Why Charter Schools Open Where They Do—And Why That’s a Problem
The pandemic showed how school choice could play out in suburban communities like Wake County, North Carolina, and it isn’t pretty.
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This article was produced by Our Schools.
Introduction[edit | edit source]
While sheltering with her family during the COVID-19 pandemic and dealing with the challenges of remote learning, Michelle Tomlinson couldn’t help but notice in her social media channels the growing frequency of charter school advertising. She was annoyed that the schools were targeting public school parents where she lived in the suburban northeast corner of Wake County, North Carolina, the sixth-wealthiest zip code in North Carolina,[1] with some of the state’s top-performing public schools.
One ad led to a video of Jonathan Hage, CEO of Charter Schools USA, a national charter school chain with numerous schools in North Carolina. The ad claimed the company’s facilities “are ready and will be open for the new school year” without referring to North Carolina state guidelines for reopening schools safely in the wake of COVID-19.
Tomlinson questioned how Hage and his staff could have developed a plan to reopen all of their schools, and Hage could be ready to promote that plan via a video uploaded to YouTube on June 8, 2020, and in a tweet on June 9, when the state guidelines had not been issued until June 8.
She was further annoyed by a local news outlet reporting a positive story about local charter schools successfully pivoting from in-person teaching to online instruction without mentioning charter schools often enroll more well-off students whose parents are more likely to own laptops, tablets, and computers and have high-speed Wi-Fi connections to the internet.
Tomlinson also knew well the financial impact the new charter schools would have at a time when public schools in North Carolina, and all other states, had been bracing for deep cuts in funding due to the economic fallout of coronavirus. At the time, North Carolina state funding levels faced a potential $1.6 billion shortfall in the coming year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Tomlinson was not alone among Wake County parents who were worried about new charters opening in their communities during a time of crisis. Well before the coronavirus struck, she helped organize a petition campaign among the parents to demand the North Carolina State Board of Education halt approvals of new charter schools in their communities.
The parents’ concerns included weak demand for the charters and the likelihood that the influx of charters would cause traffic problems, inject profiteers into the school community, and exacerbate racial and economic segregation in the school system. The campaign generated more than 941 signatures before the petition was closed.
In 2019, local school officials and school PTAs implored the North Carolina State Board of Education not to approve the two newest charters coming to Wake Forest, a community in northeast Wake County, arguing that charter “saturation” was adding to racial segregation in local schools and threatening to financially destabilize the district. The state board approved the schools anyway.
In 2020, Wake County parents wrote letters to local news outlets saying new charter schools weren’t needed, and they protested at public hearings considering whether to open the new charters.
Why were new charter schools opening in northeast Wake County?
Answering that question was not only a priority for Wake County parents and school officials but also a growing concern nationwide as the number of charter schools has continued to expand with, at least in states like North Carolina, little to no government regulation.
‘This Fiscal Impact Is Concerning’[edit | edit source]
“[These parents and public school advocates] should expect charter schools to drain financial resources from their communities’ public schools,” Preston Green told Our Schools in a phone call in March 2020.
Green, a University of Connecticut professor, is the author of numerous critical studies of charter schools, including one in which he argued that the charter industry’s operations resemble the business practices of Enron, the mammoth energy corporation that collapsed under a weight of debt and scandal.[2]
As evidence, Green sent Our Schools an email citing a 2018 study of five non-urban, North Carolina school districts.[3] The study determined that these non-urban districts lost about $4,000 to $6,000 for every student enrolled in a charter school.
Green said that because controversial charter schools have so far been less widespread in the suburbs compared to inner-city communities[4] such as Chicago, Philadelphia,[5] and Detroit,[6] it’s likely that many suburban parents who previously were unfamiliar with the fiscal impacts of charter schools will increasingly express concerns about seeing new charter schools popping up in their communities.
“This fiscal impact is concerning,” Green explained, “because public schools have fixed costs, such as facilities and administration, that cannot be cut very easily.”
Even if school districts close and consolidate buildings in response to enrollment losses from charters, the presence of charters will continue to drain the district, Green explained, because charters can and often do “open schools in the same location of the closed school or intensely recruit that school’s newly dislocated students. In addition, because charter schools often close, school districts have to maintain sufficient space in their remaining schools.”
In North Carolina, and most states, public school districts must reenroll students who live in their attendance zones, even if the students have left a charter school in midyear. Yet charters that shed students midyear are allowed to retain the funding that followed the child to the school at the beginning of the year.
Green’s troubling predictions about charter expansions into the suburbs were already happening in Wake County.
Nearly Impossible to Plan For[edit | edit source]
The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) student enrollment grew a paltry 42 new students in 2018–2019, ABC local Channel 11 reported, while parents choosing homeschooling increased 77 percent and families opting for charter schools jumped 90 percent. Enrollment growth in district schools rebounded to 1,436 new students in 2019–2020, according to local news outlet WRAL, but an enrollment forecast issued by the district predicted only 33 new students in 2020–2021.
The 2020 WCPSS report quoted by WRAL noted that the growth of “non-WCPSS systems, including charter schools,” would likely “capture a larger share of the K–12 population in Wake County.”
Tomlinson pointed Our Schools to district data showing that a number of WCPSS schools that were within 5 miles of where new charter schools have been located were under-enrolled in 2018–2019, including Richland Creek Elementary, at 60 percent capacity; Wake Forest Elementary (renamed Wake Forest iSTEM Magnet Elementary), 79 percent; Rolesville Middle, 68 percent; and Wakefield Middle, 83 percent.
Enrollment swings caused by charter expansions are nearly impossible to plan for in competitive school districts like Wake County, and district financial officers have a difficult time making revenue forecasts when students and their parents decide to transfer schools.
Other factors affecting district enrollment, such as shifts in housing, demographics, and employment, are more predictable, according to a February 2020 article in Education Week. But parent transfers are much more difficult to anticipate, and budget cuts that schools make midyear to respond to enrollment drops can add to the exodus of students.
And as Green observed, the presence of charter schools placed further financial strain on Wake County schools.
So Why Wake County… or Anywhere?[edit | edit source]
“Charter schools can open where they choose,” Christine Kushner told Our Schools in a March 2020 phone conversation. Kushner, a Princeton graduate in public policy who has lived in Wake County for more than 20 years, was on the school board of the Wake County Public School System from 2011 to 2022, when she declined to seek reelection.
Kushner asserted the schools were not needed, “academically or for capacity reasons.” She disputed claims charter operators have made that the northeast part of the county “needs seats,” and she called that claim, “not an accurate statement.”
One reason why charter schools expanded in northeastern Wake County seemed to be because they could.
In 2011, when the North Carolina state legislature voted to lift the state’s maximum limit of 100 charters allowed in the state, there was little to no consideration of where charters should expand to. Ten years later, with the number of charters nearly doubled, it seemed that the charter industry itself was allowed to determine that.
Up until August 2023, the state’s light regulatory hand consisted of a Charter Schools Advisory Board that received and reviewed charter applications and renewals and made recommendations to the State Board of Education, which issued the final decision.
It was not uncommon for members of the advisory board to have close associations with charter schools, including Joe Maimone who co-founded a charter, NC Newsline’s the Pulse reported; Jeannette Butterworth who served on the board of a charter school, Blue Ridge Now reported; and Cheryl Turner who was a principal of a charter school, Movement reported.
Another member, Steven Walker, was appointed by former Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, who the Asheville Citizen-Times reported tried to squelch information from the state’s education department showing charter schools serve disproportionately larger percentages of white and affluent students.
The Charter Schools Advisory Board set “a pretty low bar” for new charter applicants to gain approval, Kushner told Our Schools, and the State Board of Education “often follow[ed]… the advisory board’s recommendations,” according to NC Newsline.
The state’s new charter regulatory body as of August 2023, the Charter School Review Board, has even more power than the now-ended advisory board, including “the power to grant, amend, terminate, and renew charter applications,” according to NC Newsline, and many members of the review board “oversee the operations” of their own charters, according to the board’s chair in a December 2023 Carolina Journal article.
A Policy Mystery[edit | edit source]
From a policy standpoint, the geographic placements of charter schools are murky.
The shifting policy justifications for charters—whether they’re a civil rights cause, an agent for improving the performance of public schools, or a necessary choice for choice’s sake—don’t clearly explain why charter schools show up where they do.
If charters are necessary for equity, then why were they showing up in affluent northeast Wake County? If charters are needed in places where the state’s public schools are the lowest-performing, then Wake County was well down the list of districts in need. And if choice for choice’s sake is the goal, then the state’s many rural school districts—where schools are often few and far between, and parents don’t have the wherewithal for private school or homeschooling—seemed much more in need of new state-supported education options.
Another reason the choice for choice’s sake argument seemed especially misapplied to Wake County was that the district already offered more choices than were typical of most school districts.
Kushner pointed out that the district adapted to the “culture of choice,” as she put it, by expanding its magnet programs. In her mind, many of the new charters that had recently opened amounted to a “duplication of seats” because they were not offering anything more innovative than what the surrounding district schools offered.
In its 2019 letter to the state education board, Wake County school board members noted one of the new charters offered a Chinese immersion curriculum, despite the district already having a Chinese immersion school and several schools “where significant portions of the instructional day… [were] provided in Chinese.”
The letter also pointed out that another new charter, Doral Academy, was located within 5 miles of 22 schools, two of which were charters and 10 of which were public magnet schools, each with its own diverse curricular theme.
Kushner was skeptical of charter school proponents who claimed these schools have long waitlists of parents who wanted to enroll their children but couldn’t. Although some of these claims may have been true, the numbers often could not be confirmed, as pointed out in a 2014 National Education Policy Center memo about charter waitlist numbers generally.
“I’ve heard there are waitlists,” Kushner said in 2020 of charters in northeast Wake County, “but I don’t know if those lists are verified. [District schools] have to be transparent about our enrollments.”
The Education Imperative[edit | edit source]
The argument that schools were needed in northeast Wake County for academic reasons seemed thin too.
Based on an analysis of NC Department of Public Instruction data conducted by nonprofit education advocacy group EducationNC, the state’s school performance report card from 2018–2019 graded about 82 percent of Wake County schools either A, B, or C. Only two schools were rated F.
School performance in the district based on EducationNC’s data tended to trend downward going from the western part of the county to the eastern, with more C and D-rated schools in the northeast corner, which could have bolstered the case for charters in these communities.
However, these school ratings were deceptive. As state-based advocacy group Public Schools First NC explained, the ratings were calculated based on 80 percent of the weight drawn from test results and 20 percent from year-over-year growth. That gave a significant advantage to schools serving higher-income students who tended to get better results on standardized tests. So schools serving greater percentages of low-income students were at a distinct disadvantage even if they produced greater gains with their students from year to year.
An analysis of North Carolina’s school report card’s rating system posted by EducationNC in 2018 made a similar criticism, noting that were raw test results and growth weighted equally, ratings of most Wake County schools would improve significantly, especially for those “underperforming” schools rated D or F.
So if public schools in northeast Wake County had a performance problem, it likely correlated to the population of students they served and not their ability to serve them.
School Choice or School’s Choice?[edit | edit source]
As charter expansions cause enrollment attrition in public schools, it’s important to note which parents leave public schools and enroll in charters, particularly when the issue of race is considered.
“Some suburban parents might see charter schools as a tool for escaping from Wake County’s efforts to maintain a racially diverse school system,” Preston Green surmised. “Studies conducted in 2015 and 2018 have found that the state’s charter schools are more segregated than their traditional public school counterparts.”
What Green expected was indeed playing out on the ground in northeast Wake County. In an email Tomlinson sent to the North Carolina State Board of Education in January 2020, she drew from student enrollment data from state and county websites to show how charter schools in the Tar Heel State were increasing racial segregation in her community. In Wake districts 1 and 3, “the numbers… [were] staggering,” she wrote. (Districts 1 and 3 of WCPSS comprised the schools in the northeast corner of the county.)
Among these Wake County public schools, Tomlinson found 40 percent of students were white, 30 percent were Black, and 23 percent were Hispanic. She pointed out the contrast to charter schools in the area where 72 of the students were white, 10 percent were Black, and 9 percent were Hispanic.
Tomlinson’s email also expressed concern with whether new charter schools would enroll students who would be eligible for the federal government’s free or reduced-price lunch program (FRL), a common measure of poverty. Some of the schools in the vicinity of new charters had high percentages of these students, including Richland Creek Elementary, which enrolled 43.5 percent FRL, and Wake Forest Elementary, which had 49.5 percent FRL.
In contrast, many new charters that had proposed to move into her neighborhood—such as North Raleigh Charter Academy, Wake Preparatory Academy, and Wendell Falls Charter Academy—planned to enroll only 31–33 percent FRL students, according to their applications. This target would have matched districtwide percentages but not the closest neighborhood public schools they proposed to compete against.
When Wake Preparatory’s application was approved, it wasn’t clear how the school would achieve its declared FRL percentage because it wasn’t planning to enroll students by using a lottery process that was weighted favorably toward students from low-income households. After parents pointed that out to state officials, the school issued an addendum stating it would use a weighted lottery.
Applications for North Raleigh Charter Academy and Wendell Falls Charter Academy, which were both going to be managed by Charter Schools USA, pledged to use a weighted lottery, but the goal they stated would have achieved a pretty low bar—at least 15 percent of students who were economically disadvantaged.
Parents’ Concerns[edit | edit source]
What many signers of the Wake County charter school petition shared was an evolving understanding of what these schools represented in the education system and the disruption the schools brought to communities.
Initially, Tomlinson and her husband were supportive of charter schools, and they were for lifting the cap on the number of charters allowed in the state.
Tomlinson’s wariness of charters started when she noticed more families from her neighborhood leaving public schools to attend new charters. Northeast Wake County—which includes Rolesville, Wake Forest, Wakefield, Zebulon, and other rapidly growing bedroom communities—became home to 11 out of the 24 Wake County charter schools.
When she examined these new charter schools more closely, she found details that concerned her.
For instance, one of the new charters approved to locate near her, Wake Preparatory Academy, stated in its application that starting in its third year, the school planned to earn a $2.6 million surplus every year and pay over $2.6 million annually to its out-of-state for-profit management company. The school also expected to spend almost $200,000 a year on marketing.
Another fact about the school that disturbed her: The school’s management company, Charter One, was owned by Glenn Way, who oversaw a chain of charter schools based mostly in Arizona that, according to an in-depth investigation by the Arizona Republic, over a nine-year period funneled about $37 million in real estate deals, paid for largely by public funds meant for education, into companies owned by or associated with Way.
“I went from being a supporter of charter schools to now being against them,” Tomlinson told Our Schools.
Julie Raftery, a Wakefield parent who signed the petition, told Our Schools in 2020, “I first learned of charters right after we moved here.” She considered the schools to be an option only “in areas of need, where the kids who struggle the most live.” Initially, she applied to enroll her child in a charter, but decided against following through and chose a district school instead.
“When we first moved to Wakefield, the only charter in our immediate area was Franklin Academy,” she told Our Schools. “In the last five years, they have built five more charters [in her area]… Now, more are slated to be built. So what happens to the public schools?”
Brad Saunders, another parent who signed the petition, told Our Schools in 2020, “At first, I didn’t know very much about charter schools and thought charters were publicly funded private schools.” He and his wife also had a special needs child and were concerned about how charters served, or didn’t, special needs students.
“It’s wonderful what public schools do for special needs children,” he said, and expressed surprise that charters would be locating in a place where, in his mind, they weren’t needed.
“If a parent is convinced the charter school is for the benefit of their own child, I’m okay with that,” Saunders said. “But when you have [a new charter opening] on practically every other block with each catering to its own special population… you disperse the resources wider. My tax money is being spread more thinly.”
The Business Imperative[edit | edit source]
So why were new charters converging on these communities?
Raftery said, “[The] area has become a cash cow for charter schools.”
“All these charters are setting up in northeast Wake County because they’ve likely done market research that convinced them to set up here,” Saunders said. “They probably have some sort of data.”
“It seems like it’s mostly a financial decision,” Kushner ventured.
Charter schools are, after all, businesses, and businesses have existential needs and interests. When they decide to expand to new markets, they can pick a market with evidence of higher consumer demand or a market that offers prospects for higher profitability.
Also, rather than being under the regulatory umbrella of democratic school governance, charters are operated by private boards that have intentions that aren’t as well known to the surrounding community. And charters often employ private, even for-profit, organizations to manage their schools, adding yet other motivational factors that can drive expansions.
In a 2015 article for the Atlantic, Laura McKenna observed that charter schools were “less popular in suburbs than in cities” due to policy decisions and high levels of dissatisfaction urban parents had for their public schools. Many states, such as Missouri, confined charters only to the largest urban school districts, and charter advocates have lobbied to eliminate those restrictions.
McKenna also noted charter advocates were eagerly eyeing states that had recently lifted restrictions on charter expansion, where they expected new markets would open up in suburban communities.
When charters were legalized in North Carolina in 1997, early charter startups were mostly in urban communities—including Durham, Charlotte, and Raleigh. But new startups and enrollment growth in these communities have been slowing down. So when the state lifted the cap on the number of charters, suburban communities became logical targets for the industry.
Charter School Retail Strategies[edit | edit source]
But if business imperatives demand that charters move to the suburbs, why Wake County suburbs?
“It’s an easier entry point to get into the school business,” Kushner offered.
She suggested that by expanding in these communities, charters could attract marginal-cost students who were less likely to require special services, which could lower the school’s outlay per student without affecting revenue. They could also attract parents who had increased mobility because they had a car and time to transport students to and from school.
Kushner’s hunch was supported by research.
In one of the few empirical studies of why charters locate where they do, professors Christopher Lubienski, Peter Weitzel, and Charisse Gulosino found that “market competition induces most charter schools to locate in areas where they have a competitive advantage (often on the periphery), capitalizing on the opportunity to target students with less risky socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds.”[7]
Especially when communities are being targeted by for-profit-oriented charter schools, as was the case in northeast Wake County, the study found, “key decisions about where to locate appear to be driven by the willingness to pay high real estate costs in exchange for appealing to less riskier students in neighborhoods with low need indices, utilizing the incentives that arise from choice and competition. For-profit charter schools frequently avoid areas with students who may be most likely to damage their market position.”
When Our Schools first contacted Lubienski about the study for an article in 2016, he described how charter operators, especially those operated by for-profit management companies like the ones moving into Wake County, employ “ringing strategies” in which they would locate schools on the outskirts of communities with more disadvantaged students to lure the more-advantaged families with time and access to transportation to enroll their children in suburban schools.
Lubienski explained how this strategy often led to the creation of “white flight” schools that served higher concentrations of white and more well-off families, which is what parents said seemed to be happening in northeastern Wake County.
“Charters have become a vehicle for which we see more forms of student sorting,” he said, “not just by race, but that’s easier to see.”
One of those harder-to-see student characteristics was when the appeal of attending a sparkling new charter that had just shown up in a neighborhood of well-worn public schools attracted the attention of parents who generally had higher aspirations for their children—what could be called a “bright flight” of students more inclined toward striving academically.
Another obvious strategy charter school operators used was to cluster near other schools, including charters. Clustering is a well-known strategy used in the retail industry to more effectively and efficiently market all sorts of goods.
The most obvious uses of the clustering strategy are food courts, where food vendors actually benefit from being located close to their competitors. But clustering also works for higher order purchases too, like car dealerships that often locate near each other on the outskirts of a metropolitan area to enable families to quickly compare different makes and prices of cars.
A Land Rush[edit | edit source]
“Obviously, businesspeople are doing the analysis to determine locations of charters,” Lubienski surmised, “and there are a lot of considerations, including the availability of buildings and land” that could influence where to site new schools.
“Land is still generally available in the eastern part of our county,” Kushner confirmed, “which is not true of the western part.”
Not only was land available in eastern Wake County, but it also has been rapidly increasing in value. Communities that were targeted by charters were some of the fastest-growing in the state, with housing markets that were booming.
Even though charter schools are financed with public money, they often own their land and school buildings and can lease them[8] to a subsidiary and eventually sell them at a profit.
This is a reason why many charter operators have their own associated real estate development businesses.
Charter Schools USA, which operated two charters in Wake County, as of 2024, had its own development firm,[9] Red Apple Development. Doral Academy (which Wake County school board members pointed out in their 2019 letter was redundant to existing schools nearby) was operated by Academica, which is also a landlord to charter schools it manages, according to In the Public Interest.[10]
Both of these companies are based in Florida, where charter schools have become a hugely lucrative investment and real estate enterprise.
It’s also not at all unusual to find charter school boards populated with people who have connections to the real estate industry.
In the case of North Carolina in 2020, Hilda A. Parlér, for instance, was owner of Parlér Properties LLC, founder and president of Wake Forest Charter Academy, and founder and president of Wake Preparatory Academy, according to her business’s website. She also briefly served on the state’s Charter Schools Advisory Board where she had the opportunity to make money operating and building charter schools, according to the News and Observer.
“Charter schools are mostly looking for places where they can locate and sustain their revenue sources,” Lubienski said. In the case of northeast Wake County, the more lucrative revenue source by far could have been in real estate.
Better Schools or Better Marketing[edit | edit source]
In their applications to open new campuses in Wake County, charter operators justified the need for their schools with multiple reasons, often by including an analysis showing the need for more seats in a given area or an argument about the low performance of a district’s current schools compared to the charter’s supposed superior instructional model—an argument that was often unsupported by any third-party research.
However, charter school applications often seemed to read as if they were conceived after the decision was already made about the education market to be targeted.
Applications submitted by Charter Schools USA for North Raleigh Charter Academy and Wendell Falls Charter Academy included the statement, “The information we have provided in this application may be similar or identical to information that you will find in the application of other applicants who have also partnered with CSUSA.”
The application for North Raleigh Charter Academy said the school planned “to focus on the student population residing in and around the Wake Forest community located in north Wake County,” while the application for Wendell Falls pledged to “focus on the student population residing in and around the Wendell community located in northeast Wake County.”
“Wake Forest was chosen due to its current student-aged population and population growth rate, as well as the overcrowding and below-average performance of the public schools,” one application stated, while the other declared, “The community of Wendell was chosen due to its population growth and lack of school choice in the area.”
Much of the rationale for the perceived need for charter schools often seemed to boil down to marketing.
“Charters have honed their message to attract Black and Latinx students over the years, particularly with the ploy that charters can provide students with a private school educational experience,” Preston Green said. “It is quite possible that this messaging might also sway suburban parents.”
“Some of these charters are also marketing themselves as a vehicle for students to attend well-regarded universities,” Green said. “This advertising can be very attractive to parents who want to give their children every possible advantage.”
Some Wake County parents also attributed the allure of charters to a narrative[11] created by news media.
“You hear the nightly school reports about bad things happening in public schools like a student bringing a knife to school or a student calling in false alarms about a shooter,” said Brad Saunders, a Wake County parent whose work is in sales and marketing. “Some parents just don’t want their children to be exposed to this. People think these kinds of things never happen in charters.”
A narrative pushed by pro-charter media outlets in North Carolina was about how during the pandemic local public schools struggled to provide remote learning to their students while charter schools “haven’t missed… a step.”
Why the Charter School Debate Matters[edit | edit source]
Charter school proponents were quick to counter the concerns Wake County parents had by arguing that if charters weren’t needed, then parents wouldn’t have chosen them. They claimed that when parents signed up for these schools, that alone was enough proof that the schools were needed. And they maintained that charter schools didn’t hurt public schools because when parents transferred students to charters, the money followed the child, and the public school could lower its costs in proportion to the number of students leaving.
But the Wake County parents weren’t persuaded by these arguments when they saw firsthand the adverse effects of under-enrollment in their children’s schools, increased segregation of students, and the growing presence of predatory, for-profit operators.
Some charter proponents would counter these parents by ignoring their message and attacking the messengers, in this case, mostly white, relatively affluent, parents of privilege—characteristics many of the Wake County parents who signed the petition readily acknowledged could be used to describe themselves.
But what the Wake County parents demanded was reminiscent of statements made by the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives in 2016 calling for a moratorium on charter school expansions.
Heeding the complaints of parents, Wake County school board members sent a letter to the North Carolina State Board of Education saying, “the thrust of the parents’ comments are accurate. Charter schools are having a destabilizing effect on traditional schools.” Wake County school board members asked the state to consider delaying or denying the new charter school applications, but the state board approved the new schools anyway.
There was little evidence that state officials in North Carolina paid any attention to the parents’ petition.
Tomlinson told Our Schools in 2020 that none of the state board members responded substantively to her email.
Also in 2020, when a required annual report to the state legislature on the state of charter schools happened to include information showing that a majority of charter schools in the state didn’t reflect the racial makeup of their surrounding communities, the Charter Schools Advisory Board requested that section be removed. The State Board of Education complied.
An email Our Schools sent to the advisory board asking for a comment about the parent petition did not receive a reply.
“There isn’t a lack of people wanting to be in a segregated school,” said Raftery, “so the waiting lists [at charters] are long.”
“It is time for more regulation [of charters],” said Tomlinson.
In a generally conservative state like North Carolina where government regulation is often discouraged, and the charter school industry benefits from having powerful proponents in high places, the pleas of these parents seem unlikely to generate immediate action from state lawmakers.
“Experiences elsewhere have shown that many charter school operators are not working in the best interests of the school districts where they are located,” said Green. “Therefore, these parents must become more vocal about the possible negative impacts of charter school expansion on their public schools.”
‘What Gets Lost’[edit | edit source]
When Our Schools reached out to Lubienski in 2020 to see if there was an update to his 2009 study of charter school geolocation,[7] he replied in an email that he and his coauthors were completing a statewide analysis of charter schools in Indiana and weren’t ready to share results.
But consistent with his previous investigations, he continued to find that charters, especially the ones that counted on making profits, tended to “focus on the bottom line by limiting costs” and “locating in places that tend[ed] to filter out the ‘less desirable’ students.”
“There are certainly a lot of charter operators trying to do good, and do it the right way,” he wrote. “But the amazing amount of financial scandals we’ve seen with many charter operators suggests that some are in it for the money, and not for the kids.”
Ferreting out the intentions of charter school operators may or may not be something government officials or parents are very good at. But in the meantime, having the decision of where to locate charter schools solely left up to the business plans of charter entrepreneurs seems like a less than effective way to ensure all families and taxpayers are well served.
“What gets lost in the discussion,” said Kushner, “is that schools need to be accountable to the whole of the community, not just to the parents who may happen to choose them.”
- ↑ Data as of March 2020.
- ↑ Preston C. Green III, Bruce D. Baker, and Joseph O. Oluwole, “Are Charter Schools the Second Coming of Enron?: An Examination of the Gatekeepers that Protect Against Dangerous Related-Party Transactions in the Charter School Sectors,” Indiana Law Journal, vol. 93, iss. 4, article 5 (Winter 2018).
- ↑ Helen F. Ladd and John D. Singleton, “The Fiscal Externalities of Charter Schools: Evidence from North Carolina,” Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID), working paper no. 261 (April 9, 2018).
- ↑ Jeff Bryant, Salon, “Urban Communities of Color Increasingly Reject Charter Schools” (December 8, 2018).
- ↑ Jeff Bryant, Our Future, “After Years of Failed ‘Choice,’ Philadelphia Gets Its Schools Back” (March 27, 2018).
- ↑ Jeff Bryant, Our Future, “This Is Your Future Without Public Schools” (October 9, 2018).
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Christopher Lubienski, Peter Weitzel, and Charisse Gulosino; American Journal of Education; the University of Chicago; “School Choice and Competitive Incentives: Mapping the Distribution of Educational Opportunities Across Local Education Markets” (2009).
- ↑ Network for Public Education, “Do Charter Schools Profit From Educating Students?” (2019).
- ↑ Emery P. Dalesio, Associated Press, “For-Profit Charter Operator Lobbies for Workplace Schools” (June 28, 2017).
- ↑ In the Public Interest, “Academica’s Florida Real Estate Operations” (June 2016).
- ↑ Peter Greene, the Progressive, “What Back-to-School News Stories Hide About Charter Schools” (September 23, 2019).
