A ccording to the Washington Post, a new study from two professors at Stanford University and the University of Southern California finds that segregation in schools is on the rise, and school choice is to blame. Quite a damning accusation, except that it’s not true.

To begin, there are discrepancies in these newly reported statistics on the supposed increase in segregation, ranging from 25 percent to over one-third, depending on who’s citing the study and when. The researchers, Sean Reardon and Ann Owens, published their conclusions earlier this month to commemorate the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education but have yet to release an official paper.

Regardless, the actual story of integration in American schools is far more complicated than the media outcry suggests. In the past decade the number of white students has dropped by roughly 3 million, Hispanic enrollment has increased, and black enrollment has stagnated. As a result, simple demographics have led to an increase in the number of majority-minority schools. When analysts consider such broader trends, they find that segregation in American schools has actually been flat or in a slight decline.

Then there’s the more specific accusation leveled at school choice. The official announcement of this new (but unpublished) research claims that in “districts where the charter sector expanded most rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s, segregation grew the most.”

Because the full report has yet to be released, it’s frankly unclear if this statement is meant to be causal — that is, if the researchers are claiming the charter schools caused the increase in segregation. Was racial isolation increasing or decreasing in big districts before the charters’ arrival? Are the worst traditional public schools concentrated in the most racially isolated neighborhoods and so parents there are more likely to opt into charter schools?

Responsible observers should want convincing answers to these questions. Nonetheless, the media implied causation where it’s not clear that it exists, and they paint charter schools as villains.

We don’t have to rely on this eyebrow-raising unpublished analysis. In another rigorous study, when researchers zoomed out to consider entire metropolitan areas (not just individual districts), they found that while charters increase segregation between schools in a district, they actually “improve integration between school district jurisdictions, where much of the racial segregation exists.” After careful analysis, the authors conclude that charters have increased segregation in the U.S. by less than 1 percent. There’s causation, but it’s negligible.

Not to be outdone, Vox goes so far as to blame white families for the segregating effects of charters — another entirely unsubstantiated claim. In reality, if charter schools do increase segregation slightly, it’s mostly due to the choices of black and Hispanic families. Indeed, researchers have found that charters in urban districts cause segregation precisely because “they are more likely to have missions targeted at helping disadvantaged students.”

Black and Hispanic families see the educational mediocrity, behavioral chaos, calcified bureaucracies, and general malaise of traditional public education and send their kids elsewhere.

Let’s not pretend that allowing black families to choose of their own free will black-majority charter schools — which are more likely to hire black staff — is the same as de jure segregationist policies and housing-market prohibitions that kept schools separate and unequal. We don’t call it “segregation” when black families choose historically black colleges and universities and neither should we when those same families rightly choose better schools for their children at the K–12 level.

Indeed, it takes real effort to spin charters as the bad guys, given that school-district boundaries are the overwhelming cause of school segregation — an actual, real, holdover, systemically racist policy from redlining and the Jim Crow era. The media focus on small blips of supposed increases of segregation due to the charter sector while ignoring the vast majority of segregation that exists in the public-education sector — which is much more analogous to de jure segregation because parents are literally trapped in those schools by law. Focusing our ire at charter schools is akin to fixing a leaky faucet while the ocean liner sinks.

These unfounded accusations aren’t harmless, either. When running for president, Bernie Sanders hawked a similar narrative about charter schools in an effort to stymie the sector. Such misinformation trafficked through mediocre research aids the political effort to stifle the growth of charter schools.

Truly, charter schools are one of the few bright spots in the American educational landscape. The latest and most up-to-date summary of the research into their academic impacts, from Blueprint Labs at the MIT Department of Economics, is clear:

Existing evidence shows that charter schools can improve academic achievement and longer-term outcomes like four-year college enrollment, particularly among lower-performing students, non-white students, low-income students, and students with disabilities. [Emphasis added]

By the Left’s own definition, that’s an “anti-racist” policy. Indeed, charter schools are perhaps the single most promising and scalable policy to shrink the persistent achievement gap between white and black students. Public-school apologists who level attacks on charters for supposedly resegregating K–12 education should consider that maybe they’re the bad guys in this story line.