Report: CHARTER SCHOOLS TOO SEGREGATED: Study finds inequities based on race, class and language.

By Connie Llanos, Staff Writer | LA Newspaper Group

02/04/2010 -- Charter schools nationwide could be violating the civil rights of students because they are increasingly separating them by race, class and language, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights project at UCLA.

The study finds that black and Latino students enrolled at charters - schools that are publicly funded but independently run - are more likely to be isolated with classmates of their same race.

"We are seeing a lot of charters as segregated as schools in the old South that were the target of the civil-rights movement," said Gary Orfield, co-founder of the Civil Rights project.

"We are not saying that there are not good charters, or that there shouldn't be more, but they should not be funded if they are not providing basic civil rights."

In California and Los Angeles - which has the highest concentration of charters in the nation - charter campuses also attracted a higher proportion of white students than traditional schools. Based on a sample study, charters also failed to report enrollment for English language learners and low-income students or provide services to meet the needs of those students.

The study is among several recent national and local reports that have found inequities in the enrollment practices of charter schools, which largely do not take students based on attendance boundaries. The studies have sounded alarm bells about the campuses even as they are being touted as keys to education reform by officials who are creating incentives to open more.

Charter school operators and advocates, however, refute the study's findings.

"The civil rights issue here is the persistent achievement gap and high dropout rates for these students when they are left to languish in traditional schools," said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter Schools Association.

Los Angeles Unified School District currently has 152 charter schools serving some 58,000 students. More are expected to crop up under a new reform plan that allows outside operators to vie for district campuses.

Currently in LAUSD, 76 percent of all students are Latino, 9 percent black and 7 percent white, while local charters are 61 percent Latino, 17 percent black and 15 percent white. Also, LAUSD has 32 percent English language learner students compared to 22 percent enrolled in charters.

Enrollment in individual charter schools varies greatly by campus. For example, Vaughn Next Century Learning Academy, a K-12 charter school in Pacoima, is 97 percent Latino; Ivy Academia, a K-12 charter school with campuses throughout the West Valley, is 44 percent white and 27 percent Latino; and Granada Hills Charter High School is 30 percent Latino and 32 percent white.

"We have charters that are very representative of the areas they serve. Some are more mixed and others have more of one student population than another," said Jose Cole Gutierrez, LAUSD's director of charter schools.

Gutierrez said that district policy is not to require charter schools to be integrated, but simply to match the population of the communities they serve.

Many local charter advocates questioned the validity of a report on racial segregation in Los Angeles, where the majority of students hail from ethnic minorities and full integration is virtually impossible.

"Many of these charter operators in Los Angeles are specifically targeting communities that are predominantly minority ... the whole district is predominantly minority," said Maria Casillas, executive director of Families in Schools, a local education advocacy organization.

"If this study is trying to say integration is the answer, it's not. We already tried busing in this district. It did not solve the achievement gap for African-Americans or Latinos. In fact it perpetuated it. ... At least charters are now bringing additional choices."