Emmanuel Felton, Hechinger Report, June 17, 2018

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At Lake Oconee Academy, 73 percent of students are white. Down the road at Greene County’s other public schools, 12 percent of students are white and 68 percent are black; there isn’t a piano lab and there are far fewer AP courses.

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Lake Oconee Academy is a charter school. Charters are public schools, ostensibly open to all. The idea behind charters was to loosen rules and regulations hindering innovation. Many charters hire teachers who don’t belong to a teachers union or haven’t gone through a traditional teacher preparation program, for example. But some charters have also used their greater flexibility to limit which kids make it through the schoolhouse doors — creating exclusive, disproportionately white schools.

Lake Oconee Academy is one of 115 charters at which the percentage of white students is at least 20 points higher than at any of the traditional public schools in the districts where they are located, {snip}. The 20-percentage-point difference has often been used in federal desegregation lawsuits as a measure for which schools are considered “racially identifiable.” These 115 charters, which together enroll nearly 48,000 children, were concentrated in just a handful of states. In 2016, California had 33 racially identifiable white charters, Texas was home to 19 and Michigan, 14. At nearly 63 points, the gap between the percentages of white students at Lake Oconee Academy and at the whitest traditional public school in the area was the fourth-widest in the country.

In all, there are at least 747 public charter schools around the country that enroll a higher percentage of white students than any of the traditional public schools in the school districts where they are located. The differences between the charters and the whitest nearby public schools ranged from less than 1 percent to 78 percent. These schools represented one in 10 charters operating during the 2015-16 school year. Not all of these schools are necessarily contributing to school segregation. In cities where many of the public schools almost exclusively serve African-American children, these disproportionally white charters are the only racially diverse schools. But many of the 747 charters have implemented policies that critics say make it difficult for lower-income families to access them.

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But some residents say that policies at the school make it hard for black families to enroll their kids: Land’s End uniforms they can’t afford, and the fact that the charter doesn’t provide bus transportation to and from school, while the other public schools do. To many in this starkly divided county, this public charter school doesn’t seem all that public.

In its early years, Lake Oconee Academy created a priority attendance zone for the gated communities that surround it. This is legal in several states, allowing charters to pick the neighborhoods they want to serve. While these schools usually hold randomized admissions lotteries open to everyone in their school districts, families in preferred attendance zones get first dibs. Several of the 747 charters only offer their admissions materials in English, excluding immigrant families who speak other languages. (The ACLU of Arizona found that 26 percent of the charter schools it contacted didn’t provide admissions materials in Spanish, despite the prevalence of Spanish speakers in the state.) And some of these charters pressure parents to volunteer a certain number of hours, which can be hard on working families.

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Politicians often sell charters as a solution for low-income black and brown students stuck in chronically poor-performing public schools. Yet, by 2015, racially identifiable white charter schools (those with white student populations at least 20 percent higher than any traditional public schools in the district) had emerged in 18 states — at a time when charters existed in 42 states. The federal government has played a role in the growth of these charters by granting charter startup grants to schools without considering whether they will lead to increased segregation. Some have been approved even while their communities were still under active school desegregation court orders, and in one case even after residents implored the federal court to step in and bar the school from opening.

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The charter school also benefits from having its own private foundation, the Lake Oconee Academy Foundation, which raised more than $200,000 in 2015 and has more than $800,000 in assets. Those resources have helped Lake Oconee post some of the highest test scores in the state. While 64 percent of Lake Oconee eighth-graders passed the state’s eighth-grade math test in 2017, 9 percent of the other district students did. The gap was similar on the reading tests, on which 75 percent of charter school students passed, compared to 16 percent of the other district students. In 2014, the charter was awarded a coveted National Blue Ribbon from the U.S. Department of Education.

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The proliferation of racially identifiable white charters in some states but not others can be attributed in part to differences in state laws. In addition to allowing charters to draw their own attendance zones, Georgia doesn’t require charter schools to provide school bus transportation. The four states with the most racially identifiable white charters — Michigan, Arizona, Texas and California — also don’t require charters to offer transportation or to address the issue in their charter applications. And in North Carolina, which had six such charter schools in 2015, lawmakers have discussed allowing charters to give priority to children whose parents work at corporations that have contributed at least $50,000 to the school. In June, lawmakers passed a bill that lets four mostly white and affluent Charlotte suburbs open up charter schools that would give preference to their residents.

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By 2014, Lake Oconee Academy had grown to 574 students. But as it prospered, tensions rose. In early February of that year, pastor Roi Johnson led a one-man protest against the charter. Over several weeks, the demonstration grew to dozens of people. On February 24, about 80 protesters gathered for the final demonstration at the entrance of the school. They were met by more than 12 Greene County Sheriff’s deputies and six Georgia State Patrol troopers, according to a local news report. Protesters held up signs imploring Lake Oconee Academy to “end the bigotry.” The protest ended peaceably, but Johnson thinks the events ramped up public pressure on Lake Oconee ahead of the fight over the renewal of its charter in 2016. It was during that fight that the school agreed to dismantle its attendance zones and to change the school’s funding model.

Lake Oconee is one of several racially identifiable white charters that have been forced to change their practices. In 2007, a charter school in Red Bank, New Jersey, promised to recruit more Hispanic students after the local school board sued the school to demand that it increase its diversity. Nearly a decade later, local parents lodged a complaint with the school’s board, arguing that the charter still hadn’t adequately addressed the issue. In Marin County, California, the state stopped the local school board from sending additional dollars to a local charter school that served a disproportionately large number of white students compared to the district’s traditional public school, which is 70 percent black and Hispanic.

Today, Lake Oconee Academy is 73 percent white, down from 81 percent white in 2014. The added diversity is largely due to more Asian and Hispanic students. The black population has grown from 7 percent of total enrollment in 2014 to 10 percent. Further diversifying the school will be difficult. Each year, there are few open spots after it enrolls the children of teachers and board members, who are mostly white, and siblings of current students.

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In its new charter agreement the school promised to increase its ranks of nonwhite students. But this year’s preschool class, the grade at which most children enter the school, was even whiter than the school as a whole, at 78 percent white.

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Houston says Lake Oconee Academy has collaborated more with the other district schools as it’s grown, but it’s also demanded more. “As time went on, more, more and more resources had to be provided.”

Residents and at least one current school board member say that the academy’s success has starved programs at the other district schools, and that it’s going to take a while for those schools to recover from years of funding cuts. But Tasheka Redd thinks one of the main reasons the district schools are struggling is a lack of parent involvement: “Here at LOA, parents care,” she said. “It’s required.”

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