, and another four states collect the data but do not make them available to the public.

Since the publication of that report, we’ve come across significant information/updates pertaining to three states, which we would like to note briefly. We might characterize these three updates as good news, bad news, and strange news.

We Need To Reassess School Discipline

It has been widely documented that, in American schools, students of color are disproportionately punished for nonviolent behaviors, and are targeted for exclusionary discipline within schools more often than their white peers. Exclusionary discipline is defined as students being removed from their learning environment, whether by in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, or expulsion. 

In a national study, Sullivan et al. (2013) found that “Black students were more than twice as likely as White students to be suspended, whereas Hispanic and Native American students were 10 and 20 percent more likely to be suspended.” Out of all the racial minority groups, Asians had the lowest suspension rates across the board. Across all the racial groups, “males were twice as likely as female students to be suspended, and Black males had the highest rates of all subgroups.”

One reason that students of color are at a performance disadvantage to their White counterparts is because, put simply, they are being removed from the classroom much more often. This is true nationally, but it seems to be a particularly pronounced issue in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Center for Public Integrity released a 2015 study demonstrating that schools in Virginia “referred students to law enforcement agencies at a rate nearly three times the national rate” (Ferriss, 2015). According to the U.S. Department of Education, Virginia’s Black student population, which is 23 percent of all students, received 59 percent of short-term arrests and 43 percent of expulsions (Lum, 2018).

The Casual Cruelty Of Privilege

Our week began with yet another profoundly disturbing chapter in the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrant and refugee children. The New York Times reports that hundreds of underage Latino youth are being taken under the cover of darkness from their foster homes and shelters across the country and shipped off to a “tent city” in Texas near our southern border. These children will no longer be able to attend school, their access to legal services to pursue their immigration claims will be dramatically reduced, and their new settingswill not be licensed and monitored by the state child welfare authorities who ensure the safety and education of children who have been separated from their families.

The justification for these nighttime evacuations is that the government has run out of space in appropriate facilities. There is no choice, we are told, but to subject these children to the trauma of being torn, yet again, from places where they enjoyed some minimal level of normalcy and being taken to (what must be properly called) an internment camp. Yet the current crisis is not a result of increased immigration – since the numbers of those crossing the border have remained steady – but the predictable consequence of the Trump’s Administration’s draconian immigration policies. These policies have reduced the willingness of relatives to come forward for fear of their own deportation, thus lengthening the time it takes to place these youth with caregivers. The Trump administration apparently anticipated the consequences of these policies, yet made no preparation to deal with them.

This latest episode comes at the same time that hundreds of Latino children, who were forcibly taken from their parents by the Trump administration earlier this year, still remain separated from them months after a court ordered deadline for reunification. In most of these cases, the Trump Administration has deported parents, while keeping their children; it now claims that it cannot locate the parents. Children were taken from parents seeking asylum without any thought, much less a plan, on how, when and under what circumstances they would be reunited.

The Teacher Diversity Data Landscape

This week, the Albert Shanker Institute released a new research brief, authored by myself and Klarissa Cervantes. It summarizes what we found when we contacted all 51 state education agencies (including the District of Columbia) and asked whether data on teacher race and ethnicity was being collected, and whether and how it was made available to the public. This survey was begun in late 2017 and completed in early 2018.

The primary reason behind this project is the growing body of research to suggest that all students, and especially students of color, benefit from a teaching force that reflects the diverse society in which they must learn to live, work and prosper. ASI’s previous work has also documented that a great many districts should turn their attention to recruiting and retaining more teachers of color (see our 2015 report). Data are a basic requirement for achieving this goal – without data, states and districts are unable to gauge the extent of their diversity problem, target support and intervention to address that problem, and monitor the effects of those efforts. Unfortunately, the federal government does not require that states collect teacher race and ethnicity data, which means the responsbility falls to individual states. Moreover, statewide data are often insufficient – teacher diversity can vary widely within and between districts. Policymakers, administrators, and the public need detailed data (at least district-by-district and preferably school-by-school), which should be collected annually and be made easily available.

The results of our survey are generally encouraging. The vast majority of state education agencies (SEAs), 45 out of 51, report that they collect at least district-by-district data on teacher race and ethnicity (and all but two of these 45 collect school-by-school data). This is good news (and, frankly, better results than we anticipated). There are, however, areas of serious concern.

Let's Not Forget About Dreamers

March has arrived, and there is still no action on DACA. Around 800,000 people remain in limbo, those who voluntarily registered under the provisions of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Let me repeat: 800,000 people are at risk – people who grew up in this country as Americans, people who might very well be your friends, colleagues, students, classmates, and neighbors and you might not even know. They have had moments of hope and promise taken from them repeatedly. From one moment to the next, their lives change on a political whim.

Since before President Trump took office, there have been promises of bipartisan legislation. Under the Trump administration, there have been debates and stalemates, budget fights and threats of government shutdowns, and yet nothing has been done. DACA’s Dreamers have been used as leveraging tools in an attempt to secure money for “the wall” along the Mexican border and stricter immigration laws. They are being treated as bargaining chips and not as human beings. It is time for a clean “Dream Act”. The time for pointing fingers is over. How much longer do Dreamers have to wait in uncertainty, fearing that their lives may change every time there is a new U.S. president?

When the program was rescinded in September 2017, Attorney General Sessions said the following: “The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens” (Full speech here). This was misleading on many levels.

Remembering Memphis

February marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tenn., a unionization attempt by public sector workers that drew support from civil and labor rights leaders across the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., in town to organize a march in support of those strikers, was assassinated on April 4th of that year. This post is the first in a series, commemorating these anniversaries and the historic links between civil rights and worker rights, especially at a time when the right of public sector workers to unionize is being argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. This post is excerpted from a forthcoming memoir, Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain, by civil rights and labor activists Norman Hill and Velma Murphy Hill.

Even as a young man, A. Philip Randolph understood that the economic wellbeing of workers and the political rights of African Americans were inextricably linked. It is one of the reasons why, in the 1920s, he agreed to organize and operate the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black-led labor union to receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor.

It was his recognition of this coalescence of black economic and political interests that led him to threaten the first March on Washington in the 1940s; which was only preempted when President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to issue Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in Civil Service and World War II defense industries. And it was why he named the iconic 1963 march on Washington, which he organized and led, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The complete title wasn't an accident. Randolph understood that the economic component was essential in obtaining freedom and equality for black people.

Three Questions Underlying The Debate About School Choice And Segregation

The question of school choice and segregation has been a common recurring theme in education policy over the past 5-10 years (most recently in response to this Associated Press story).

Critics claim that school choice, specifically charter schools and private school vouchers, exacerbate segregation by income and especially race and ethnicity, primarily because more motivated parents with greater resources will exercise choice. Choice supporters, on the other hand, counter-argue that regular public schools are highly segregated due to the lack of choice (i.e., due to school assignment based on residence), and that school choice, which severs that tie, might lead to greater integration.

Given the proliferation of charter schools (and, to a lesser extent, vouchers) over the past 20 years, this is clearly an important debate. Yet the issue of choice and segregation entails three major underlying empirical questions that are sometimes blurred. It may be useful to discuss them briefly.

A Closer Look At Our Report On Public And Private School Segregation In DC

Last week, we released our research brief on segregation by race and ethnicity in the District of Columbia. The analysis is unique insofar as it includes regular public schools, charter schools, and private schools, thus providing a comprehensive look at segregation in our nation’s capital.

Private schools serve only about 17 percent of D.C.’s students, but almost 60 percent of its white students. This means that any analysis of segregation in D.C. that excludes private schools may be missing a pretty big part of the picture. Our brief includes estimates of segregation, using different types of measures, within the private and public sectors (including D.C.’s large charter school sector). Unsurprisingly, we find high levels of segregation in both sectors, using multiple race and ethnicity comparisons. Yet, while segregation in both sectors is extensive, it is not substantially higher in one or the other.

But one of our most interesting findings, which we’d like to discuss here, is that between 25-40 percent of total citywide segregation is actually found between the public and private sectors. This is not a particularly intuitive finding to interpret, so a quick explanation may be useful.

What Are "Segregated Schools?"

The conventional wisdom in education circles is that U.S. schools are “resegregating” (see here and here for examples). The basis for these claims is usually some form of the following empirical statement: An increasing proportion of schools serve predominantly minority student populations (e.g., GAO 2016). In other words, there are more “segregated schools.”

Underlying the characterization of this finding as “resegregation” is one of the longstanding methodological debates in education and other fields today: How to measure segregation (Massey and Denton 1988). And, as is often the case with these debates, it’s not just about methodology, but also about larger conceptual issues. We might very casually address these important issues by posing a framing question: Is a school that serves 90-95 percent minority students necessarily a “segregated school?”

Most people would answer yes. And, putting aside the semantic distinction that it is students rather than schools that are segregated, they would be correct. But there is a lot of nuance here that is actually important.

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