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The political popularity of charter schools is unmistakable. This article explores the relationship between charter schools and segregation across the country, in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter students in 2007-2008.

An in-depth literature review of the impact of School Choice around the world done by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) has demonstrated emphatically that providing more school choices for parents has the effect of creating more school segregation.

""By any measure, New Jersey has one of the most segregated school systems in the country," said David Sciarra, director of the Education Law Center, the organization that brought the school aid cases to the state's highest court."

"The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have filed a complaint that accuses the state of Wisconsin and some private schools that accept vouchers of creating a system of segregated public schools."

Kozol thinks that No Child Left Behind is creating two classes of citizens: Those in low-income schools who are taught to "to spit up predigested answers," and those in affluent schools who are taught to ask insightful questions, demand things, and make decisions. Kozol believes that racial segregation in the nation's schools is worse than when he started advocating against it as an activist in 1968.

"...The black-white gap was closing because, thanks in part to Johnson's War on Poverty, segregation was decreasing in the United States. The progress stopped because neo-liberal approaches to policy focused on school and market variables and not any longer on social and civil variables. Segregation increased. Today, many policy makers and educators do not see pooling or unpooling poverty as "reading variables" like phonemic awareness or comprehension strategies. But the truth of the matter -- and it is an expensive truth to ignore -- is that school is not separate from society, and that ceasing to pool poverty is the key variable to undoing the black-white gap, as well as the gap between rich and poor children more generally. "

A popular history of vouchers suggests that they are a "new" reform tool and a product of free market ideas. They captured national attention relatively recently when they were implemented in the Milwaukee and Cleveland schools in the early 1990s.  In 2002, the Supreme Court resolved the constitutional questions concerning Cleveland's voucher program. This history typically cites Milton Friedman as the intellectual father of vouchers. Not so fast, says Professor Jim Carl. The origins and purposes of vouchers in American education are closely tied to our social history, he argues. In Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education, Carl skillfully traces the origins of vouchers back to the segregated South in the 1950s. In this context, they were used to combat desegregation post- Brown.  However, through their history, civil rights advocates, free market economists, and policy makers all have embraced vouchers, seeking solutions to urban education. In other words, vouchers have been pliable and appealed to different groups, for different reasons. But, importantly, they began as a product of a social agenda in the South.

When Trailblazers Academy opened in 1999, the charter school was hailed for taking in low-achieving students that the city's traditional public schools ignored. Now, with the school's charter up for renewal in May, its unusual model is being scrutinized. State test scores at Trailblazers and its sister high school, Stamford Academy, are among the lowest in Connecticut, and community leaders are concerned about its large concentration of minority students. "I applaud them for giving underrepresented and underserved children extra services, but I do question why they have to be done in a segregated organization," said Wendy Lecker, the former president of the Stamford Parent Teacher Council.

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we've turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court's ruling that racially segregated schools were "inherently unequal" shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned "Black Monday" and vowed "massive resistance." But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

When the Richmond and Louisville metro areas reached a school desegregation crossroads in the 1970s, they went in different directions. After the Supreme Court prevented a plan to consolidate Richmond's schools with those in Henrico and Chesterfield counties, the city was left to pursue a futile desegregation plan on its own. White and middle-class flight continued unabated. Meanwhile, a court-ordered consolidation of the Louisville-Jefferson County, Ky., schools produced Ku Klux Klan opposition. But the fuss eventually died down and the region took ownership of its desegregation policy without court supervision. Metro Louisville ultimately implemented a voluntary student assignment plan based on the geographic distribution of students by race and poverty. The benefits have extended beyond education. From 1990 to 2010, black-white residential segregation in Louisville-Jefferson County fell at nearly twice the rate as in metro Richmond, according to research by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.

It's always good to see issues of school segregation and integration back on the table as part of the education reform discussion; most recently, the discussion of this important reform goal was triggered in New York by Eva Moskowitz's latest demand of the state that her chain of schools should be exempted from following the state charter law which requires that all charters serve high-needs students in proportions comparable to those of local schools. However, Moskowitz's claim that her purpose in seeking this right to play by different rules than other charters is simply to expand school integration is deeply disingenuous.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that public education is "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education stood for the proposition that the federal government would no longer allow states and municipalities to deny equal educational opportunity to a historically oppressed racial minority. Ruling unanimously, the justices overturned the noxious concept that "separate" education could ever be "equal." Yet today, nearly 60 years later, our schools remain separate and unequal. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. The average white student attends a school where 77 percent of his or her peers are also white. Schools today are "as segregated as they were in the 1960s before busing began." We are living in a world in which schools are patently separate."

Yesterday, national scholars on both sides of the debate over the constitutionality, educational value and cultural importance of the racial and ethnic integration of the schools gave testimony at the state Capitol. Joining them was the architect of Minnesota's last two legal challenges to school segregation, attorney Daniel Shulman, who criticized the state for failing to enforce the law and said he's willing to go back to court to fix that.

The leaders of one of the most economically depressed and racially segregated cities in the nation have decided that the answer to its problems is to fire teachers, close public schools, expand the number of charters, and possibly to expand the voucher program as well. In the eyes of Ohio's elected officials, evidence about the past performance of charters and vouchers means nothing.

Teachers in Louisiana have found themselves on the frontlines of austerity. First, in an unprecedented vote, the Jefferson Parish School Board voted 8-1 to close seven campuses, four of them traditional elementary schools and the rest alternative programs for students struggling academically. The board issued more bad news when it announced it was dropping plans to add an art instruction wing at Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts due to cost concerns. Construction of the wing is a hot-button issue in the area because the proposal to convert Lincoln into a magnet school that would draw students from across the parish was a result of the deliberations leading up to the system's settling a forty-seven-year-old desegregation lawsuit last year.

"While reasonable people can disagree about whether this is "privatization," the question remains as to whether the market mechanisms embodied within the charter model lead to more socially just outcomes.  After all, many might be willing to accept privatization if choice and competition produce more equitable and just opportunities, especially for disadvantaged children. However, an increasing consensus in research circles suggests that charter schools may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the chronic inequity in America's education system.  Despite its roots as an initiative to promote more equitable outcomes, multiple studies have linked charter programs with segregation. "

"Sixty years after Brown, whiter, wealthier communities are breaking away from racially and economically diverse school districts."

Two new studies show that the Philadelphia region is one of the most separate and unequal when it comes to neighborhoods and schools for blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians.

At first glance, the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers and the Wake County, North Carolina, school board couldn't be more disparate. Charles and David Koch, the brains behind the massive Koch Industries conglomerate and the funders of so many right-wing political causes, are national figures, credited with (or accused of, depending on your political persuasion) launching the tea party movement and waging war on the Obama administration and its agenda. The Wake County public school board is, well, just that.