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 No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, see choice as central to a solution: "Unless more schools are freed from the constraints of the traditional public school system, the racial gap in academic achievement will not significantly narrow, we suspect." They say that since middle-class white families can choose their schools through the housing market, shouldn't poor black and Latino families have the same choice? Yet, it turns out, they want to offer those families not a choice to attend the schools in affluent suburban neighborhoods but instead just some choice, which is usually another segregated, impoverished school under a different management system. They say, "Every urban school should become a charter." Civil rights advocates of choice often want a much broader kind of choice under very different rules.

Too often choice has been assumed to be good in and of itself. In markets there are, of course, good and bad choices. And there are markets with strong rules of the game, as well as those in which deregulation leads to abuses. All of us who have lived through the Great Recession know that unregulated markets can produce very bad outcomes. At a time when there is a severe shortage of public resources in most states and communities, when poverty and racial isolation have grown, and when the consequences of educational failure have increased, it is critical to examine the evidence on how well various forms of choice are working, and for whom. It turns out that there is much less evidence in favor of some leading forms of choice than one might suppose from all of the enthusiastic advocacy for them. if some forms of choice divert energy and money from more beneficial reforms or actually cause additional harm, we need to know about it.

Three Presidents Affirm Choice through Charters

One reason for the rapid expansion of choice, particularly in the form of charter schools, is broad bipartisan support. President Obama took the most assertive federal move in mandating this form of choice in states that had had few or no charters. While speaking at the National Urban League convention in 2009, he justified using emergency funds through his Race to the Top program to strongly press states to fund more charter schools.

Now, in some cases [when schools fail], that's going to mean restarting the school under different management as a charter school—as an independent public school formed by parents, teachers, and civic leaders who've got broad leeway to innovate. And some people don't like charter schools. They say, well, that's going to take away money from other public schools that also need support. Charter schools aren't a magic bullet, but I want to give states and school districts the chance to try new things. If a charter school works, then let's apply those lessons elsewhere. And if a charter school doesn't work, we'll hold it accountable; we'll shut it down.

So, no, I don't support all charter schools, but I do support good charter schools.... One school called Pickett went from just 14 percent of students being proficient in math to almost 70 percent. (Applause.) Now—and here's the kicker—at the same time academic performance improved, violence dropped by 80 percent—80 percent. And that's no coincidence. (Applause.)

Now, if Pickett can do it, every troubled school can do it. But that means we're going to have to shake some things up. Setting high standards, common standards, empowering students to meet them; partnering with our teachers to achieve excellence in the classroom; educating our children—all of them—to graduate ready for college, ready for a career, ready to make the most of their lives—none of this should be controversial.

President Obama was suggesting that charter schools were better than regular public schools, that they were a "new thing," that deep educational problems could be solved by taking control from public schools and giving public funds to semiprivate local organizations, that success could be spread to many other schools, and that there was some kind of serious accountability in place for charter schools. He highlighted a few charters that had reported large gains and characterized charter schools as local, community-based efforts, even though there are growing firms deeply involved in managing many of them. He said that he was giving states "the chance" to expand charters, but he was actually strongly and successfully pressuring them by making this a precondition for competing for urgently needed federal funds to avoid massive cutbacks.

Presidential support for charters has been bipartisan and enthusiastic for more than two decades. Obama's predecessor, President George W. Bush, praised choice and alternatives in his first State of the Union address, in 2001: "Schools will be given a reasonable chance to improve, and the support to do so. Yet if they don't, if they continue to fail, we must give parents and students different options: a better public school, a private school, tutoring, or a charter school. In the end, every child in a bad situation must be given a better choice, because when it comes to our children, failure is simply not an option." Bush was carrying on themes developed by President Bill Clinton in his last State of the Union Address, in which he highlighted his support for expanding charter schools as a key educational gain: "We know charter schools provide real public school choice. When I became President, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. Today, thanks to you, there are 1,700. I ask you now to help us meet our goal of 3,000 charter schools by next year." Choice outside the public school system has been promoted as a major educational solution by leaders of widely differing political backgrounds. This movement is not the product of research showing that choice produces educational gains; that is usually simply assumed, even though research is, at best, mixed. The debate is not about evidence—it is often about ideology.

No one who has looked at stagnant achievement scores and graduation rates or examined the reality of many public schools that serve communities of poor minority children can deny that these children deserve something far better than the schools they are assigned to. There are many public schools that have been officially branded as failures for years under No Child Left Behind and state standards. They daily confront the personal and community consequences of concentrated poverty and often find it very hard to attract and hold the qualified, experienced teachers these students badly need. Accountability policies have documented the students' poor outcomes, but threats, sanctions, and many other reform ideas have failed to work. The achievement gaps have been virtually unchanged in the high-stakes testing and charter school era.

The opportunity for students in these schools to enroll in much better schools would clearly be a benefit. Much of the publicity about charter schools assumes that they are the best way to provide such opportunities. Choice is attractive, usually does not cost much, and leaves those already satisfied with their schools undisturbed, just where they want to be. The politics and parent eagerness are not difficult to understand. Yet the questions remain: Do the common forms of choice help students learn more, graduate, go to college, become better citizens, or get good jobs? Are there better answers?

After half a century of unfulfilled pledges to fix the most troubled schools, we need to be sure that this is not another empty promise. Are we betting on something that has no net educational advantages and might even increase the already dramatic stratification of school systems that gives the best education to the most privileged families and segregated and inferior schools to the most disadvantaged? Markets and competition sound good, but a look at the kinds of grocery stores and health care services provided by the private market shows that competition has not provided quality in poor and minority communities equal to that available to middle-class neighborhoods, even with the substantial increases in their residents' buying power provided by food stamps and Medicaid. Does school competition work any better? What kinds of choice are most effective?

Varieties of Choice

Analysts often say the devil is in the details when talking about whether or not a policy will work. Choice programs can differ in several fundamental aspects, producing major differences in the kinds of opportunities offered, who gets the best choices, and what the overall outcomes are. Choice can be within one school district or among school districts. It can be within public schools or between public and private schools. It can be open to all equally on the basis of interest, or choice schools can have admissions requirements, making the schools the choosers. It can have a plan for diversity or ignore the issue of segregation. Management can be nonprofit or for-profit. The program can provide free public transportation to chosen schools or require the family to provide its own transportation. It can offer genuinely beneficial choices of much better schools or limit choices to weak receiving schools. There can be good educational provisions for language-minority and special education children or there can be none. It can include subsidized lunches for poor kids or not. The receiving schools can feature strong professional faculties or inexperienced and untrained newcomers. The choice system can have strong outreach and counseling for all parents or limit its market to particular groups or neighborhoods. Special and unique magnet curricula may be offered or not.

All the combinations and permutations of these features mean that there are a great many kinds of choice and that the kind of choice offered matters greatly. Choice approaches cover the gamut from those likely to offer few benefits to children in poor communities to programs that could be of great value. In many voluntary transfer programs, few families understand their options, few transfer, and some transfer to even weaker schools. In Boston, however, thousands of families of color register their children years in advance for a limited chance to attend a strong suburban school system. In many cities where students in schools that fail to meet standards have the right to transfer, only one or two in a hundred do so, in part because there are few schools that offer truly superior opportunities. Choice is only meaningful as an educational reform strategy when better options are available and when the parents who need them know about them and are supported in making their decisions.