Concern that charter schools might re-segregate public education surfaced almost as soon as they were proposed. A charter school is a public school given greater autonomy by state or local school officials who require performance reviews every three or five years. The Scripps Howard study confirmed the president's claim for Texas and found it also generally holds true for the nation as a whole. Racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 56.8 percent of all students enrolled in the 1,465 charter schools reported to the Department of Education for the 1999-2000 school year. Minority students are almost twice as likely to attend charter schools as are white students.
Integration follows good education.
Minority parents know just as well as white kids where the good schools are. The study found that 90 percent of the charter schools in mostly minority school districts were serving mostly minority students. In many cases, state and local boards of education considered race when granting school charters. The fear was that our charter school was going to skim the best kids and the best parents. We wanted a more diverse population, and we got kids from 33 different schools.