Educational Delusions?. Gary Orfield

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      As the courts changed and diversity plans were dismantled, lawsuits challenged the right of schools to hold spaces for underrepresented groups, and some federal courts overturned those policies.⁴³ New magnet schools were sometimes created without desegregation plans, solely to offer special schools. Magnets that were born with desegregation plans and had been integrated often dropped their plans and became more segregated, though a substantial fraction did not, as discussed in chapter 5.

      Throughout the magnet experience it has been apparent that parents with better information do better. Ironically, without civil rights policies in place they tend to do much better, increasing inequality. No matter how many strategies for fairness were devised, it was clear that parents who had better information about and understanding of what often became complex choice systems in large school districts were more likely to get their children into the best schools and that parents with less education, fewer connections, and less understanding of the impact of more competitive and integrated schools were less likely to make a choice or have their children accepted.⁴⁴

      Choice and competition for students, even for desirable ends such as lasting and substantial race and class desegregation, inevitably involve winners and losers among schools and reflect the unequal human capital and networks of different groups of parents. To the extent that these schools and programs are successful in becoming (or being perceived as) clearly superior, they can turn into not just means to an end but ends in themselves for ambitious parents, whose battles to get their children admitted sometimes challenge and defeat desegregation goals. Civil rights advocates understood the inherent problems of choice but also the great difficulty in finding ways to provide opportunities for minority children to access genuinely better schools while simultaneously attracting and holding more privileged families to produce the gains of class and racial integration. Given the difficult legal and policy constraints, magnets often became the best option if they could institute strong policies for equity.

      Transfers and Controlled Choice

      From the 1960s on a standard feature of a great many desegregation plans was the Majority to Minority (M to M) transfer plan, which permitted students to transfer only from a school where their race was the majority to one where it was the minority. In practice, this meant that black and Latino students transferred from segregated schools of their race to largely white schools. The numbers of such transfers were small, normally around 1 or 2 percent of those eligible. Another kind of transfer, beginning in the middle 1960s and spreading to only a few cities, was interdistrict transfer, usually from segregated central city schools to white suburban schools but sometimes to regional magnet schools in other districts serving the same metro area. Some of these plans have been very popular, but only those in St. Louis and Milwaukee reached numbers above a few thousand students, primarily because of the small number of suburban openings in most plans. And now both the St. Louis and Milwaukee programs have been reduced in scope in spite of substantial successes.⁴⁵

      The last of the major efforts to use choice for desegregation was called, appropriately enough, controlled choice. A fully developed controlled choice plan was first implemented in 1981, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right across the Charles River from Boston, which had experienced tremendous conflict in its 1974 school integration plan, which mandated the transfer of students to schools across racial boundaries. Controlled choice was designed to move decisively away from both a neighborhood school system and a mandatory transfer plan by requiring parents to look across the district and rank their top school preferences. Because all parents with school-age children were required to participate, making a choice did not require special initiative or knowledge of the policy. Students were assigned to their highest-ranked school that was compatible with the city's desegregation goals. The great majority of families received one of their top choices, giving them a sense of control and minimizing conflict without abandoning integration goals.⁴⁶ There were, of course, some who did not get a top choice and protested the plan, but the number of involuntary assignments was much lower than in mandatory plans. There were a number of other provisions designed to ensure equity, such as an information center that parents were required or strongly encouraged to visit to receive information and counseling about their options (this was also often an element of desegregation and magnet plans).

      Controlled choice encouraged competition among schools and addressed the normal exclusion of parents who did not choose from good transfer opportunities. Boston and a number of other districts subsequently implemented it.⁴⁷ This was the last of the choice plans that were designed with civil rights goals in mind. In districts that had controlled choice for a considerable period of time, parents’ preferences for neighborhood schools declined sharply as they learned about other options. When the mandatory Boston court order was dropped after a more conservative Supreme Court authorized ending desegregation orders and there was a move to return to assigning students to their neighborhood school, strong opposition arose because a large majority of Bostonians saw these schools as weak, did not consider them a first choice, and did not want their children stuck in them.⁴⁸ As with magnet schools, the controlled choice experience showed that it was possible to use choice—with clear efforts to strengthen information dispersal and recruitment and put limits on segregative choices—to produce a good deal of integration with a minimum of community conflict and, at the same time, to create desirable schools.

      FORGETTING THE LESSONS OF CHOICE PROGRAMS

      If the central justification for choice in the late civil rights era was to create voluntary desegregation and equalize education through innovation, the choice programs that have come to the fore in a more conservative era have often been hailed not as means to an end but as solutions to failing urban schools without any reference to segregation or systemic barriers to choice. Conservatives who denied that the problem of failing schools was rooted in social inequality and systematically unequal schooling shifted the blame to families and school bureaucracies.⁴⁹ In contrast to civil rights advocates, who defined the central barriers to opportunity as racial discrimination, isolated poverty, and unequal education, the backers of newer plans—vouchers and charter schools—rested their claims on theories about the inherent inferiority of public schools run by large bureaucracies with strong teachers unions.⁵⁰ A school outside a public school system would, by its nature, be better. Bill Gates, whose foundation strongly supports charter schools, spoke to the National Charter Schools Conference in 2010, hailing the “great progress” of the movement and calling charters “the only schools that have the full opportunity to innovate” in a country where “the way we educate students ... has not changed in generations.” He said that public schools had received more funding over generations but had “poor results.” The country needed “brand new approaches,” and “that's the one thing charter schools do best.” As in a market, “it's imperative that we take the risk to make change.”⁵¹

      Race and poverty were largely considered irrelevant, and many charter schools were intentionally established in impoverished minority neighborhoods, where families were desperate for any option and public schools were far less powerful than in the suburbs. Some were set up to serve only a particular racial or ethnic group, challenging basic elements of civil rights policy with the claim that they had special empathy for minority students, justifying segregation by race and poverty.⁵² The operators of charter schools also claimed that educational entrepreneurs—such as themselves—could solve educational inequality using competition and freedom from bureaucracies and unions. They ignored the related facts that choice without civil rights controls would increase segregation and that segregated schools were systematically less successful, the realization of which had been central to the development of choice policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Segregation was simply accepted as a given and not seen as a serious limit to equal opportunity. Free markets and ending public regulation and the power of teachers’ organizations would solve educational gaps.

      From Magnets to Charters

      Charter schools, СКАЧАТЬ