Three Kinds of Charter Schools: Largely Segregated, Intensely Segregated, and Apartheid

If a charter school in the leafy suburbs of Georgia or North Carolina offers no federal breakfast or lunch program and no transportation for kids, can poor parents choose this school for their children who will, otherwise, not have breakfast, lunch, or a ride to and from school?

If a charter school in Memphis or Minneapolis offers, as the only option to a crumbling public school, a chain gang charter that mimics the total compliance KIPP behavioral and cultural neutering programs, can middle class parents ever be expected to choose to enroll their Seths and Caitlins there?

So no, the new segregation via charter school in America is not accomplish through legal mandates but by willful and transparent discriminatory and racist measures that emanate from a corporate welfare educational caste system.  All under the rotted banner of "choice" and all of it embraced by an economically-engineered Congress and Administration bought and paid for by the corporations and hedge funders who have devised this proto-fascist system of apartheid that threatens the foundations of the Republic. 

Even as Duncan's NCLB waiver fiasco offers new opportunities for Team Obama to use some of their bribe money to "incent" schools toward diversity, not a nickel is provided.  Just as there was not a nickel provided to encourage diversity under the $3 billion plus of RTTT, even as applications without removal of charter caps were thrown in the trash. 


In the excellent piece of reporting below by John Hechinger, notice Russlyn Ali's comments that capture Team Obama's Ostrich Approach to civil rights enforcement: "there is no evidence of discrimination."  Really? 

So how is Team Obama countering the new awareness of segregation by charter school?  They trot out Arne with "voluntary guidelines," but only after the completion of the largest federal incentive in history for the return to Jim Crow schools.  Yes, Arne, I am beginning to understand why you say that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. 

By John Hechinger - Dec 22, 2011 

At Dugsi Academy, a public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, girls wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and flowing ankle-length skirts study Arabic and Somali. The charter school educates “East African children in the Twin Cities,” its website says. Every student is black.

At Twin Cities German Immersion School, another St. Paul charter, children gather under a map of “Deutschland,” study with interns from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and learn to dance the waltz. Ninety percent of its students are white.

Six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million U.S. children. While charter-school leaders say programs targeting ethnic groups enrich education, they are isolating low-achievers and damaging diversity, said Myron Orfield, a lawyer and demographer.

“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” said Orfield, who directs the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty. “When you see an all-white school and an all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”

Charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers studied 40 states, the District of Columbia, and 39 metropolitan areas. In particular, higher percentages of charter-school students attend what the report called “racially isolated” schools, where 90 percent or more students are from disadvantaged minority groups.

Charter-School Birthplace

In Minnesota, the birthplace of the U.S. charter-school movement, the divide is more than black and white.

St. Paul’s Hmong College Prep Academy, 99 percent Asian- American in the past school year, immerses students “in the rich heritage that defines Hmong culture.” Its Academia Cesar Chavez School -- 93 percent Hispanic -- promises bilingual education “by advocating Latino cultural values in an environment of familia and community.”

Minneapolis’s Four Directions Charter School, 94 percent Native American, black and Hispanic, promotes “lifelong learning for American Indian students.”

Charter schools, which select children through lotteries, are open to all who apply, said Abdulkadir Osman, Dugsi’s executive director.

“Some people call it segregation,” Osman said. “This is the parent’s choice. They can go anywhere they want. We are offering families something unique.”

Nobody ‘Forced’

That’s a “significant difference” between Minnesota charters and segregated schools in the 1950s South, said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at Macalester College in St. Paul.

“Nobody is being forced to go to these schools,” said Nathan, who helped write Minnesota’s 1991 charter-school law.

Ever since Horace Mann crusaded for free universal education in the 19th century, public schools have been hailed as the U.S. institutions that bring together people of disparate backgrounds.

The atomization of charter schools coincides with growing U.S. diversity. Americans of other races will outnumber whites by 2042, the Census Bureau projects.

Even after a divided Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that schools couldn’t consider race in making pupil assignments to integrate schools, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy urged districts to find other ways to fight “de facto resegregation” and “racial isolation.”

“The nation’s schools strive to teach that our strength comes from people of different races, creeds, and cultures uniting in commitment to the freedom of all,” Kennedy wrote.

Diverse Workplaces

Citing Kennedy’s words, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder this month called for schools -- including charters -- to combat growing segregation.

Along with breeding “educational inequity,” racially- divided schools deny children the experiences they need to succeed in an increasingly diverse workplace, Duncan said in announcing voluntary guidelines for schools.

Charter schools may specialize in serving a single culture as long as they have open admissions, and there’s no evidence of discrimination, said Russlynn Ali, assistant education secretary for civil rights.

The education department is encouraging charter schools to promote diversity. Charters could expand recruiting and consider lotteries that give extra weight to disadvantaged groups, such as families living in low-income neighborhoods or children who speak English as a second language, Ali said in a phone interview.

Immigrant Magnet

Minnesota, 85 percent white, is a case study of the nation’s growing diversity. Since the 1970s, Minneapolis and St. Paul have become a magnet for Hmong refugees, who fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, Somalis sought refuge from civil war.

St. Paul, where the nation’s first charter school opened in 1992, is 16 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Asian-American, according to the U.S Census Bureau.

Charter schools should be similarly diverse, recommended a 1988 report that provided the groundwork for Minnesota’s charter-school law.

“We envision the creation of schools which, by design, would invite a dynamic mix of students by race and ability levels,” the Citizens League, a St. Paul-based nonprofit public-policy group, wrote in the report.

‘Great Failure’

Instead, in the 2009-2010 school year, three quarters of the Minneapolis and St. Paul region’s 127 charter schools were “highly segregated,” according to the University of Minnesota Law School’s race institute. Forty-four percent of schools were 80 percent or more non-white, and 32 percent, mostly white.

“It’s been a great failure that the most segregated schools in Minnesota are charter schools,” said Mindy Greiling, a state representative who lobbied for the charter-school law when she was a member of a suburban school board in the 1980s. “It breaks my heart.”

Segregation is typical nationwide. Seventy percent of black charter-school students across the country attended “racially isolated” schools, twice as many as the share in traditional public schools, according to the report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Half of all Latino charter-school students went to these intensely segregated schools, the study found. In the West and the South, the two most racially diverse regions of the country, “charters serve as havens for white flight from public schools,” the report said.

Hmong Roots

They also serve as havens for minority students who need extra help, said leaders of Minnesota charter schools.
Christianna Hang, founder of Hmong College Prep Academy, said she designed the school so children, mostly first- generation Americans, didn’t feel adrift in public schools as she did when she arrived in the U.S. in 1980.

In the Hmong academy’s central hallway, a tapestry depicts families living in Laos, fleeing the Vietnam War and arriving in America. The school’s roughly 700 students, in grades kindergarten through 12th grade, learn Hmong.

“I came here for my parents as much as for me,” said Mai Chee Xiong, a 17-year-old senior. “I was very Americanized. I wanted to be able to speak with them in our language, and I wanted to understand my roots.”

In the 2009-2010 school year, 26 percent of Hmong Academy students met or exceeded standards on state math exams, while 30 percent did so in reading. About half passed those tests in the St. Paul Public School District.

Harvard Banners

To raise expectations, classrooms adopt colleges, hanging banners from Harvard University, Yale University and Dartmouth College over their doors.

“If we don’t do something to help these kids, they will get lost,” Hang said. “If they drop out of school, they will never become productive citizens, and there’s no way they will achieve the American dream.”

Dugsi Academy, the school for East Africans, and Twin Cities German Immersion School make for some of St. Paul’s sharpest contrasts.

Until this school year, the two schools were neighbors, across a busy commercial thoroughfare in a racially diverse neighborhood. At different times of the day, the kids used a city playground in front of the German school for recess. Dugsi has since moved three miles away, across a highway from the Hmong academy.

The German Immersion School is a bright, airy former factory with exposed brick and high ceilings.

Fluent German

“Eva, was ist das?” kindergarten teacher Elena Heindl asked one morning earlier this month as she pointed a red flashlight to letters, eliciting the name of each one in German.

To succeed at the school, students must be fluent in German to enroll, unless they enter before second or third grade, Julie Elias, a parent, told prospective families on a tour this month.

“You can’t just move into the neighborhood if you want to go to our school,” Elias said. The school is legally required to take anyone picked in its lottery, though it counsels parents against enrolling in older grades without German knowledge, said Annika Fjelstad, its director.

The school, which includes many families with one parent who speaks German or that have German relatives, holds special events at the Germanic-American Institute in a $1.3 million St. Paul house with a ballroom. Children like to call the institute “our school’s mansion,” said Chris Weimholt, another parent giving the tour.

No Buses

In the 2009-2010 school year, 87 percent of children at the German school passed state math tests and 84 percent did so in reading, according to the Minnesota Department of Education. Fifteen percent qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch program, compared with 71 percent in St. Paul. The school doesn’t offer bus transportation, so most parents drive, often carpooling, Elias said.

The language requirement and lack of transportation prevents poor families from attending, said Greiling, the state legislator, who has toured the school.

“A regular public school could never have that kind of bar,” she said. “It seems an odd thing that this would be legal.”

The German program doesn’t have buses because they would cost $100,000 a year, too heavy a burden for an expanding school of 274 that wants to maintain classes of 20 students, Fjelstad said. An immersion school can’t take kids who aren’t fluent after early grades, she said.

In February, the school formed an “inclusivity” task force to find ways to make the school more reflective of the community, Fjelstad said. The school will try to improve recruiting through its relationship with community organizations, such as a neighboring YMCA, she said.

International View

The school offers a different kind of diversity, said Weimholt, a nurse whose grandfather emigrated from Germany after World War I. “It doesn’t look diverse by skin color. But families straddle two different continents. The school truly has an international perspective.”

So does Dugsi Academy. Children learn Arabic and Somali along with English and traditional academic subjects. A caller last month heard no English on a school voice mail.

One morning in late November, a sixth-grade social-studies class discussed immigration with 28-year-old Khaleefah Abdallah, who himself fled Somalia 12 years ago. The boys wore jeans and sweatshirts. The girls sported hijabs, or traditional Muslim head coverings with skirts or long pants.

‘Melting Pot’

Abdallah asked his class about the idea of the American “melting pot:” immigrants assimilating into U.S. culture. He suggested another metaphor, a “salad bowl,” where people from different backgrounds mix while retaining their own identity.

“I agree with the salad bowl,” Fadumo Ahmed, 12, dressed in a black hijab and sneakers with pink laces, told the class. “We all come from different places, but we still want to keep our culture.”

Students shared stories of the challenge of co-existing in mainstream America.

Ahmed Hassan, 12, complained about a boy on a city playground who made fun of the long traditional robe he wore one Friday.

“He told me it looked like a skirt,” Hassan said. Abdallah told the class that, under the U.S. constitution, Americans have the freedom to express themselves through their clothing.

Test Scores

Dugsi, a low-slung red-brick building in an office park, has about 300 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Almost all qualify for federal free or reduced lunches, according to the state. Only 19 percent passed state math exams in the 2009-2010 school year, while 40 percent did so in reading.

The school’s test scores reflect families’ backgrounds. said Osman, the Dugsi director and a former employee of the U.S. Embassy in Somalia, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. Parents work as cab drivers, nurses and grocers, Osman said. Many had no formal schooling.

It would be better if one day Somali students could go to school with children from other backgrounds, Osman said.
“That’s the beauty of America -- Latinos, Caucasians, African-Americans and Native Americans, all together in the same building, eating lunch and in the same classrooms,” Osman said. “It would be something wonderful. That’s what I’m thinking of for my own kids and grandchildren.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John Hechinger in Boston at jhechinger@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net

White Billionaire Boys' Club to Save Poor People of Color with Apartheid Schooling?

Email notice from Rethinking Schools:

In the article “Ultimate $uperpower: Supersized dollars drive Waiting for Superman agenda,” investigative journalist Barbara Miner looks at the money behind the movie, its promoters and those who will benefit from the movie.  She writes, “In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.” After examining the role of hedge funds, foundations and other players, she asks, “Should the American people put their faith in a white billionaires boys club to lead the revolution on behalf of poor people of color?”

To view the article and/or to obtain a downloadable PDF go to:

http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/Articles/20101020-MinerUltimateSuperpower

Duncan Decries Segregation While Rewarding Apartheid Charters

The audacity of Arne Duncan was on display again Saturday, as Arne spoke before the ABA in Chicago:

. . . U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan said if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he’d be disheartened to see so many schools still effectively segregated.


“Dr. King would have been angered to see that too often we underinvest in disadvantaged students, that they still have fewer opportunities to take rigorous college prep courses, that many black and brown and low-income students are still languishing in aging facilities,” the former chief of the Chicago Public Schools said. 

Dr. King would be angered to see the Secretary of Education offering up an endless stream of bromides and platitudes about civil rights while providing billion of dollars to incentivize the destruction of public schools in urban America and the creation of apartheid corporate charter schools to replace them.  I would guess, enraged, might be a better term.  Adding to his rage, no doubt, would be Arne's ardent support for the total compliance KIPP testing camps for those willful black and brown children, camps staffed by white missionary temps from Teach for Awhile America whose on the job training comes at the expense of poor children of color.  What a mockery:

Duncan also said reforms are needed at colleges of education, e.g. providing more opportunities for on-the-job teacher training, and increasing efforts to recruit minorities and men to reflect the diversity of classrooms, where just 1 in 50 teachers are black men. 

 Is there a nickel of the $4 billion of RTTT aimed to reward states or cities who put together plans to end segregation or for creating new integrated schooling models? Or any money for recruiting and educating black males to become teachers?  No and no.

The Fast Track to Resegregation: Corporate Charter Schools

Twenty years ago educators believed charter schools could be hothouses of pedagogical innovation outside the normal confines of public education. As with many other good ideas aimed at encouraging diversity of thought, corporate America appropriated the charter school movement as their own and even advertised louder about innovation and letting a thousand flowers bloom. By the end of the Bush reign, however, the charter movement had established a major beachhead with over 4000 schools in 40 states, mostly in urban America. And so by the time Duncan had been anointed by Eli Broad as Secretary, it was time to kill most of the thousand flowers and to scale up the penal pedagogy model based on total compliance that uses unlicensed and unqualified teachers to drill math and reading test prep in schools without libraries or real curriculums. Containment schools based on total compliance and psychological neutering that no parent in the leafy suburbs would dare send their children to.

According to Duncan, "This is not let a thousand flowers bloom. We only let the best of the best open schools. It should be a very rigorous, competitive process. The chance to educate our children is really a sacred obligation." Yet according to the only national study of charters, fewer than 2 of 10 of these segregated chain gangs produce higher test scores than the public schools they replace. Of course, they do save 20 cents on every dollar for the cost of teachers. Never mind the huge savings accrued from turning a dog kennel or a shutdown Dodge dealership into a school for impoverished minority children.

And now we have another research study that shows in spades how corporate charters are hastening the resegregation of schools.

New Report - Charter Schools' Political Success is a Civil Rights Failure

CRP's analysis of the 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students reveals that not only are charter schools more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every instance, but troubling data gaps also make it impossible to assess charter schools enrollments of low-income and English Learner students.

Download the report and related documents from the press release page.

And here are some clips from Nick Anderson's story today in WaPo:

Seven out of 10 black charter school students are on campuses with extremely few white students, according to a new study of enrollment trends that shows the independent public schools are less racially diverse than their traditional counterparts.

The findings from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which are being released Thursday, reflect the proliferation of charter schools in the District of Columbia and other major cities with struggling school systems and high minority populations.

To the authors of the study, the findings point to a civil rights issue: "As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates," the study concludes, "the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools."

. . . .

n the District, about 28,000 students attend charter schools; the school system has about 46,000 students. Recent data show that 84 percent of the city's charter school students are African American, compared with 78 percent in regular public schools.

Nationally, according to 2007-08 federal data that the study cited, black students account for 32 percent of charter school enrollment. That is roughly twice their share of enrollment in regular public schools.

The study also found that 70 percent of black charter students are in schools in which at least 90 percent of the student population is nonwhite, and 43 percent of black charter students are in schools with virtually all-minority enrollment. For black students in regular public schools, the comparable shares were 36 percent (in the high-minority enrollment schools) and 15 percent (in virtually all-minority schools).. . .

So yes, corporate apartheid schooling is the civil rights issue of this generation. You bet it is. When will the NAACP or the federal government notice?

Penal Pedagogy for Corporate Interests: The Seeding of Violent Revolution

The hungry corporate beast advances in LA. From the LATimes, Dec. 11, on the proposed "restructuring" of Fremont High:

. . . .A similar effort was undertaken by an outside entity last year at Locke High, near Watts. Green Dot Public Schools, a charter organization, dismissed the staff -- and rehired a small percentage -- when it converted the campus into small charter schools that are operated independently of the district. Fremont, jampacked with 4,500 students, is substantially larger than Locke.

Boston College education professor Dennis Shirley called the reconstitutions harmfully "disruptive," and said "policymakers seem to think there's this limitless pool of people who want to work in the most impoverished and struggling communities."

Now at the apartheid Locke High, hired goons patrol the hall, ready at any moment to pepper spray and take down students when given the signal by the intercom code. As a separate entity ungoverned by the civil restraints and due process requirements of public schools and elected boards, Locke has been fashioned as Steve Barr's Big House, scary enough to to send Barr, himself, running for a less exposed position inside the corporate education bubble of Gates, Broad, the Waltons, etc.

This new corporate system of penal pedagogy, enabled by spineless and corrupt pols who don't give a shit about the poor, or the children of the poor, represents the squalid end of the path of least resistance for a society blinded by greed, the culmination of a generational malignant neglect of the principles of justice and social justice, thus assuring the acquiescence to a policy of segregation, containment, and constant surveillance that is worse than segregation during Jim Crow. At least then the black teachers in the apartheid schools were professionals who had the children's best interest in mind, rather than the de-certified ragtime corps of white female corporate missionaries intent upon a few years of do-gooderism before law school or breeding.

Unless this corporatization of American urban education is turned back by a society that now seems intent upon ignoring it, we will have successfully planted the certain seeds of violent revolution, or worse, the kind of terrorism that, heretofore, we have had to look abroad to war against. Any economic system that, in the end, must feed upon its own children to survive, is doomed, as it should be. Just as any political system that enables such atrocities to occur surely deserves the same end.

Today Beverly Hills decides it will take no more outsiders.

Alabama Concerned About Charter School Segregation: Massachusetts Goes Full Ahead

As the pressure to bow to the bribes heats up in the Obama/Gates/Broad Race Over the Cliff, states like Alabama without charter laws are feeling the pressure from the Oligarchs to open their doors to "innovation." So far charter schools have brought us innovations like more scripted teaching, uncertified or undercertified teachers with lower pay and no job security, the elimination of libraries, no food service or transportation or athletics, no like art or music, the undermining of public school funding, and a hearty embrace of apartheid schooling. Now that's what Sam Walton would call innovation!

As states like Massachusetts under a black Dem governor move forward with plans to make sure that more charter chain gangs are opened in poor neighborhoods to control and contain the minority populations, states like Alabama under a white Republican governor are actually taking the time to ask if charter schools could benefit anyone outside the corporatocracy, while bringing real harm to the civil rights gains of the past 5o years. Not only that, but there is at least one newspaper in Alabama, unlike in Boston, that includes news stories that express these reservations so that the citizens may make an informed decision about charters.

And so I salute the Montgomery Advertiser, which published "Push for Charter Schools Sparks Segregation Concerns:"

. . . .“I think superintendents would be willing to look at and explore what possibilities there are,” he said. “But what I’m afraid of is that if we rush this we will write a bad law that basically creates a dual system.”

The re-segregation of schools has been one of the most voiced concerns when it comes to charter schools. And a new report from The Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles has enumerated those concerns. The project has made an ongoing study of charter schools and the lack of civil rights policy concerning them. The report, “Equity Overlooked: Charter Schools and Civil Rights Policies,” [Equity Overlooked: Charter Schools and Civil Rights Policy] finds that charter schools can raise the danger of further escalating the re-segregation of public schools, a phenomenon that is already taking place in traditional public schools in the South.

The authors of the report, Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, write that, “Tying education stimulus dollars eligibility to charter numbers unfairly pressures states to ramp up efforts to authorize and open charter schools without considering the impact on racial and economic segregation.”

. . . .

Funding charter schools also is another hot-button issue. Former Booker T. Washington Magnet High School principal and current state Sen. Quinton Ross, D-Montgomery, said he attended Riley’s education symposium, where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke about Race to the Top and how charter schools would be a prerequisite to access those funds.

While Race to the Top no longer has that same emphasis, Ross said he knows it’s important to the Obama administration. But he’s not sure if the state is financially ready to have charter schools.

“When you think of charter schools, they can be another innovative way of delivering education,” he said. “But you have to keep in mind that there are many things draining our education dollars. We could open the door to fund these types of initiatives (charter schools), so that we can access these Race to the Top funds, but just like the stimulus money this money is going to go away.”

Ross, who is also on both the Senate’s education committees, said when the federal money runs out, it will be up to the state to pay for its charter schools and they could be in the same situation that many of the state’s initiatives are in now — strapped for cash.

In addition, Ross said charter schools typically handle their own finances and school districts would essentially be turning over the dollars they’re allocated and held responsible for to these schools with little, if any, say in how that money is spent. He said if a charter school closes down because of financial mismanagement or because it doesn’t have the resources to stay open, that’s state money that disappears.

New Study Documents Long Island Apartheid Schooling

A new study directed by Amy Stuart Wells of Teachers College, Columbia University, documents Long Island's segregated school systems. Below is the press release, a summary of major findings, and a list of recommendations. Absent from the recommendations, unfortunately, is any mention of national, state, and local assessment systems that sort and segregate on the basis of family income. Since minorities constitute a disproportionate percentage of the poor, as long as we depend upon standardized tests that predictably sort populations based upon family wealth and income, any efforts to integrate schools will be muted by counter-efforts to separate students with tracking based on standardized test scores.

Standardized tests are no less the driver of separation and ostracism than they were almost a hundred years ago when the first IQ tests were used during WWI to determine who would be sent to the trenches in France or to desk jobs in Washington.

Suburban System of Disparate Villages and Hamlets Impacts Students' Equal Access to High Quality Education

Garden City, NY (October 1, 2009) - A Long Island Index Special Report, "Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts," finds alarming disparities among Long Island's school districts. The report, based on a study conducted by Teachers College, Columbia University, aims to understand how Long Island's system of delivering educational services across 125 districts impacts students' access to a high quality education. The study's author, Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, explains, "Although this study is about Long Island's educational system, it is indicative of what is occurring in suburbs across our country. The segregation that occurs here and the accompanying impact on education funding and quality typifies what's happening across America and is a national concern." Dr. Wells and her colleagues studied five different Long Island school districts, each representing a specific demographic trend on the Island, and conducted interviews with more than 75 school administrators, teachers, students, parents and school board members. In order to maintain the confidentiality of the interviews, the names of the school districts have been changed to pseudonyms. "What we hear in these voices - whether they are privileged, affluent white students in a low needs district or educators struggling to provide an 'adequate' education for the poorest students of color in a high-needs district - is how the separateness defines them and their educational opportunities" said Dr. Wells. The study sheds new light on the following: How public school districts with more resources are able to generate higher levels of public funding and further supplement that funding through private resources from parents, community members and other donors who are connected to the district. How the inequities become wider in this type of system as wealthier schools have greater ability to offer students wider selections of courses, better teachers and more access to opportunities. "In poorer schools their 'ceiling' is meeting state mandates" said Dr. Wells. "For more affluent schools the academic 'floor' is even higher than the poorer schools' ceiling". How the types of support systems that students at wealthier schools typically have in place, inside and outside of school - and that students in less affluent districts often lack -- help them through the difficult times. The presence or absence of such supports weighs more heavily than the kinds of problems or challenges students face in affluent versus poor communities. How school and district reputations can become self-fulfilling prophecies, with poorer districts unable to attract more affluent residents or more prepared educators. "We found that in some wealthy districts, there were hundreds of applicants for a single teaching job, while in poorer districts just miles away, schools had difficulty attracting a single applicant for a teaching job" said Dr. Wells. As a result, these ways of "knowing" school districts through their reputations helps to legitimize the separation and inequality across districts that so many people on Long Island say is morally wrong. Nancy Rauch Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation and publisher of the Long Island Index, noted that, "If the Island is to rebuild its economic engine and provide the high quality jobs we were once known for, we have to address the economic and structural divide among our school districts. We cannot meet the needs of the future if we continue to allow today's disparities to continue. Building 125 walls between 125 districts has led to great social injustice, intolerable property tax costs and will ultimately lead to failure". In one of the districts studied by the Teachers College research team, the issues of diversity are front and center as the teachers and administrators grapple with whether or not to alter their existing system of separating middle school students into "Honors" and "Regular" classes. In the current system, the Honors classes tend to be disproportionately white while the regular classes are disproportionately African American and Latino. One administrator equates it to "apartheid." "The Long Island suburban school system has taken a national problem of separating children to a higher and more damaging level" noted Ann Golob, Director of the Long Island Index. "Although we have been re-segregating for the past three decades, many school districts are quietly finding alternatives that open the door to opportunities to more students. De-tracking is one option for districts that have diverse populations but segregated classrooms within the school. But for those districts where homogeneity - whether largely white and Asian or alternatively, African American and Latino - is the norm, a wider set of programs and policies need to be considered." Despite the rigidity of the existing school district structure, the authors point to several options that could be adopted by Long Islanders to incorporate greater flexibility and give all students greater exposure to an expanded array of opportunities. These include: Give BOCES (Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services) a greater role in helping students cross school district boundaries and gain exposure to a more diverse mix of students by creating more "magnet" schools or expanded educational programs beyond the current array of vocational, special education and arts programs. Create a series of "choice-oriented programs", similar to the ones that exist throughout the country, that allow students to transfer between districts in order to attend a wider variety of schools. Find innovative ways to make school district boundaries more porous allowing the flow of students and teachers across them for special events, classes and programs. Look to the NYS legislature to create policies and programs that support and sustain integrated educational opportunities. Resources for faculty recruitment and development to help educators address issues of tracking and re-segregation within racially and ethnically diverse schools. Amend New York State Laws to provide fewer public funds to private schools. In some districts the proportion of funds that flow out from the public schools Under the terms of the Long Island Index study, the names of the schools that were the focus of Dr. Wells' research cannot be released. However, the Long Island Index and Teachers College can provide the media access to South Side High School in Rockville Centre, on Long Island, a school where nearly 40% of the school's black and Hispanic students are candidates for the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, a two-year college-credit program similar to Advanced Placement. Fifteen years ago, virtually no students of color at South Side were taking IB or AP courses. Now, thanks to the school's decision to eliminate tracks (categories that separate those who are college-bound from those deemed not to be) the school averages fewer than five dropouts per year, every student takes accelerated math and nearly all take calculus. Black and Latino students in Rockville Centre also have higher rates of earning the New York State regents diploma than do white students statewide. To read more about the South Side High and issues of segregation and school quality in suburbia, visit http://www.tc.edu/news/article.htm?id=6609. "Let's hope that Long Islanders heed the call of both the Long Island Index Report 2009 and this more qualitative analysis of inequality and choose to take action to make their suburban setting a model for the future of a diverse society and not a throw back to a past of white flight, inequality and hyper-segregation created and reinforced during the 20th Century," said Dr. Wells. Download "Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts." Read the Long Island Index Special Analysis, "Long Island's Educational Structure: Resources, Outcomes, Options."