In the previous articles about online charters, I have outlined reasons why these schools can be detrimental to black home schooling families, namely the proliferation of black families who are again becoming totally reliant upon schools to teach their children as opposed to parents taking an active role in their own children's education, the easy opportunity for unequal resource allocation, and the absence of these schools to provide a balanced and fair black and multicultural education, a factor that weighs heavily in the reasons black families decide to home school in the first place.
Additionally, another primary reason black families decide to home school is because they are tired of their children facing racism of varying sorts and degrees by some school systems, districts, administrators and teachers. Racism, in whatever form, from the lack of advanced placement classes in urban schools to the increased chances of black children to be labeled remedial or ADD/ ADHD, is pushing black parents to educate their children at home, where they are free to learn without the negative influences of educational biases and racist attitudes about their ability to learn.
While these parents are abandoning brick and mortar public schools, online charter schools are waiting in the wings to bring these families back into the fold of public education in order not to lose precious government funding. Racism along with the aforementioned factors, however, can become a negative factor in online charter schools despite these schools being in a virtual environment.
It is important to note that virtual educational environments are not insusceptible to racism. Although virtual teachers and administrators will not have direct personal access with students, per se, they will know children's names and also the names of their parents. In effect, if a child is determined to be black by his name or his parents' name, how differently will that child be treated? Recent research by University of Florida economist David Figlio shows children with black sounding names are more apt to do poorly in school, especially in reading and math, not because their names make them inherently less smart, but because along with their name comes a whole host of racist attitudes about their ability to excel in school and bad impressions of black parents who would give their children black sounding names. How, then, will racism factor into online charter schools? Although there is no research about racism in online charter schools specifically, one must not throw this concern out entirely.
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