Are US Taxpayers Funding Modern Segregation Academies In North Carolina?
North Carolina goes to school getty  In too many parts of the U.S., the response to Brown v. Board of Education was not so much, I guess well have to stop that so much as Okay, we can work around that. One workaround was the segregation academiesprivate schools that provided parents a means of keeping their children out of integrated public schools. Another technique was school district secessionfacilitating white flight by simply carving away the white portion of a diverse school district. Now the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group supporting public schools, says their research shows that versions of these segregationist policies are still in use in North Carolina, and federal taxpayer dollars are helping to finance them. North Carolina received a $26.6 million dollar grant from the federal Charter Schools Program in 2018. 42 charter schools received a piece of that grant. Only 30 of those have reported demographic information, according to NPE executive director Carol Burris, and of those 30, 11 have a significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located.  One example is Hopgood Academy, located in Halifax County. The county ranks 90th out of 100 counties in per capita income, but more than 28% of its residents live below the poverty line. In March of 1969, the U.S. Justice Department rejected the Halifax County districts desegregation plan. A small mostly-white sliver of the county tried to set themselves up as a separate district, but lost a suit against the Justice Department in that same year. But in 1969, Hobgood Academy was established, a mostly white private school near a mostly Black public school. (This timeline comes courtesy of Rodney Pierce, a Halifax County social studies teacher and 2019 North Carolina Social Studies Teacher of the Year.) The pattern in Halifax County is not a unique one. Delaware County in Pennsylvania also has a population of Black and White, rich and poor, that has long been carved up into gerrymandered, segregated districts and non-public schools. But in Halifax County, another wrinkle has been added. Soon after the CSP grant was awarded to the state, a movement appeared to convert the private school to a charter school. Opponents pointed out that the school was simply looking for financial relief for woes caused by declining enrollment, and that fans of free market ed reform should then be happy to see the school fold, but the charter was granted. That charter school retains its heavily white student body. And it received a half-million-dollar grant from CSP. A report released in 2018 documented in considerable detail how North Carolinas charter schools have served as a driver of segregation. But in 2018 the legislature was debating a proposal to let four wealthy suburbs of Charlotte found their own charters and secede from the larger district. Critics argued that this would further segregation, but the bill became law. It would have been easy for then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to notice that segregation via charters was a hot issue in North Carolina. Hopgood is not the only example of a white flight academy. The Community Public Charter is located on the grounds of the Community Pentecostal Center and listed on the church website as one of its ministries. During 2019, when the school was awarded a CSP grant of $250,000, 95% of the schools students were White; in the local public district, only 53 percent of the students are White. The Community School of Davidson, like Hobgood, was formerly a secular private school run in a Baptist church. Now a charter school, it received a $700,000 CSP grant to expand. The year it received its grant, 84 percent of its students were White compared with 27 percent of the students in its public school district. The Network for Public Education has criticized the Charter School Program for waste and fraud before. About this new development, Burris said via email,  I am certain the U.S. Department of Education has no interest in starting or supporting white flight/poverty flight charters. The North Carolina grant's story shows how little control the Department has once they push the nearly half-billion dollars out the door each year. The federal Charter Schools Program is broken. It needs to be dramatically fixed or defunded. School segregation and white flight continue to be problem in U.S. education.