Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
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Segregation Surprise?: How Public and Charter Schools Have (Always) Failed
On social media, I witnessed charter advocates try to justify the exact failures Andre Perry unmasks in his Charter school leaders are complicit with segregation, and it’s hurting their movement, where he concludes:
Make no mistake, segregated schools of the past and present are a result of horrible policy choices that most people are willing to accept. There is a reason that after more than 20 years, the research is mixed on charter schools. Schools in black and brown communities were built on broken foundations — i.e., segregation. By not addressing segregation, reformers are turning off the stove when the house is going up in flames.
Perry was having none of it, the apologists’ dissembling, but was far more patient and willing to engage this nonsense than I.
I also have no energy left to revisit this again, except to point out that finding it surprising that both traditional public schools and charter schools are failing the most vulnerable populations of students—often black, brown, poor, speakers of home languages other than English, and having special needs—requires being willfully ignorant of decades of evidence.
And thus, what the rabid edureformers have willfully ignored for quite some time:
As Perry confronts, edureformers are embodiments of one of the most powerful warnings from James Baldwin:
