For the early years of North Carolina's charter school program, the racial imbalance in charter schools reflects choices made by both black and white families. Studying fourth through eighth graders who switched into the charter school sector, Bifulco and Ladd (2007, see table 2) documented that students from each racial group gravitated to charter schools containing more of their own group than the school they were leaving. Black students moved out of traditional public schools that were on average 53 percent black to charter schools that averaged 72 percent black; white choosers left schools that were on average 28 percent black in favor of schools that averaged less than 18 percent black. Conditional logit models designed to infer the preferences of charter school choosers confirmed that black and white parents had very different preferences with respect to a school's racial composition. In particular, the preferred mix for black parents was a school that was between 40 and 60 percent black, while the preferred mix for white parents was 20 percent black. Not surprisingly, these preferences are often incompatible with racial balance. Even though black parents might prefer racially balanced schools, the fact that white parents prefer schools with far lower proportions of black students sets up a tipping point. Once a school becomes “too black,” it becomes almost all black as white parents avoid it.