The segregated states of the Deep South fought desegregation tooth-and-nail for years after the 1954 Brown decision. The white leadership did not want white children to go to school with black children, period. Their first response was to declare that they would never desegregate: never, never, never. As pressure from the federal government and the courts accelerated, southern officials found a new tactic to preserve segregation: school choice. School choice, they knew, would protect the status quo: White children would “choose” to stay in white schools, and black children would “choose” to stay in black schools. Eventually the federal courts struck down every school choice plan, recognizing that it was a blatant effort to avoid the letter and spirit of the Brown decision.
But here we are, eighty years later, with segregation on the rise and school choice in the ascendancy as its vehicle.
Southern states are adopting charters and vouchers because their long-frustrated effort to return to segregated schools is at last feasible. Not only is it feasible, in some circles, it is fashionable. Now the media celebrates all-black schools and ignores the fact that they are segregated. The subtext is: Look at this! An all-black school with high test scores! Isn’t that great?
Mississippi just passed legislation to establish vouchers for children with special needs and to permit more charters. The “vouchers for children with special needs” is a first step towards a broader voucher plan that grows to include low-income children; then to include children in schools that have low test scores; then to include more and more children, until everyone gets a voucher. The not-so-subtle joke is that the voucher is not large enough to pay the tuition at a first-rate private school, so most of the children will have a voucher to go to a religious school whose teachers are uncertified and whose resources are meager. Worse, the children with special needs abandon the legal protections that the public school guarantees when they leave the public system.
Other states, such as Ohio, Nevada, Indiana, Louisiana, Florida, and Maryland, have endorsed voucher plans (which are never called vouchers but some euphemism, like “opportunity scholarships.) The irony in these states is that their constitutions explicitly prohibits the diversion of public school funds to religious schools, yet legislators proclaim their fealty to constitutional principles even as they pass laws to send public money to religious schools. Vouchers for children with disabilities is the camel’s nose under the tent, to get the movement started.
The rise of vouchers is not a response to popular demand. Vouchers have been put to voters in several states, and every time they have been soundly defeated, even in red state Utah. The revival of the voucher movement is nothing more than ideology and politics taking charge of schooling. School choice is not the “civil rights issue of our time,” as its proponents claim; it is the predictable way to roll back civil rights in our time.
After 25 years of experimentation with charters and vouchers, we know that they do not get better results than public schools unless they choose their students and kick out the ones who don’t have high test scores and don’t adhere to strict requirements for obedience. Charters and vouchers drain money from public schools, which still educate the vast majority of children. Once school choice gets rooted in a state, the subject consumes all the energy of legislators. It is as if the 90% who attend real public schools became invisible.
Despite the absence of any advantages and the presence of scandals, frauds, and discrimination, more and more states are falling victim to the false promise of “school choice.” As one Florida superintendent explained it to me, charters enable parents to keep their children away from “those children.” Both charters and vouchers increase racial segregation, religious segregation, and economic segregation.
These trends are ominous for our democracy.
It’s an ALEC initiative. AZ legislature wants to give every student in AZ an “opportunity scholarship” for private school tuition. “Opportunity Scholarships” can also be used for home schooling. Some parents “home school” and save the money for their kid’s college. It’s a scam. An expose found that wealthy kids use these scholarships the most, as a down payment for expensive private school tuition. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/education/2016/02/23/state-money-helping-wealthier-arizona-kids-go-private-schools/80303730/
Great! We can have a fragmented system where no one gets enough funding and lawmakers can just wash their hands of public education completely.
If all they’re planning on doing is handing out vouchers to private contractors, politicians can all be replaced with a competent accounting firm, right?
I see a lot of potential for efficiency in these privatization plans. Let’s start at the top and privatize the statehouses.
The AZ legislature knows full well that the students designated for vouchers this coming year cannot afford private school tuition, about a $5,000 difference in value of voucher and tuition. Nor can they afford lunches and transportation. What it does is open the door the following year to all students without any qualifications and draws on available state funds for public schools. Gov. Ducey really likes the idea of attaching funds to each student as in New Orleans and now Nevada.
Vouchers are an easy fix for politicians, which is why they love them so much. Hand out a voucher, problem solved.
Let’s see how long Mississippi lawmakers can avoid addressing the actual public schools in the state, the schools that admit everyone and probably will serve 97% of children..
I’m betting 2 or 3 sessions, depending on how many lawsuits are filed. After this they can move to EXPANDING vouchers and charters, so it could be years before they re-visit public schools.
While I realize how cynical I sound here, it wasn’t hard to see this coming….
economic segregation drives everything else
Our society is become increasingly (and grossly) economically segregated, with “gated communities” the most obvious evidence.
In most cases, economic segregation also means racial segregation.
“Segway-gation”
They figured out a way
To bring back Jimmy Crowe
It’s based on hourly pay
And dictates where you go
should be “Crow’
The allegedly integrated states of the Northeast and Midwest bitterly fought and continue to fight desegregation efforts. The nation’s most influential and unapologetic supporter of school segregation arguably was not George Wallace or Bull Connor, but Boston school board member and city councilwoman Louise Day Hicks. Today, the South’s public schools are better integrated than schools throughout the North, particularly those in the New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas.
All of this segregation was created and is sustained not by choice, but by Louise Day Hicks’s “neighborhood schools.” The long-accepted idea that school segregation is an innocent byproduct of residential segregation is nothing more than a myth: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/ate11/faculty-profile/files/Highsmith&Erickson_AJE_2015.pdf. Today, in 2016, even in the core of the most liberal neighborhood of one of the nation’s most liberal cities, school integration is bitterly opposed and fought by whites: http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/11/18/city-postpones-controversial-upper-west-side-rezoning/
Charters don’t drain funding from public schools any more than magnet schools do, or suburban white-flight schools do–money follows students. As for charter performance, the four random-assignment studies conducted so far show that charters are outperforming district schools, and CREDO’s most recent study of urban charter schools also shows a clear edge for charter schools:
http://urbancharters.stanford.edu
http://economics.mit.edu/files/6335
Click to access charter_school_impacts.pdf
Click to access how_NYC_charter_schools_affect_achievement_sept2009.pdf
Click to access ednext20054_52.pdf
What’s ominous for democracy is determining school assignment by street address. Why are you focusing on a narrow subset of schools that you yourself like to say educate only a small number of students? Why aren’t you focusing on the much bigger problem, and using your influence to push for those meaningful and actionable solutions you wrote about in Chapter 31 of “Reign”? Why aren’t you calling for Rockville Centre to merge districts with Malverne, or for embarrassingly non-diverse PS 321 to open its doors to more at-risk kids?
Tim,
I grew up in the segregated South. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I didn’t say that schools in the north (or anyplace) today are segregated to the degree that they were in Houston during your childhood.
I said that schools today in the north are more segregated, and in the case of places like Long Island and Westchester, far more segregated, than schools in the south. The research on this is abundant and clear-cut: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/05/15/the-most-segregated-schools-may-not-be-in-the-states-youd-expect-2/
Note that integration efforts began to decline far before the existence and expansion of choice, in reponse to court orders/reversals. If the Koch brothers are trying to worsen segregation, they are wasting their time and money. The American people and their neighborhood schools were already several steps ahead of them.
In Florida Scott just signed a law that will allow students to attend ANY school in Florida, provided there is space. Originally designed to give star athletes any advantage to attend winning schools, it will cause major disruption and make planning more difficult. The law will discriminate against poor minority students that lack parent transportation. I foresee increased segregation as a result of this law, and increased charter takeovers of “failing” schools.
This law includes some minor tweaks to charter oversight. New charters will be required to disclose their financial past, and charters with consecutive “F” grades will be closed. There are some additional rules about higher education which is in the link below.http://www.pnj.com/story/news/2016/04/14/education-landscape-altered-dramatically/83037910/
Ed reform will eventually turn our public school systems into our health care system, and
our health care system is a disaster. It’s held together with duct tape and baling wire.
It’s almost like they’re MODELING it on the US health care system.
I have no idea why anyone would want to replicate that. None.
Now that choice has solved poverty in Mississippi, the lawmakers can take the rest of the year off.
Who knew it was this easy and all they had to do was issue payments to contractors?
Seems like they’re vastly over-staffed if that’s their only role.
Vouchers are utilized as handy dandy metaphors of empowerment, choice and freedom that widely appeals to the disenfranchised, economically depressed masses who gobble up the sound bytes and illusion brought to them by corporate America. (Have it YOUR way!).
Standardized testing is little more than an instrument to sort human capital for exploitation. Said test scores fit very nicely into the “voucher as freedom from public education mediocrity and/or tyranny” that reformers utilize as part of their propaganda. Part of the reframing of this debate needs to involve reclaiming authentic assessment that relies on a body of evidence to build a picture of the whole child.
A surgeon who insists on utilizing a thermometer as the sole instrument for an operation would be considered folly – a misuse of the intent and/or design of the instrument that will guarantee a fatal outcome. The thermometer is part of the tool kit which allows the surgeon to monitor well being during the patient’s procedure.
We educators need to use this and other analogies to reframe the debate about public ed as a human right and reclaim authentic assessment as a body of evidence that builds a portrait of the WHOLE child.
Who says Mississippi schools are segregated? In our high school of nearly 800 students, we have one White student and one Latina. Isn’t that integrated?
Of course in order to discipline students fairly according to race, they should both be suspended all the time no matter that they are good kids because we know that race is not a driving factor in student misconduct. So whenever we suspend a Black student, we must suspend the White student and the Latina student too. Even so, our suspension rate for Black students will still be nearly 100% of our suspensions, so we must be targeting the Black students disproportionately.