Choice and Civil Rights

Forgetting History, Facing Consequences

Gary Orfield

The idea of school choice has a tangled history. It is an idea that has taken many shapes, under the banner of the same hopeful word, one that seems to have a simple positive meaning but embodies many contradictory possibilities. Choice has a thousand different faces, some treacherous, some benign. It includes the creation of charter and magnet schools, voluntary transfer programs under state and federal legislation, choice-based desegregation plans, transfer rights under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and voucher programs. The distinctions and this history are important to understand because forgetting what has been learned about choice systems that failed means repeating mistakes and paying the costs. There is no reason to keep making that error.

The large-scale emergence of schools of choice is deeply related to the civil rights struggles of the second half of the twentieth century, on both the conservative and the liberal side. This book therefore brings civil rights back into the center of the debate about choice policies and alternatives, since both contemporary sides in the issue see offering better options to poor minority students as an essential goal of choice. The conclusions of a number of researchers suggest that although helping minority children is a central justification for choice proponents, ignoring the essential civil rights dimensions of choice plans risks compounding rather than remedying racial inequality.

WHAT IS EDUCATIONAL CHOICE?

School choice first arose as a major policy idea in southern states struggling over civil rights and was claimed by both liberals and conservatives. Much was learned through experiments in hundreds of communities about how different forms of choice worked. In recent decades, as the civil rights impulse has faded and its opponents have gained power, school choice has become increasingly separated from civil rights while being linked to different agendas. Yet the critical differences among types of choice have often been so obscured that few understand them. We need to sort out what we are talking about and connect the different plans to their consequences for students and our society. The stakes are high because educational inequality is intensifying while education is ever more critical in determining life chances, and the population of school-age children is becoming predominantly nonwhite.

Choice is a very seductive idea. In a society with a powerful commitment to individual freedom, religious pluralism, democratic government, and a market economy, the idea of choice has many positive resonances. We choose our religion, we choose our spouse, we choose many aspects of our lifestyle, we select what we buy, and we want to believe that we can choose our future. What could be more American than the freedom to choose your own school, or even to create a school? Freedom, creativity, markets, competition, attacks on old bureaucracies—all of these match elements of American tradition and the spirit of an era that's cynical about government, disappointed in social reforms, and dominated by business ideas. It hardly seems surprising that all of the five most recent presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, have embraced choice as a major solution for educational inequality and fostered it through public policy. Not coincidentally, none of them has paid much attention to issues of discrimination.

President Barack Obama's administration actively used the economic disaster of the Great Recession of 2008–10 to strongly pressure states by offering desperately needed funds in exchange for policy changes, including a great expansion of charter schools in what it called the Race to the Top. There was little discussion of the fact that public school choice really isn't an American tradition, that only a handful of states had made large commitments to charter schools before the Obama administration encouraged them to do so, or that the evidence of charters' educational benefits was very weak. Education policy since Ronald Reagan has been based largely on standards and accountability, sanctions, and market competition, setting aside earlier concerns about poverty and race.

What do the choice plans really mean? What do we know about the conditions under which choice provides clear benefits for the children and communities that most need them? Under what conditions is it likely to fail? What kinds of policies are needed to ensure racial equity and opportunity in choice programs? This book addresses all of these questions.

Our huge, diverse, and decentralized nation produces a wide variety of educational experiments and policies, whose impacts can be compared and from which important information can be gleaned. We have now had a half century of very different experiments with choice. Although it still plays a modest overall role in U.S. schools, it is growing rapidly and is heavily concentrated in districts with many of the nation's most disadvantaged students and most troubled public schools. Many choice advocates argue that it is the most important solution for the problems faced by millions of students in poor minority neighborhoods with segregated, high-poverty schools that fail to meet state and federal standards. Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom, in their book...