In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will listen to arguments on the constitutionality of School Choice programs. School Choice is in dispute around the country, because many private religious programs receive funding from state and local governments. Thus, those opposed to the programs argue that government money being used to support School Choice programs is a violation of the separation of church and state. This is the central question the Supreme Court will be addressing.
The constitutionality question will be an important one to answer. It is not, however, the only problem that exists with School Choice. School Choice has its roots in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended racial segregation in education. After that decision, many Southern conservatives advocated School Choice as a way to circumvent the process of desegregation. Although those advocating School Choice today are not using this program to stop desegregation efforts, the current plan does contribute to increased segregation in primary and secondary schools.
The voucher proposal of the 1990s tried to give lower income families the same opportunities for their children to attend private schools as those who are able to afford them. In theory, vouchers give these families state aid in the form of tuition vouchers or a tuition tax credit to help pay for their child’s schooling. Proponents think these vouchers will allow parents to better choose which school they wish their child to attend. Although programs of this kind have been attempted all over the country, not one has been proven to have a positive outcome overall.
The market School Choice creates encourages ethnic and racial segregation, because parents can use race to decide where their child will go to school. Studies in the Netherlands and in the United States have demonstrated that the parents will often choose schools not on the basis of academic quality, but on other, nonacademic forces, such as proximity to where they live and familiarity with the values of the school.
This is exactly the opposite of what most School Choice proponents sponsor. Advocates assume the decision will be made on academics alone, but the whole point of school choice is that parents will choose the schools that best educate their children, according to the values they hold. So, in reality, many children may actually attend schools that are more segregated, but not necessarily academically better for them.
However, parental choice is not the only cause of segregation. Schools themselves segregate by choosing students that are “valuable commodities,” thus creating elitism in the school system. Disadvantaged students are not seen to be as “valuable” as more affluent students, and therefore are left out of the quality schools. This situation produces a lack of choice because even though disadvantaged students can choose the school they want, they might not be deemed as “valuable” as other students, and therefore cannot go to the quality school.
School Choice makes it a lot easier for private schools to discriminate against poor people of color because, unlike public schools, they have the ability to enroll only certain kinds of students. This happens because parents want to place their child with specific kinds of students and not into an academically and racially diverse kind of program that would actually serve to further their education.
However, without School Choice, most disadvantaged families would not be able to afford a private school education for their children. The justification of some School Choice plans is to give the disadvantaged an opportunity to go to a private school, although the voucher rarely pays for the entire tuition.
In reality, vouchers only subsidize already socio-economically advantaged students who can readily afford these schools with the assistance of a voucher. Even if the grants were enough, many schools could just increase their tuition so lower socioeconomic level students could not afford that school, thus only allowing the “correct” kind of student.
School Choice will create a race to the bottom for public schools and will not give them cause to better themselves or their curriculum. It will serve only to drain financial resources from public schools, because the money that formerly went to them will now pay for the tuition stipends at private schools. It will also drain the intellectual resources from those schools, because many students will opt to attend private schools. This will only cause the situation in public schools to worsen.
A School Choice system does not give equal opportunities to disadvantaged families. In the end, it gives them a poorer education because they still cannot afford private schools, and it drains their only real option, public schools. The biggest problem with School Choice is that it ends up creating a two-tiered system that exacerbates the gap between the rich and the poor. The theoretical goal of school choice is to create competition between schools, and thus better them. But whenever you have competition, there are winners and losers. And in education we cannot afford to have any losers.
Mike Dean ([email protected]) graduated from UW-Madison in May 2001. He is a former chair of the Associated Students of Madison.