America’s public schools have a problem with segregation. This has always been the case and it wasn’t resolved by Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case which determined that separate but equal schools is unconstitutional. Recent research shows that school segregation in 2018 is as bad as it was in the 1960s. It continues to get worse, in part, because local and state governments allow certain areas to create their own school districts and schools that promote segregation.
In North Carolina, this is an issue that is causing the NAACP to consider legal action against the state after its legislature passed a measure which will allow four mainly white towns to create their own charter schools. According to The Washington Post, opponents of the law say that this is an intentional design for racial and economic segregation.
“Clearly, this is an effort to go back to the 1900s with Jim Crow where these enclaves for whites are being allowed to be set up,” Irv Joyner, a lawyer and the legal redress chair for the North Carolina NAACP, was quoted as saying by the Charlotte Post.
The law allows four towns outside of Charlotte (Cornelius, Huntersville, Matthews and Mint Hill) to create charter schools which only admit students whose families live within the town borders. This has been a long-standing debate in public education. Republicans like to say that these kinds of measures are designed to give parents more choices about where they send their kids to school. And no one can deny that parents should want and strive for the best for their children.
But the end result is almost always the same—public schools that serve predominately black and brown low-income students remain under-resourced and segregated, while white parents who have the means send their kids to well-resourced public schools with less racial diversity. These charter schools are also publicly funded and operated privately which means that taxpayer dollars are used to finance segregation. Creating separate private or all-white public schools was a tactic that whites in the South utilized so that they could get around the decision made by Brown v. Board of Education. And it is becoming popular once again. In the last 18 years, there are more than 70 communities in the South who have tried to secede from their school districts. Almost 50 of them have been successful in creating their own smaller, wealthier and less diverse districts.