goal of this book is to document the ways in which choice policies are playing out in a variety of contemporary communities and to relate those experiences and other research on choice and its history to basic questions of civil rights and the creation of real opportunities for black and Latino students locked into inferior, segregated schools, often in declining districts. The short answer is that for the dominant forms of choice at the center of the debate for the past three decades—charters and vouchers—there is no convincing evidence that color-blind choice makes any significant difference in student achievement. The currently dominant ideology of choice holds that any kind of choice is better than regular public schools by definition and considers school outcomes almost exclusively in terms of test scores. But this same ideology leads many away from looking at the high segregation of our schools and toward ignoring the increasingly powerful evidence of its educational damage for all students.
This book explores why choice policies have evolved as they have and whether choice provides access to more-diverse schools, with better-prepared classmates and teachers, schools that better reflect and prepare students for the highly diverse society in which they will live and work as adults. Since the 1970s this issue has been largely ignored in the debate over choice. As we forgot the lessons of the civil rights era, we tended to lose sight of its goals as well. This book puts them front and center.
Chapter 2 explores the basic arguments about choice both in market theory and in the very different integration theory, which derives from the civil rights experience. Both aim at the same goal, equalizing opportunity for the most-disadvantaged students, but their arguments have fundamentally different value and fact premises. This analysis provides a context for the case studies that follow.
The third chapter, by Erica Frankenberg, takes up a central challenge posed by the Supreme Court's major decision on voluntary desegregation programs in the 2007 Parents Involved case: because the court has prohibited the most common policies for preventing segregation in choice programs, must communities accept the resegregation of their schools that follows the dissolution of integration plans? Since policies using other variables, such as social class, in an indirect way to foster racial diversity have had limited success, this prohibition was a clear threat to that goal, and many districts overinterpreted the decision and assumed that they could not do anything that would work. But the Supreme Court majority actually said that school integration was still a compelling interest and explicitly authorized school systems to take some positive actions that were not about assigning individual students, such as redrawing attendance boundaries. Berkeley, a diverse district that has pursued integration for half a century, used computers to study and classify hundreds of mini-neighborhoods across the city by race as an important element in assigning students to schools. The policy—which focuses on neighborhoods, not individual students—worked and was upheld by the courts. It is an important example for other districts.
The way a community understands choice relates to its history and policies. In chapter 4, Barbara Shircliffe and Jennifer Morley's study of the Hillsborough County school district (including metropolitan Tampa, Florida) explores the impact of a long history of city-suburban desegregation on the way choice programs are framed. Because of that history—including the fact that the district is county-wide, encompassing cities and suburbs—Hillsborough possesses understanding and experiences that may help maintain some diversity even under a color-blind choice policy. This has been most difficult in Tampa, where substantial resegregation has occurred.
This book also analyzes the impacts of the two largest forms of choice now in operation in American schools—magnet schools and charter schools. In the decades since the civil rights era, as Genevieve Siegel-Hawley and Erica Frankenberg explain in chapter 5, the original goals of magnets have been modified and sometimes lost as the law and politics have changed. Yet they still constitute the nation's largest system of school choice, an important and popular option that national policy debates and funding priorities have nonetheless largely neglected for decades, not because of evidence that private and charter schools are better but because of the contemporary antagonism toward anything that is part of a public school system or has a union.
Since charter schools have been the most important manifestation of choice in the past two decades and have received far more governmental and private support than any other form, this book looks at them in three major chapters. Chapter 6, also by Frankenberg and Siegel-Hawley, shows how the lack of meaningful civil rights policies has made charter schools even more segregated than regular public schools, particularly for black students, and how, in spite of many claims to the contrary by the charter school movement and its advocates, there is no convincing evidence of any net educational advantage from charter schools. Though there are some outstanding charter schools that perform better than the average public school, there are more that perform worse, and, on average, there appears to be no significant difference in test scores between charter and public schools. Additionally, charter school research has virtually ignored many of the impacts of more-diverse schools. The study in chapter 7, by Myron Orfield, Baris Gumus-Dawes, and Thomas Luce, addresses the evolution of the charter school movement where it began, in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Chapter 8, by the same authors, looks at the rapid charterization of schools in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina virtually wiped out the public school system there and conservatives in Washington DC and Baton Rouge took the opportunity to implement a massive experiment, using the leverage of billions of dollars of federal aid to rebuild the city. As president, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have hailed some of the strongest charter schools in their visits to New Orleans, and the city provides a kind of test of what might happen under all-out charter school development. The results of this study raise challenging questions about the possible fragmentation and stratification of competing school systems within a single impoverished city as private schools that receive vouchers—and hence public funds—offer a variety of school programs while public schools become isolated, residual institutions. The researchers of chapters 7 and 8 find no convincing proof of educational gains but instead clear evidence that the charter schools have helped stratify, not diversify, the schools in the two areas. They also find nothing intrinsically superior about charter schools.
Determined to avoid the limits of publications that are content to merely describe problems, this book turns in its final set of chapters to the question of how we could use choice more effectively. Chapter 9 confronts the dilemma that inequality is rooted in metropolitan stratification but we are trying to deal with it through choices that are at either the neighborhood or the city level. The problems of segregation by race, class, and language and of unequal educational opportunity and achievement are starkly different in various parts of each metropolitan area. Policy discussions have largely ignored the metropolitan dimensions for decades, but there is powerful evidence favoring metropolitan-wide solutions, which produce more stable communities and more access to better schools for poor and minority students. There have been, however, some notable successes in metropolitan choice programs that deserve careful attention. Amy Stuart Wells and her coauthors explore those experiences and suggest ways that choice could be most effective across district lines. The link of housing to school options and the interaction of housing segregation with the fragmentation of metropolitan communities into many very different school districts are fundamental sources of unequal opportunity, and interdistrict policies are one of the only ways to overcome these forces.
Information availability is absolutely central to theories of markets, but research shows that the dispersal of information about choices is unequal in ways that further disadvantage minority and poor families. Any unequal distribution of information undermines the basic fairness of choice systems since it leads to the most-informed people—usually already otherwise advantaged—getting better opportunities. Jack Dougherty and his colleagues report in chapter 9 on a systematic effort in Hartford, Connecticut, to greatly raise the quality and accessibility of information about local schools. The project used the Web to improve information dispersal and worked against unequal internet access with special information and training sessions and access points. This chapter deepens understanding of information divides and the feasibility of interventions.
The current views of people in the Louisville (Jefferson Country, Kentucky) school district illuminate community desires in a metro district whose plan the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in 2007. Both parents and students told interviewers that they strongly favor continuing