Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools The Impact of Charters on Public Education

With the NAACP calling for a moratorium on the establishment of charter schools, and a Massachusetts ballot initiative generating national attention before the last election, school privatization is in the news. Critics of charter schools decry their uneven performance, use of public funds, and practice of excluding challenging students. This concise yet powerful volume examines their rise in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, exploring the specific conditions that spurred their proliferation. Jim Crow Schools also chronicles the efforts of national and local activists advocating free, high-quality, and equitably-funded public education. Raynard Sanders (New Orleans), David Stovall (Chicago), and Terrenda White (New York City) show how charter schools - private institutions, usually established in poor or working-class African American and Latinx communities - promote competition instead of collaboration, and are chiefly driven by financial interests. Sanders, Stovall, and White also reveal how charters position themselves as "public" to secure tax money, but use their private status to hide data about enrollment and salaries. Furthermore, they document the lasting consequences of charter school expansion, including the displacement of experienced African American teachers; the popularization of a rigid, militarized pedagogy; and the destabilization of other community resources.