The Choice We Face
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The tensions on display in Charleston are emblematic of public education today. It is contentious and tumultuous. The debate is political. The schools we choose impact how we raise our children and where we live. How we interface with this system is one of the most difficult choices we face today.
The Choice We Face traces the history of an idea. It follows the social and political forces that gave rise to a ubiquitous “school choice” reform movement. Since its origin in the 1950s, school choice has become entrenched in our national outlook on school reform. It is nearly unquestioned in areas that have fully converted to “choice districts,” and there are many such districts across the country. All but six states have enacted charter school legislation, bringing into being the defining characteristic of school choice today. Between 2000 and 2015, the proportion of public schools that operated as charter schools rose to 7 percent. The number of charters more than tripled to nearly seven thousand in the same period. EdChoice, a private advocacy organization founded as the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in 1996, cited twenty-nine states that have enacted legislation including education savings accounts (ESAs), school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and individual tax credits and deductions that support private schools under the umbrella of “school choice.” In 2016, over 40 percent of parents with children in school indicated that public school choice was available to them. If choice or popular manifestations of it like charter schools are not in one’s own district—and the majority of districts do not have a charter school and most parents claim they get their first choice of public schools—it is a topic of national significance and in the talking points of both political parties.6 School choice as an idea is everywhere, even when it does not exist in local policy. The American public has been sold the idea that school choice is the panacea for a broken system.
Yet this great reform movement is paradoxical. While “school choice” has captivated a significant part of the country, it remains sorely misunderstood. One study claimed that 41 percent of Americans do not understand the term or inaccurately define it in terms of its current application. A Gallup Poll in 2014 found that between 40 and 60 percent of Americans were unclear about the very nature of charters on a series of points ranging from religion to tuition and overall quality of charter schools.7
We hear so much about school choice on the news, at school board meetings, and with our friends that most people, especially White Americans, see it as their inalienable right. Since the Reagan era, both Republicans and Democrats have seemed to agree that choice is not only a proven way to reform schools but something they must provide their constituents. Despite the best of intentions, most choice advocates—including those on the left—disconnect the issue with its troubling past. Most Americans fail to see how school choice is grounded in a complex history of race, exclusion, and unequal competition for scarce resources.
The Choice We Face unravels this paradox through time. It uncovers the clear line from the birth of school choice in the 1950s as a weapon against integration to the endemic problems we see in our schools today. It traces its development to a wide-scale divestment from public education in the wake of the civil rights movement, catalyzed by a self-fulfilling narrative of failure. The 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, a federal report that argued that our failing school system put the country in peril, affirmed the gloomy assessment of US schools.8 News stories, published reports, and national discourse harangued us with alarming narratives about the failure of public education. Today, we are told, children continue to fall behind their international peers in China, Japan, Korea, Finland, Estonia, and a host of other countries we at one time surpassed.9 Schools are not preparing our children with the technological skills to compete in the twenty-first century. Children are exposed to violence, poor teaching, and a host of other problems. School choice in the current context becomes an easy sell if not a lifeline for those stuck in a failing system.
To be sure, critics on all sides point to falling test scores, incompetent teaching, scarce resources and a myriad of other valid concerns. Yet this was not always the case. Since the Second World War, the American public’s view of public education has plummeted. In the 1940s, Gallup and public opinion polls found that 85 percent of Americans agreed “that young people today are getting a better education in school than their parents got.” One study found that 87 percent of parents were satisfied with the schools their children attended. When asked for criticisms of the schools they attended, 40 percent said they could not identify anything wrong with the schools. Educators fared well too, as 60 percent of teachers earned top distinctions in a public survey. Yet by the 1970s and early 1980s, after desegregation and the acerbic debate it spurred, Americans held far less favorable opinions. Polls and surveys revealed that only 35 percent thought contemporary schools were better than those of the past. By the 1980s, Americans gave the public school system a marginally passing C- grade.10
School choice is understandably a celebrated solution to a perceived crisis. Millions have taken advantage of it. By 2018, over 10 percent of parents, which translates into over five million students, had opted out of traditional neighborhood public schools and elected to attend either public schools of choice (often privately managed) or a traditional private or religious school.11 Tens of millions more seek to leave traditional public schools. Since school budget formulas are largely determined by the number of students enrolled, over $33 billion each year has followed students who have left traditional public education—a sizable endowment that would otherwise go to traditional neighborhood public schools.12 Radically shortchanged, these schools are then asked to perform educational miracles on a shoestring budget.
School choice today is not without racial undertones. Race, in fact, makes school choice one of the most controversial—and misleading—reform policies to date. The percentage of White families with children attending neighborhood public schools has fallen to 50 percent. The percentage of African Americans is 16 percent, and Latinx and Asian students comprise 30 percent of the public school population. In regard to choice schools, Whites comprise 35 percent of the charter school population while 27 percent are black and 30 percent are Latinx students. Private school enrollment, which is 70 percent White, is also telling.13 Whites have left our public system in large numbers for private and charter schools. In their wake they have left behind a crumbling infrastructure for those who do not benefit from the same privileges.
Much to the chagrin of many White liberals, school choice enjoys sizable support from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) families. Parents who have been historically slighted by public education clamor for reform. BIPOC students make up the majority of the charter school population. Numerous studies have indicated strong support for charter schools among Black respondents—nearly 50 percent—and Latinx communities support choice with similar enthusiasm. Such studies also show that support for choice among people of color has risen over 10 percent in the past ten years. School choice is popular and getting more popular, cutting across racial divides.14
Part of the reason for the success of school choice advocates is that high-profile politicians, education reformers, and civil rights luminaries have touted it as a pressing civil rights issue. The broad bipartisan support of choice, one of the few issues that unites a politically divided nation, complicates the issue of choice as well. On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump vowed to “fight to make sure every single African American child in this country is fully included in the American dream.” For Trump, this struggle entailed “the new civil rights issue of our time: school choice.” In 2020 and in the midst of nationwide protest and rebellion, Trump once again affirmed the notion, stating “frankly, school choice is the civil rights statement of the year, of the decade and probably beyond.” The secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, a controversial advocate of religious school vouchers, supported choice by similarly invoking civil rights ideology. Without acknowledging a history of de jure segre
gation, DeVos claimed that historically black colleges and universities provided proof that “choice” benefited African Americans.15
Black civil rights advocates liken school choice to civil rights as well. The National Civil Rights Museum awarded Geoffrey Canada, a former teacher and charter school founder in New York, the National Freedom Award in 2013. “Dr. King taught me something,” Canada noted in his acceptance speech, “that if you know something is wrong, you need to stand up, no matter what the price.” His solution, the Harlem Children’s Zone, is one of the most revered charter school programs in the country. Even the children of Dr. King support choice. In 2016, Martin Luther King III led one of the largest school choice rallies in the nation. “This is about freedom,” King told the crowd gathered in Florida, “the freedom to choose for your family and your child.”16
Still, as much as racial justice underpins the school choice movement, opponents cite ongoing segregation and racial disparities in public school funding, academic achievement, discipline, and other areas that remain unaddressed by school choice. Since 2013 the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed suits against school choice laws in Mississippi and Alabama, arguing that charter school funding, education tax credits, school vouchers, and other mechanisms of choice violate state constitutions because they divert resources from traditional public schools. The NAACP issued a moratorium on charter schools in 2016 and 2017, urging instead the strengthening of “free, high-quality . . . and equitably-funded public education for all children.” The NAACP declared: “We are dedicated to eliminating the severe racial inequities that continue to plague the education system.”17
Efforts to profit from school choice cloud the issue as well. Under school choice, for-profit charter schools operate with legal protection. Corporations that fund charter schools stand to profit through subsidiary companies that provide educational services. Individuals who run charters are paid substantial salaries that are supported by public dollars, and, at times, salaries are drawn from money gained through the fraudulent exploitation of tax laws or funding formulas designed to fund schools for all children.18 The very language of business—”consumers,” “competition,” and “product”—creates an educational “marketplace” that can be driven by profit alone. The fact that people or corporations can financially benefit from providing an education contradicts the inherent notion that education reform is “all about the children.”
Largely funded through the same property taxes and state funds as traditional public schools, schools of choice siphon off scarce resources, talented teachers, and other forms of capital. Poor communities and students of color make up the majority of the public school system and are often relegated to schools that are forced into extreme parsimony through budget cuts and staffed with fewer experienced teachers. They are disproportionately punished in a school-to-prison system that the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement seeks to abolish. Though complicit in the perpetuation of choice that benefits their own best interests, White families are casualties as well. Increasingly corralled in homogenous schools, White children often grow up ignorant of their privilege and the complexities of a diversifying society often divided by issues of race.19 The very nature of public education, in short, is under threat, and those who continue to rely on neighborhood public schools outside affluent areas—BIPOC and students living in poverty—are getting the short end of the stick.
Choice, not further investment in traditional public schools, is the Department of Education’s solution to a failing education system.20 The appointment of Betsy DeVos symbolized the triumph of choice, the ignorance that shrouds it, and the resultant threat to public education. As a person with no teaching experience and a record of donating millions from her family’s fortune to the privatization of public education, she recently occupied a position that enabled her to further dismantle the public school system.
As offended as some Americans were by DeVos’s unabashed support for school choice and privatization, the widespread acceptance of choice should have come as no surprise. The policies of President Barack Obama and his first secretary of education, Arne Duncan, funded reform initiatives that used the same paradigm of choice. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 advocated for the same policies. She urged the teachers’ unions in New York: “Continue to stand behind the charter school/public school movement, because I believe that parents do deserve greater choice within the public school system to meet the unique needs of their children.”21 DeVos may have rubbed Clinton supporters the wrong way, but she continued a bipartisan legacy.
Shallow understandings of school choice policy, negligent comprehension of its history, and failure to grasp its consequences constitute a gross misunderstanding of educational policy today. Wealthy conservatives, liberal reformers, and grassroots community organizers—and those who stand in judgment—all make competing claims to “school choice.” Advocates of choice are not simply what historian Adam Laats called “the other school reformers”—conservative advocates who integrally shaped the trajectory of American public education.22 People of all political stripes have jumped aboard. The school choice terrain is complicated, entrenched, and often confusing. Today, over half a century after the inception of school choice, many people treat it as an unalienable right granted by the Constitution and, in the more complicated cases, as a civil right that can be used to guarantee access to full citizenship. They feel the freedom to choose their school is protected alongside other freedoms inherent to the founding of the United States. Choice may have been conceived as an objective and universal right, but the truth is that it has enabled a quasi-public system to function for the benefit of some students as it undermines support for and weakens a traditional public system with economic, ideological, and political disinvestment.
The Choice We Face unpacks the genealogy of school choice and sheds light on this misunderstood and often misconstrued history, tracing the direct link between its troubled past and its controversial manifestation today. Originating from an esoteric theory of the economist Milton Friedman, school choice was applied by “liberal” parents and policymakers from New York, Chicago, and Boston at the same time as it was used by segregationists in Charleston and Birmingham. When the Democratic Party, under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, scrapped some of the ideology but maintained the essence of school choice, they molded choice into a popular and bipartisan program.
School choice today, in its most salient forms, is defined through both its purported ideals and documented shortcomings. Parents face a bevy of choices—magnet schools, charter schools, private schools, voucher programs, online schools, homeschooling, and combinations of these. Repackaged with promises of liberation, most are misunderstood, though they all connect to past efforts to maintain a racist school system or in some cases to abolish it. Grounded in a troubled history and repackaged with promises of liberation, it’s a choice we all must face.
CHAPTER ONE
The “Divine Right” and Our Freedom of Choice in Education
THE VENERATED CONGRESSMAN and civil rights activist John Lewis was fourteen years old in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was unconstitutional. The ruling held tremendous potential for the young Lewis, who was acutely aware of the indignities of a Jim Crow education. Attending school in Pike County, Alabama, Lewis rode daily past White schoolhouses that were, he later remembered, “very sleek, very modern, with nice playground equipment outside, nothing like our cluster of small cinder-block buildings, with the dirt field on which we played at recess and the privies out back.” To get to school, he and his peers shared a bus, a “rattling, rusty jalopy, an old hand-me-down.” It was prone to stalling. Lewis recalled several occasions when he emptied out of the bus with his classmates to shoulder the lumbering vehicle back onto the muddy road to complete the trip to school.1 The accumulated slights of segregation, from school buses to schoolhouses, were daunting to young people like Lewis trying
to make it in America. Yet the Brown decision and the struggle to achieve it offered hope.
Education for Lewis—like millions of others—was a civil right. The acquisition of literacy was the means to full citizenship, greater opportunity, a path toward upward mobility promised in the rhetoric surrounding education in the United States. It held a deeper meaning of freedom and resistance. Those enslaved and oppressed by America’s stringent racial caste system attached a liberating significance to literacy and passed it down each generation. “I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school who told me, ‘Read, my child, read,’ and I tried to read everything,” Lewis recalled. “I was obsessed with learning all I could about the world beyond the one I knew, and that’s why the school library became like a second home to me.” For Lewis’s teachers and elders, “education represented an almost mythical key to the kingdom of America’s riches, the kingdom so long denied to our race.”2
The Black newspapers found in Lewis’s second home printed victorious declarations about the decision. Harlem’s Amsterdam News proclaimed, “The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory of the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” The popular Chicago Defender postulated that the decision meant “the beginning of the end of the dual society in American life.” The Pittsburgh Courier editorialized, “The conscience of America has spoken through its constitutional voice . . . idealism and social morality can and do prevail in the United States, regardless of race, creed or color.”3