Some readers will likely interpret these data to mean that charters are more racially isolated than TPS-but that’s not necessarily so. Because the report simply compares a school’s racial composition to the surrounding neighborhood, a racially imbalanced school could actually be less racially isolated than the surrounding neighborhood. The report itself is clear in this distinction, but the headline on Brookings’s website (“60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, how racially balanced are America’s public schools?”) is decidedly less cautious.
The other major problem with the study is that it doesn’t consider the fact that most charter schools-by design-are located in urban communities. By definition cities have more population density, making it more feasible for parents to choose schools outside their immediate neighborhoods, and making a mismatch between neighborhood demographics and school demographics more likely. That’s just not the case in the spread-out suburbs or in rural areas.
Thus the analysts erred in comparing charters nationwide and statewide to traditional public schools, since the former are mostly located in cities and the latter are located everywhere.
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