Governing for Whom? The Link Between Representative Governance and Segregation in North Carolina’s Charter Schools

Abstract

Market-based reforms have become pervasive in the public sector, generating a vigorous debate about whether they promote public goals like effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. Nonprofit organizations are not only instrumental in the market for public services but also play important representative roles in democratic society. This article uses Guo and Musso’s theory of representative governance to examine how representation and participation in nonprofit governance influence representational outcomes in marketized environments. Leveraging the conflicting interests that nonprofit charter schools face in a geographic region marked by segregation, this article examines whether a nonprofit charter school’s representative capacity improves representational outcomes. Findings suggest that, on average, charter schools in the sample employed few mechanisms to increase representative capacity and that lower descriptive representation was linked to segregating outcomes rather than representational outcomes.