Growing Charter School Segregation and the Need for Integration in Light of Obama's Race to the Top Program

In 1954, the US Supreme Court announced its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Thurgood Marshall, who was later named to the Supreme Court in 1967, argued the case before the Court on behalf of the plaintiffs as a lawyer from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Growing evidence shows that segregation is worse in US public school systems today than it was in 1954 when Brown was decided. The Obama administration's latest attempt to reform public schooling is unlikely to remedy this problem as its well-known Race to the Top (RTT) initiative attempts to improve education in part by championing an increase in charter schooling, which is arguably the most segregated sector of schools in the US. This article contends that increasing the number of charter schools across the US per the Obama administration's RTT initiative is not the answer to closing the racial and economic achievement gap, at least not without significantly more accountability and oversight.