Writing in last week’s Boston Phoenix, Chris Faraone tees up some of the controversies surrounding charter schools in Boston. One big beef of charter critics that he lays out in the piece, which is provocatively titled “Boston Public-School Apartheid?”, is that high-performing charter elementary schools and middle schools send many of their students on to private secondary schools (undoubtedly, though unstated, with the help of hefty scholarships, since most of these students come from low-income families). Almost none of the graduates of schools like Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, a Mission Hill middle school, or the Edward W. Brooke Charter School, a K-8 school in Roslindale, enroll in Boston’s regular district high schools. This is a pattern, writes Faraone, that district school administrators and teachers say is “exacerbating” the woes of the beleaguered city school system by steering better students away from its schools. 

This, apparently, is one dimension of the “apartheid” charter schools are introducing into Boston schools, an odd choice of terms given the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic make-up of the student bodies at charter schools charged with this offense. 

As the article acknowledges, many of the city’s regular district high schools are educational basket cases. Few families with other options would choose to send their own children to one of these schools — and, no doubt, this is true for most of the district teachers and administrators lobbing grenades at charter schools. Those of greater means regularly make the same decision as these charter-school families to steer clear of urban school systems, but they do so by buying their way into affluent suburbs with good schools. Calling out low-income families who don’t have the means to move to Brookline for wanting the best education possible for their children seems like a tough line of argument to pursue for anyone claiming to care about inequities in US education.