Summary:
- North Carolina’s school systems are gradually re-segregating by race
- The growth of charter schools is a clear contributing factor to resegregation
- Education policy should be guided by evidence, not ideology
By Miles Kirkpatrick, Research Associate
It’s no secret that schools nationwide, as well as those here in North Carolina, are slowly re-segregating. 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure segregation, modern-day policy decisions are increasing de facto segregation, to the detriment of not only the basic educational mission, but our communities as a whole.
In 2018, the North Carolina Justice Center released its report Stymied by Segregation: How Integration Can Transform NC Schools. The general consensus of the existing research, then as now, was that school segregation has clear negative impacts on low-income students and students of color; that racial integration has equally clear positive impacts; and that school integration does not have negative impacts on high-income white students. The data showed that from 2008 to 2018, the number of racially and economically isolated schools had increased and that charter schools tended to worsen segregation.
Rigorously measuring segregation can be difficult. There are all sorts of indices and indicators, but directly relevant metric is “exposure,” which measures students’ exposure to other students of different backgrounds. Students in well-integrated schools have higher exposure to those with different backgrounds, and those in more racially segregated schools have lower exposure. The Stanford Segregation Explorer, a data exploration tool produced by the university’s Educational Opportunity Project, provides just such a measure.
Using the Explorer, it’s possible to directly measure white students’ exposure to Black students. A white-black exposure metric of 0.5 would mean that the average white student’s classmates are 50% more white than the average Black student’s classmates. In other words, 0 means more integrated schools, and a 1 means more segregated ones. With this in mind, we can examine North Carolina’s growth of segregation at the county level and carefully test what could be contributing to the problem.
As of 2022, rates of segregation varied across North Carolina's school districts, but they were highest in counties like Halifax (0.506), Washington (0.476), Vance (0.445), Mecklenburg (0.438), and Davidson (0.412). When compared to 1991, this metric of segregation went up almost almost across the board with the sharpest jumps being in Mecklenburg, Vance, and Washington counties.
So what is causing North Carolina's increasing school segregation?
There are, of course, myriad factors at play: residential segregation naturally fuels the problem and releasing school districts from their desegregation obligations in the 1990s didn’t help. But studies on this topic consistently find that part of the problem is the growth of charter schools. Charter schools have been shown to increase racial segregation on average, mainly by enabling "white flight" from more integrated schools.
The best way to test this theory is to look at charter schools' racial breakdowns compared to their home counties. For this analysis, any charter school with a more than 20% difference in the proportion of white students compared to the county population is considered racially disproportionate.
Not every district's charter program is equal. Most districts with charter schools may only have one or two. Looking at charter school data from that 2018, a notable few counties lapped the field. Buncombe, Forsyth, Iredell, and New Hanover have five each; Guilford has nine; Durham has 13; Wake has 18; and Mecklenburg has a staggering 25.
That is, charter schools are overwhelmingly a big-county phenomenon.
Looking at the breakdown of those big eight counties, we see that most of their schools have racial makeups dramatically different from those of their counties. Mecklenburg is the worst offender, with ten disproportionally white charters, eight disproportionally non-white charters, and only seven racially proportional charter schools.
Returning to a state map view, we can see that racially disproportionate charters are relatively common, with 28 counties having at least one.
For many of those counties, those racially segregated charters comprise the entire charter system.
Engaging on the merits
It has become sadly common for charter school advocates to dismiss opposition to charter schools as unreasonable, conspiratorial, and unsubstantiated. For example, John Hood, a columnist with the Art Pope-John Locke Foundation, recently issued an open challenge to opponents of charter schools to critique them using, in his words "normal policy analysis."
Though we at Carolina Forward are neither "opponents" nor "supporters" per se of charter schools, we do care about evidence, data, and engaging with real-world facts to make decisions pragmatically. From that vantage point, the answer to Hood's challenge is straightforward: charter schools have been shown to worsen racial segregation without any improvement in academic performance.
There is a clear line to be drawn between North Carolina's increasingly segregated school systems and the growth of highly racially segregated charter schools, particularly when such a large number of those charter schools show signs of being enclaves of "white flight." Regardless of the intention of charter school operators, racial segregation is nevertheless a clear result.
This does not even begin to address the other central issue of actual academic performance. The evidence here is unambiguous: the NC Department of Public Instruction's own testing data shows that charter schools don't contribute to better academic performance, as measured by end-of-grade (EOG) tests. In fact, charters consistently under-perform traditional public schools, even with a student population that enjoys more advantages.
This is not conspiracy or sensationalism - it's normal policy analysis.
The burden, instead, is on advocates of school privatization like Hood to provide better, and clearer, arguments, and to engage on the merits. For example, it has become common practice for school privatization advocates to issue blanket dismissals of rigorous, peer-reviewed educational policy research as irretrievably "biased," simply because it often does not support political conservatives' policy preferences. This is not just conspiratorial, it demonstrates a basic lack of interest in engaging constructively with evidence. It transfers debate about education policy from an evidence-based research question to a political one, with an obvious effect on the quality of debate.
The moral and constitutional duty of the State of North Carolina to educate the next generation of its citizens won't be fulfilled with platitudes and wishcasting. It starts with adequately resourcing and supporting the public school system, which educates the vast majority of North Carolina's schoolchildren, and likely always will. Charter schools may have a valid part to play in fulfilling and supporting that educational mission. But the evidence shows that they are fueling a reversion into racial segregation today - a trend everyone should oppose.