School Choice and the Future of American Democracy

2 | Leaving the Public Schools Behind

2 | Leaving the Public Schools Behind Suppose at some point, for whatever reason, the public schools deteriorate. Thereupon, increasing numbers of quality -education-conscious parents will send their children to private schools. This “exit” may occasion some impulse toward an improvement of the public schools: but here again this impulse is far less signi‹cant than the loss to the public schools of those member-customers who would be most motivated and determined to put up a ‹ght against the deterioration if they did not have the alternative of the private schools. —Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty1 In the beginning, school choice was mostly about race. In spite of the justi‹cations of choice on ef‹ciency grounds made by Milton Friedman, early school choice policies were designed either to perpetuate racial segregation or to try to overcome it. In the case of providing parents with public funds to send their children to private schools, it was a case of Southern school districts and state legislatures attempting to subvert the U.S. Supreme Court in its efforts to desegregate the public schools. In Virginia , for example, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors refused in 1959 to fund its public schools. Instead, a private foundation was set up to provide white children with state- and county-funded tuition grants to attend private schools. The Supreme Court of the United States overturned this early voucher program, instead voicing its impatience with such shenanigans.2 Today, however, private voucher programs are usually targeted at inner city school districts and are presented as options for parents of color, given serious issues with the academic quality of the city public schools. Vouchers work like tickets paid for by the state, redeemable for tuition at participating schools, including private religious and nonreligious ones. It is important to note that voucher programs need not exclude public schools from the choice mix. In fact, one of the original publicly funded voucher programs—the Ohio Pilot Scholarship Program—allowed public schools in ‹fteen neighboring school districts to accept the vouchers of 21 Cleveland’s public school students. No public schools in these wealthier districts with smaller minority student populations chose to accept vouchers . School of‹cials argued that the vouchers—and extra offers of tuition money from the state—were insuf‹cient reimbursement for the costs involved.3 The result of the exclusion of suburban public and private schools—whether by choice or a poor incentive structure—is that vouchers are an inner city thing, unlikely to offer much hope of ending the economic isolation of inner city children.4 In the case of early efforts at establishing school choice within a public system, the goal was to try to reverse—or at least stem—the ›ight of white middle-class parents to suburban school systems. The tool for this ambitious goal was the magnet school, a public school designed around a particular theme, such as science or the arts, that parents could choose instead of their assigned neighborhood school. Magnet schools are still around, and the very best are as good as any school, public or private. In general, however, they have not produced racial integration or stemmed the recent trend toward resegregation in public education. My point is not to claim that private or public choice programs are necessarily going to exacerbate or improve racial segregation in the United States, but to point out that social, racial, ethnic, and economic contexts have always been closely connected to providing choices in education and will likely continue to do so in the future. School choice policies are going to be superimposed on real communities, whose characteristics may, in part, determine the bene‹cial and destructive outcomes for those communities . In addition, speci‹c choice policies are very different from each other, in their histories, legacies, and potential for bene‹cial or destructive repercussions. Few debates in education policy today are as controversial as the question of whether students who enroll in private schools with the aid of publicly funded vouchers are better off for it. Studies of the original two public voucher programs, in Cleveland and Milwaukee, found insuf‹cient evidence to determine that voucher programs were having any bene‹cial effects for their enrollees.5 The strongest statement in support of vouchers comes from a study of a privately funded voucher program in New York City.6 The authors of the study concluded that African American children demonstrated signi‹cant achievement gains compared to program applicants...