Moments before denying the second of three applications from proposed public charter schools last July, Metro Nashville Public Schools District 5 school board member Christiane Buggs repeated a myth about the students charters serve.Buggs claimed charters aren’t looking to serve African American students in North Nashville.“When we look at our choice schools across Nashville, most of them do not come from low-income housing projects, they don’t come from low SES (socioeconomic status) families, they more often than not come from middle-class families,” said Buggs in the July meeting.A new charter dashboard launched by the Tennessee Comptroller this week will help parents navigate through misinformation of the type Buggs presented. The dashboard allows users to research the racial demographics and enrollment numbers of districts that offer public charter schools, and the specific info for each school.For Metro-Nashville Public Schools, the Comptroller’s dashboard shows less than 14 percent of public charter schools are white, and the vast majority (83.5 percent) are either African American or Hispanic.¶
Statewide charters are serving an even higher percentage of students of color.According to the Comptroller’s dashboard, nearly 69 percent of the state’s more than 41 thousand public charter school students are African American, and more than 22 percent are Hispanic. Less than 7 percent are white.¶
The percentage of white students attending public charter schools is even less prominent in the state’s largest school district.According to the Comptroller’s dashboard, less than 1 percent of the public charter school students in Memphis-Shelby County Schools are white. More than 75 percent of the district’s public charter school students are African American and nearly 21 percent are Hispanic.¶
The dashboard is the latest in a series of publications and resources the Comptroller is creating to inform the public about public charter schools in Tennessee. Future publications will research charter applications, the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, and the state-run Achievement School District.¶
