In a special National Charter Schools Week Education Gadfly Show podcast, Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, joins Mike and David to discuss whether charters have impeded racial integration in American schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study investigating if intensive English learner programs benefit students.
Recommended content:
“70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, new research shows rise in school segregation” —Carrie Spector, Stanford Education
Tomas Monarrez, Brian Kisida, and Matthew M. Chingos. “The effect of charter schools on school segregation,” EdWorkingPaper No. 20-308, Annenberg Institute at Brown University (2020).
Camila Morales and Monica Mogollon, “The effects of a newcomer program on the academic achievement of English Learners,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (May 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at dbuck@fordhaminstitute.org.
The following transcript was created using AI software.
Michael Petrilli:
Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Today, Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, joins us to discuss whether charters have impeded racial integration in American schools. Then on the research minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating if intensive newcomer English programs benefit EL students. All this on the Education Gadfly show,
Hello. This is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Brian Kisida. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian Kisida:
Thank you, Mike, it's really great to join you.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, Brian is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri Go Mizzou, and we are here to talk about charter schools and integration here on National Charter School Week. Happy Charter School week to you, Brian. I'm not sure if you celebrate or not.
Brian Kisida:
Sure. I did know it was that, but I don't those things so much.
Michael Petrilli:
And also joining us as always, and a man who celebrates National charter school week every week of the year. I dunno how you'd celebrate charter school week. Exactly. I mean, other than writing about charter schools, talking about charter schools, which we're going to do, but I don't think there's any fasting or anything like that involved, unlike some other celebrations out there. Oh my goodness. Well, Brian, we are so excited to have you on the show. We invited you here because there's a new study on charter schools and racial integration that is getting a lot of attention study by Sean Reardon and his colleague. And we know you have done some great work on this subject as well, and we are really trying to make sense of it. Let's do that on Ed reform update.
I'll say speaking personally, I think this is a super important topic and then I quickly get into the weeds of the methodology and I get so confused because of how scholars have tried to figure out how to study this issue, which is not as straightforward as it may seem. So I want to get into all of that. But first, lemme just start with this is the way the press talks about this is they use the word segregation and it's always been for a long time, the case conservatism especially, don't love that word, except when we're talking about Jim Crow kind of jore segregation. That was a particular evil saying to black children, you may not go to the school because you were black. Then there's what happens when schools are not racially integrated, maybe because of housing policies. That too, though definitely had racist history.
There's also the white flight dynamic, and now we talk about school choice in charter schools where there's this question of whether we are not having schools as integrated as maybe we could have because of the choices that parents are making. And is it fair to call that segregation, especially if we're not talking about the choices of white parents, right? We're talking about the choices maybe of black parents of Hispanic parents. I don't remember seeing in the higher ed context, for example, people talking about HBCUs in the modern era being segregated, right? People take for granted that those are some fantastic schools that some African-Americans choose to enroll in and to have a proud history. And yet if the issue is that black families are choosing charter schools and therefore the traditional public schools are not as integrated as they might've otherwise been, we call that segregation. So that is my speech. You are welcome to comment on it. If you have any comments on that though, you don't have to.
Brian Kisida:
No, I definitely do. I mean, first I think arguing against terminology is somewhat a difficult task. It's really hard to change the vocabulary that people have agreed upon. But there is the incredible nuance as you point out between the idea of what historically has been called dejure segregation versus defacto segregation. So that means segregation. That was a matter of legal barriers to entry for minority populations versus people making choices. But I don't know. I've had some instances where we've tried to use other words like stratification or isolation or different words like that. And I think that it's very hard. I think some of this is media driven. Segregation is a term that can drive a lot of headlines, but I also want to, I think maybe push back on this characterization that we don't have segregation like we did in the past. I just don't think that charter schools are the source. So I mean, just to set the stage as somebody who studies education policy, if I'm at a dinner party and somebody asks me what's the biggest problem facing education today? I think the answer is segregation or whatever term we want to use, but it's like one of these problems that nobody really knows how to address. There's been all these different ways of coming at this problem, and it seems like politically there's no good solutions out there.
Michael Petrilli:
So Brian, let's get into just the background here. So, alright, some of these studies say that whatever we call this, let's call it to racial isolation has gotten worse or at least no better in recent decades. And then there's a secondary point we're going to get to, which is that charter schools are partly to blame. So first, just the overall trend. I mean, can that possibly be true that we haven't made much progress in decades when it comes to giving kids access to integrated school environments?
Brian Kisida:
So that narrative is a little bit dependent on which research study you look and how you measure segregation. But I would say that the broad best way to characterize that literature is that segregation for about the last 20 years has been flat or declining. And this has been shown in numerous studies with the exception of some of the less good studies that use these poor measures that don't actually take into account the fact that the United States just has an increasingly diverse population. So our schools tend to have more traditionally underserved minority populations. But once you account for that, the trends are largely flat. And that's confirmed and work that I've done and work that other people have done. Now with regards to this latest report by Owens and Rearden, they do find that segregation is increasing by looking at particular samples. So in some cases, they're looking at the hundred largest school districts, and in some cases they're looking at, I think somewhere around 500 school districts that tend to enroll large populations of black students. And they're finding an increase there. But by and large, if we look at all 15,000 school districts in the country, we don't find those trends. So that's not to say that it's not happening, it just seems that it's happening in particular places.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, no, that's interesting. I could imagine this is just a hypothesis that you may see maybe racial isolation increasing in the urban core districts that tend to be the big districts, but maybe decreasing in the suburbs as the suburbs become more diverse. And if you don't have bunch of those suburban districts in the sample, then you're going to miss that. And you've mentioned the diversity, I mean, way back when this was really a white black issue because the population of Hispanic and Asian kids was tiny, at least in most places. Now we've got this huge group of Hispanic kids and a growing group of Asian kids. So you're saying that some studies try to deal with that and some just do not.
Brian Kisida:
Right? I mean, not to point fingers, but I will mean the biggest headlines I tend to see come with the most sensational applies findings. And most of those have come out of the UCLA's civil rights project, which looks at something like, what's the proportion of schools that are 90% non-white or something like that, which we know is something that's increasing just because of demographic trends in the United States. And so that's not an appropriate measure to look at if we want to really understand, we have to take that into account. Owens and Rearden do use a good normalized measure, as have we in our research. And when you use that, you don't find striking increases in the aggregate, but it seems like they're finding these types of increases in particular large districts.
Michael Petrilli:
So now in your study and in the Rearden one, there are these findings around charter schools. So just help me try to understand what we're even looking at. Is it if there were some world where we didn't have a charter school movement, here's what things would look like versus the world we live in where we do have charter schools? Is that the way to think about it?
Brian Kisida:
Yeah, I mean, the research that I did with Tomas Menez and met Shingo at the Urban Institute, so we're doing a causal analysis. So we're looking at 20 years of data and we're looking when charter schools open, what the effect of that has on these measures of the population. And when we look at this in the aggregate, our basic takeaway is yes, there is an increase in segregation, but it's quite small. So in our national study, the presence of charters has created a 0.72 percentage point increase in segregation. So that's something that I think in terms of percentage points, that doesn't sound like a lot. If we sort of talk about that in terms of percent change, which is a number that can sometimes be misleading, we find that there's a 6% increase in segregation. And then if you look at Owens and Rearden finding effects that are two or three times larger than ours, and so they're expressing those in some cases as I think a 40% increase, which is based off of about a three percentage point increase. But again, that's looking at a small slice of the school districts in the country. But I guess either way that you look at it, it's somewhere between a one to three percentage point increase.
Michael Petrilli:
And do we know how much of this is driven by parents of color choosing charter schools versus white parents choosing charter schools?
Brian Kisida:
That's a really difficult question to answer because these studies are using aggregate data. So they're looking at the share of students of different ethnic backgrounds in the district. They're not tracking individual students. And this is actually kind of one of the things that makes this a difficult thing to research because we don't really know that a student's going from this public school to this charter school. We're just looking at how those compositions are changing over time. And in fact, one of the sort of things that we impact in our study is this idea of where you measure segregation at what geographic unit you use matters a lot. So if we just look at the school district as the unit of analysis similar to Owens and Rearden, we find a larger effect. Again, that's where we find the 6% increase or the 0.72 percentage point increase.
But if we increase that geographic area to include metro areas which contain numbers of school districts, the effect is smaller. And when we disaggregate that between the district effect and the within district effect, we actually find that charter schools have an integrating force because students are moving from one district that's more racially isolated to a district that's less. And in our analysis, that actually erases about half of the effect that we see in terms of charter school segregation. So the geography matters, and of course, I think if we were doing this just as a school district exercise, it wouldn't matter to look at school districts because that is the appropriate unit of analysis when it comes to charter schools. The point is that students can travel across district lines. The vast majority of segregation in the United States is between districts, not within districts. The basic, and this is kind of what I was getting at when I was trying to hold onto the idea that there is a such thing still as deju segregation, legal segregation, and it is actually school attendance boundaries and school district lines, because those are legal barriers to integration that you're not allowed to cross unless you go to a charter school or you break the law, or in some places where there may be interdistrict choice.
Michael Petrilli:
David, I'm sorry, I have not let you in here. What's on your mind?
David Griffith:
I'm curious to get Brian's perspective. You characterize, you started by characterizing segregation, for lack of a better word, as kind of the biggest problem in American education today. I don't know if I agree to be honest with you, but let's just go with that. I'm curious to know what you think, if anything we could do about it, right? Is there some mechanism that I haven't thought about? I know we have diversified design charters, we have weighted lotteries, we have all these things that kind of sound good in principle, and then you try them and it doesn't really seem like anything happens, at least at scale. I don't know. Is there a solution we haven't thought of?
Brian Kisida:
I don't know that there is. I mean, this is kind of, there's the famous Norman Rockwell painting, the problem we all live with, I think, and a lot of people have adopted that sort of phrase to talk about segregation in America. But I think it's better articulated as the problem we all ignore because it's this, it does kind of strike me as one of the largest hypocrisies in education policy attempts to integrate even through some sort of voluntary inter or interdistrict choice are often fought by suburban parents that don't want to open up their school to poor students or minority students, or they don't want their students to be rezoned somewhere else. And typically these tend to be parents that we would describe as left-leaning liberals who would not in agreement if we talked about the drastic issue of segregation and how important it is. But when the rubber meets the road, they're not willing to actually make the changes necessary. So it seems to be this politically impossible problem in terms of solving it that way. I do think there's other ways to address the problems that that segregation creates, but I don't know if there's much we can do to affect segregation itself through policy.
Michael Petrilli:
Well, and the history here is important. Charter schools came to life in the early 1990s. This was after a period when their big urban school districts were very much in decline, largely because of white flight and then middle class black flight disinvestment. They were kind of in this death spiral and nobody knew how to fix 'em. I mean, there were various ways of reform that weren't working. And so there was a lot of energy around doing something to start fresh and to give poor families, especially black families, a chance immediately to get something better. And so the charter school movement was born, and we quickly saw these, so-called No Excuses Schools, the kipps of the world, which basically said, look, if we are not going to bind a way to get rid of these schools with concentrated poverty and racial concentration, then we're going to figure out a way to make them work effectively.
And they did. And that seems to be a thorn in the side of some of these other folks all these years later. And look, I mean, I get it. If you really believe that the only answer is to integrate the schools, then I guess you see charter schools as a sideshow or something that is really raising questions about that strategy. But look, we know how to build charter schools, including great charter schools, including great charter schools that are high poverty and that serve all black and Hispanic kids. What you said earlier, Brian, I think is right. We don't know how to integrate our schools or at least come up with a strategy that's politically feasible.
Brian Kisida:
Well, not only that, we fight it right, not, but, so let me give you an example close to home, but this happens all over the country. So the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis executed 4,500 residency investigations over the past five years. And so they refer to this as educational larceny. So these are parents who are lying about their address to get into a better school and you go to jail.
Michael Petrilli:
Well, we will have to leave it there on that somber note, Brian Kisida at the University of Missouri, thank you so much for joining us. Do check out his study. We'll include it in the show notes. Hope you come back on the show sometime soon, Brian.
Brian Kisida:
Thank you.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern:
Thank you, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
Happy National Charter Schools week.
Amber Northern:
Ah, to you too.
Michael Petrilli:
You may not know about it because I'm not sure you can really celebrate there in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Sorry about that,
Amber Northern:
Mike. You are right about that. You are right about that.
Michael Petrilli:
I know you all are trying. You're trying with those, what do you call them, those charter like schools? We
Amber Northern:
Call them lab schools, but we do not put lab schools in charters in the same sentence, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
Oh, is that right? I'm not sure I knew that. I think I said to a reporter recently. Oh, lab schools, they're basically charter schools sort
Amber Northern:
Of. No, no, they're not. They are not between school districts and community colleges or four year universities. And we'll be putting that in Dan, do not. Do not edit that part out. Yes.
Michael Petrilli:
Sorry. Dr. Northern member of the Virginia Board of Education. Okay. Well, what you got for us on the research front,
Amber Northern:
We have a new study that examines the effect of an intensive English program on the ELA and math academic achievement of newly arrived English learners looking at tracking them for up to three years after they enter this intensive English program. So again, the program targets EL students whose initial English proficiency is deemed too low even to participate in mainstream ESL services. They offer these students services in a sheltered environment off of their main campus for a minimum of six weeks up to one year, where they're taught foundational English language and literacy skills, such as learning the alphabet, basic English vocabulary, and tech structure. Core subjects such as math and science are also taught, but to a much lesser extent as a focus is on learning the English language rather than on grade level content. Afterwards. These kids transition to mainstream ESL instruction in their neighborhood school, which is typically a combination of push in or pull out services combined with English only core content classes.
So we've got a regression discontinuity design here. They're comparing outcomes of kids whose initial English proficiency scores on the wida, which is a ELL assessment that most folks have heard of. They fall within a small band around the eligibility cutoff for this intense program. So they therefore have, the kids have comparable initial English language skills, but they otherwise receive different types of English language development supports. So you've got these EL kids who barely missed the cutoff for the newcomer program receiving this mainstream ESL support from their district. And then you've got this intensive program, so just kids falling on the margins of the cutoff. They use individual level data on the universe of kids who were screened for EL classification in grades three through eight, 2009 to 2019. They attended public schools in a large urban district in Georgia. That district serves a county that is residents to nearly 80% of the refugees who have resettled in Georgia.
Michael Petrilli:
Oh, interesting. So you say county, so maybe not. Atlanta
Amber Northern:
Serves a county that is residents to 80% of refugees. The initial sample consists over 7,000 kids of whom they have data on WIDA scores, they've got demographics, got refugee status, and they're looking primarily at their end of grade ELA and math scores at grades three through eight. Alright, what'd they find? Small and insignificant effects in the short term, which is just a year out on students' ELA scores, however, big differences by grade levels. So eligible students in the younger grades, which is three through five, had higher ELA test scores. In the short term, it's about 0.20 to almost 0.4, 0.39 standard deviations compared to the ineligible kids. They also found suggestive evidence of similar impacts on math, but the math weren't as stable. Those math results changed based on the model they were using. On the other hand, the middle school kids saw a decline in ELA and math scores 0.21, up to 0.25 standard deviations in the short term, and now they're going to go looking long term up to three years out.
And then they find that those patterns are largely panning out in the long term. So the short term gains among the younger kids remain stable over time. So they continued to score up to 0.38 standard deviations higher in ELA. Three years after that initial program started, similar programs in math and those declines in test scores, we saw who in the middle school. So grades six through seven, those kids continued on a downward trajectory by the second year. So two years after program eligibility students in the newcomer program and the middle school grades experienced a 0.56 decline in ELA end course or grade scores compared to the control kids. So they had this big discussion on the grade of first exposure to this newcomer program is a key factor upon how these trajectories evolved. But one last thing, and I thought this was interesting, these positive persistent effects that we saw on ELA were accompanied by negative impacts on English language proficiency. So they say, okay, one explanation maybe is that what they're measuring on the English proficiency test is different than they're measuring on the ELA end of grade test because English proficiency is a lot about speaking and listening, but they're like, well, maybe that's more prone to be influenced by linguistic isolation from their English speaking peers. Because we're recall that these program kids have up to a year isolated from these core content classes in their general education classes. So that's what I've got.
Michael Petrilli:
Interesting. I guess I'm surprised though that I would think that usually in my head I'd say, well, the younger kids, we should just let them sink or swim and they'll figure it out and the older kids would need more help learning the language first and yet that's the opposite of what we found here. Right?
Amber Northern:
It is it,
Michael Petrilli:
What do you think about that, David?
David Griffith:
Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm also thinking about the counterfactual here, right? If you just miss a year of math in middle school, I don't know, maybe it means more right than it does if you miss second grade math, whatever that is. I don't know. The sort of content stuff is more fluid at the elementary level, so maybe that's part of it. But I hear what you're saying, Mike. I mean, Amber is the sense that all these kids, I don't know that they come into elementary school or middle school with kind of similarly low English skills, at least at the start, or do we think these are different populations?
Amber Northern:
No, from what they gathered, it was very similar what they're coming in to start with. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, you think that, gosh, by the time you get middle school, maybe it's just part of, it's just too late if you don't know the language. I don't know. It's confusing.
Michael Petrilli:
And that the counterfactual wasn't just, I guess I should be careful with my sink or swim. Right? They were still getting ESL in the counterfactual,
Amber Northern:
Right? In their district. But it wasn't as intensely focused on learning the language as this was.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. And it wasn't as isolated as this other one
Amber Northern:
Was. Right. That's right.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, well, hey, I'm glad we're studying this stuff. This is obviously a big issue all over the country right now as we have this wave of migrant kids coming in and many of them with very low English proficiency. So good stuff. Even if it makes us scratch our heads.
Amber Northern:
Yes. And especially, I mean the English proficiency, the speaking and listening, I thought, okay, well maybe that could be it. But that was called a head scratcher too, right? The proficiency scores went down. Anyhow, yeah, we need some more black studies, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
We want to understand what the heck is going
Amber Northern:
On going on.
Michael Petrilli:
All right, good. Well, thank you, Amber. Good stuff. That is all the time. We've got Ford this week though, so until next week,
David Griffith:
I'm David Griffin.
Michael Petrilli:
And I'm Mike Peti at the Thomas b Fordham Institute. Signing off
#920: Integration and charter schools, with Brian Kisida