How and why has race come to dominate the dialogue over charter schools in Hoboken?
In the eyes of their critics, the charters’ original sin was not segregation but strangulation of the Hoboken school district’s budget through ever-increasing state-mandated payments.
Hoboken’s two founding charter schools have drawn a whiter and richer student body than the surrounding district since their opening in 1998. But it was only when the third local charter moved to expand and a fourth tried to open in the past three years that opposition to charters crystallized and became an election issue.
Since that time, race, and to a lesser extent class, have become the premier hot potato of Hoboken educational politics.
To be certain, legal machinations are at play, now that the Board of Education has challenged the expansion of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) in court. State law does not cap how many charters can open in one city, but it frowns on segregation, even when unintentional.
Still, the law and the debate over diversity reflect something deeper about the complex and uncomfortable social structures that continue to dictate educational outcomes in America.
City University of New York urban studies professor Molly Vollman Makris argues in a recently-released book on students living in Hoboken’s public housing projects that although parents across the spectrum profess to value diversity and integration, it is their aggregate choices and preferences that result in segregated charter and district schools year after year.
Embedded in Hoboken
First published last month, “Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City” is an expansion of Makris’ dissertation at a joint Rutgers-New Jersey Institute of Technology PhD program. Consciously geared towards an academic audience, the book offers an in-depth, depoliticized look into how segregation crops up in Hoboken’s public schools, and what implications it holds, especially for the disadvantaged children who live in the Hoboken Housing Authority (HHA).
The issues discussed in the book are not merely theoretical for Makris. She has lived in southwest Hoboken for the past six years and currently has a child enrolled in a public preschool in town.
“When you have that many white ping pong balls in the lottery, you’re going to reach in and just keep pulling out White families.” – Charter school founder
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Instead, Makris conducted extensive interviews with both advantaged and disadvantaged parents in Hoboken, since their perceptions of local schools are the most important factor in determining who applies where and the eventual racial and socioeconomic makeup of the schools.
True choice
Among Hoboken’s five district schools, Connors Elementary School stands out as the most segregated. In the 2012-13 school year, Connors was four percent white and 97 percent economically disadvantaged based on students’ eligibility for free or reduced price lunch.
Although Connors is the closest elementary school to the HHA main campus, where the majority of Hoboken’s low-income residents live, its segregated student body cannot be attributed to residential segregation alone.
As Makris notes, the neighborhood surrounding the HHA is full of condo buildings housing advantaged families, and Hoboken is a choice district, meaning parents can request any local elementary school regardless of where they live.
However, Hoboken Public Schools does not provide any buses for non-special education students, and most HHA residents do not own cars. Thus, writes Makris, while advantaged Hoboken parents can drive their students to whichever school they think will fit their child best, HHA parents favor Connors out of convenience (Makris refers to all Hoboken schools by pseudonym in her book, but their identities are easily identifiable based on statistics and descriptive context).
This is not to say that some HHA parents don’t also feel that Connors is the best fit for their children. Many current HHA parents attended Connors as children and told Makris, “I want [my children] to go where I went.” Years of communal history give HHA children at Connors social capital they would not enjoy at an uptown school like the Wallace School.
HHA parents interviewed by Makris also cited the strict discipline imposed at Connors as a point of attraction.
These same characteristics and culture are the reason almost no advantaged parents seek to send their kids to Connors. While professing to value diversity, upper middle class parents who lived near Connors told Makris they feared making their child the “guinea pig” at a school where they would not fit in.
Advantaged parents also told Makris they place significant stock in rankings and test scores, metrics in which Connors and other primary low-income schools underperform.
Instead of discipline, advantaged parents said they valued curriculum and opportunities for parental involvement, two areas where charter schools often excel. Some HHA parents told Makris they valued the same things, but still sent their kids to Connors because they had no way of getting their children to a more remote charter or district school.
“At a time when cities are appealing to wealthy families,” writes Makris, “instead of working to integrate their children and their social and cultural capital into the segregated urban public schools, school choice options allow them to maintain segregated schools by providing true choice only to the advantaged.”
Given these fundamental differences, Makris speculated that the district would be segregated even if no charter schools existed in town.
Rather than creating the segregation problem in Hoboken public schools, as the Hoboken Board of Education alleged in its lawsuit against HoLa, Makris said charter schools have the effect of “maintaining segregation that’s always been there to a certain extent and not allowing for the integration that could happen now.”
What keeps charters so white?
Unlike the Hoboken’s neighborhood district schools, which are categorized and calcified by decades of built-up reputation, charter schools arrive tabula rasa. Outside of sibling preference, they select students from throughout the community through a randomized lottery. In theory, Hoboken’s charter schools are perfectly placed to be the middle-class schools so desired by social scientists.
Indeed, the earliest classes of Hoboken Charter and Elysian Charter Schools approached the platonic ideal of balanced diversity. For the 1999-2000 school year, for example, Hoboken Charter School was 42 percent low-income students and 48 percent minority students.
In the fifteen years since, both schools have seen their student bodies become gradually whiter and more economically advantaged, though not through any dint of their organizers.
“What I found was the founders of the charter schools were very committed to creating diverse schools, and in some cases very disappointed that that vision had not come through,” said Makris.
One major factor limiting charter school’s reach within the HHA community is what Makris calls “charter confusion.”
“At a base level, people don’t understand what a charter school is,” she said. The key difference was that advantaged parents were clued into the charters by their social networks once their children reached school age, while low-income parents remained in the dark.
All three charter schools say they make concerted efforts to reach out to minority and low-income students. For example, HoLa representatives say they knock on doors in public and subsidized housing, put up posters in western Hoboken, and speak to parents outside of Hoboken preschool programs.
While not doubting the veracity of these statements, Makris said she found little to no evidence of exposure to charter school information among public housing residents.
Of 12 randomly-selected HHA parents interviewed by Makris, only one could name all three charter schools in Hoboken. Many believed – correctly – that charters were hard to get into and – incorrectly – that they charged tuition to attend. As a result, most of the parents interviewed have never applied to a charter school for their children.
Convenience remains a key issue. While HoLa is very close to the HHA campus, both Hoboken and Elysian Charter Schools are in the front of Hoboken closer to the waterfront, and Elysian recently announced that it will move to the extreme north end of Hoboken.
By contrast, most advantaged white parents apply to charter schools, even those that would otherwise happily send their child to a private or a district school, and most of those apply to all three charters.
While Makris found no evidence of rigging charter lotteries in favor of advantaged children, she noted that the schools’ use of sibling preferences inadvertently maintained segregation. At one charter school open house she attended, administrators said half of the spots in kindergarten in the upcoming lottery were already occupied by siblings of current students.
Low-income preference sought
This past December, HoLa sought to include a low-income preference in their lottery, though their application was not approved by the state in time for the 2015-16 school year.
While charter schools’ sibling preference policy amounts to an automatic entrance for younger siblings, the low income preference, as described by HoLa in January, would work by giving low-income students double the chances in the lottery.
With such a lopsided proportion of white advantaged parents seeking charter admission already, the weighting could end up being too little too late. At a time when HoLa is reporting waiting lists as high as 240 children for some classes, Makris encountered only a handful of HHA parents who had applied to the school or any other charter. Will doubling the chances of low income students have the desired effect if there are already quadruple as many advantaged students in the pool?
As one charter school founder told Makris, “When you have that many white ping pong balls in the lottery, you’re going to reach in and just keep pulling out white families.”
While she bemoaned the politicization of school choice in Hoboken, Makris said HoLa probably would not have pursued a low-income preference if not for the school board’s lawsuit accusing them of segregation.
In a convoluted way, said Makris, the school board’s lawsuit gives HoLa administrators cover to pursue a low-income preference that would have been a hard sell under normal circumstances.
“It takes something [like a lawsuit] to precipitate a major change because I’m sure the advantaged population is not going to be thrilled that they’re going to have less lottery balls,” said Makris.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.