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Latest liberal assault on school reform involves playing race card Last week we reported how charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional public schools.

This return to the dark days of our segregated past supposedly should be of concern to us even if it is not to the thousands of black parents who willingly enroll their children in the charter schools.

That would make the children victims of racism perpetrated by their parents, an interesting new twist on an old outrage.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run. They compete for students with public schools. Teachers' unions hate them because they take jobs from unionized teachers.

There are legitimate concerns. The schools lack the same oversight as public schools and, on average, do not perform better than public schools.

But last year the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, upped the ante by injecting racism into the debate.

It released a national study calling charters a "civil rights failure" because they "stratify students by race, class, and possibly language."

The folks at UCLA argue that concentrating low-income minority kids leads to their failure. And so we need to dilute them with kids from the middle and upper class. This has led to calls for some form of mandatory diversification at charter schools.

The problem is that the lack of diversity is voluntary. The schools don't pick students. They must take them on a first-come, first-served basis. If there are more kids than slots, then a lottery is held.

..the reason some charters are almost completely black is that black parents are happy with that arrangement.

This leaves the civil-rights activists arguing that the parents don't know what is best for their own children. Can you say "liberal elitists"?

The notion that black kids have to be diluted with white kids also smacks of racism. [end excerpt]