Educational Delusions?. Gary Orfield

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СКАЧАТЬ officials, who will still face complex challenges both in figuring out what approaches will work best given local conditions and in developing a constituency to support such a plan. The document's main importance was in telling educators both that integration is important and that the two involved central departments of the federal government, Education and Justice, will stand behind them if they take positive action to pursue integrated schools within the boundaries of the law.

      

      Forgetting History, Repeating Old Mistakes?

      The story of choice policies and the law on choice reflects the winds of political and social change in the nation. The evolution of choice as a serious component of American education began with a conservative strategy to preserve segregation and to provide an exit for white families from racially changing neighborhoods in northern cities. The Virginia voucher plan was undisguised racism. Across the South at the beginning of serious district-wide desegregation, local leaders set up “segregation academies,” often with the support of local government. There was, of course, little willingness by the whites whose children left public schools to provide tax resources to adequately support the nonwhite public schools. New private schools expanded choice for whites while denying choice for blacks and undermined the schools that were their only option. In some communities, the abandonment or closing of public schools made the constitutional rights promised by the Brown decision a dead letter.

      Civil rights law transformed choice by adding policies that worked better, but it still fell far short of substantially desegregating southern schools. At the peak of the integration effort, both federal civil rights officials and the U.S. Supreme Court basically rejected even choice with civil rights policies as hopelessly inadequate and implemented mandatory desegregation. When the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of cities and then refused to include their suburbs, the cities responded with new forms of choice—magnet schools and controlled choice plans—increasing integration with what were often desirable educational options for parents of all races. This was supported by a small federal aid program and was highly popular in many cities, though there were always questions about its reach.

      As a succession of conservative administrations succeeded in limiting civil rights policies, reconstructing the Supreme Court, and eliminating the federal funds that supported desegregation strategies, the social justice and integrationist theories of choice were replaced by market theory, which emphasizes the primacy of unconstrained individual choice and ignores external constraints on choice. This theory presumes that discrimination has ended, that race-conscious policies can no longer be justified, and that the real causes of educational failure are rooted in public school bureaucracies and unions—problems that could be solved by competition from private schools or semiprivate, publicly financed charter schools. The voucher and charter movements did not explicitly reject integration, and advocates of choice said it would increase real options for segregated minority families. Choice without civil rights protections expanded rapidly in charter schools. As their number increased, their striking segregation became apparent—were we repeating the errors of freedom of choice and open enrollment policies that had failed four decades earlier?

      

      The Supreme Court's 2007 reversal left communities where choice had produced successful desegregated schools very discouraged. Some found new successful strategies; many simply gave up. Given the close division of the court and the recurrence of some of the results of the earlier color-blind choice approaches, one wonders whether this cycle is over or whether the effects of growing resegregation will one day become the basis for a new set of demands for connecting choice with civil rights. The Obama administration's civil rights guidance could be a first step in that direction.

      THIS BOOK'S CONTRIBUTION

      The basic 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 СКАЧАТЬ