Studies Spotlight Charters Designed for Integration

Parent volunteer Brian Scheuble is handed pieces of kelp art by his son, Charlie, a 5th grader at Larchmont Charter School in Los Angeles. Arts projects and other hands-on activities are a daily part of the learning experience for Larchmont students.

—Jamie Rector for Education Week

By Jaclyn Zubrzycki

Nearly six decades after Brown v. Board of Education , the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ushered in an era of efforts to integrate public schools, charter school advocates and researchers are shining a light on a number of those independent public schools that are integrated by design.

Two new reports—one from the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, another from the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council—examine charter schools that have racially and socioeconomically diverse enrollments as part of their school missions. Researchers and advocates say that there is increasing demand for such schools, but that national educational priorities and policies are not necessarily stacked in their favor.

“Charters have always had the potential to be incredibly diverse schools,” said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “They’re not bound to residential patterns,” she said, which means that their student populations need not reflect the less diverse neighborhoods where...