Florida charters less diverse than other public schools

Racial imbalance is making a comeback in Florida's public schools with the new wave of charter schools springing up across the state.

One out of eight charter schools has a student body comprising 90 percent or more of a single race or ethnicity, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of the state's 456 taxpayer-financed charters shows. That compares with one out of 12 traditional public schools.

Those top-heavy charters are adding to the list of out-of-balance public schools that have perplexed educators since integration 40 years ago. They have worked for decades to reduce the racial imbalance through rezoning, school transfer options, magnet schools and other devices to shift students.

More of the charters with skewed enrollments may be on the way as lawmakers and Gov. Rick Scott push for changes in state law to allow more such schools.

more . . . http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/fl-charter-schools-segregation-20110501,0,4242749.story

for established civil rights when they are "public schools", funded with taxpayer and federal dollars.

Part of the problem I think is that the minorities think they will be included in charter schools. Unless the student is brilliant or near brilliant they can forget about it.

I don't know how other states do their funding but here in Indiana funding is based on the number of students enrolled on the third Friday of the school term. The charter schools overbook the students and then when the cutoff date is passed they dismiss the ones they don't want and they end up back in public schools and the public schools are providing services to the students they have with less funding per student. While charter schools have more per student.

I was a bit surprised to see that it does not.

You should read it, LiberalFighter.

They do their count on one day in September and then start kicking kids out.

Those danged uppity minorities are just filling the public schools!

So what could be better than getting public money for your exclusive digs?

In our neck of the woods, even the public schools have segregation inside, when you look at the makeup of AP, IB, and concurrent college classes in high school - they're a good bit "lighter" than the "regular" classes....

and in all of her classes, most of the students are Hispanic.

The ease of getting to a school is always a big issue for parents.

The reason Oliver Brown sued the Topeka, KS Board of Education was that he wanted his daughter to go to a school seven blocks from home rather than walking six blocks to get picked up by a bus and taken to an all-black school much farther away. The idea of forced integration is really a perversion of what the whole thing was about in the first place.

I'm not sure how you would go about encouraging large numbers of non-black students to seek an "African-based curriculum." It sounds like Joseph Littles-Nguzo Saba was either designed specifically to attract black students, or maybe it's located in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood.