The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  While not all were successful, magnet schools gained academic distinction. Magnets were and still are common enough to generate widespread interest. Desired by parents who remain committed to public education, magnets allow parents control over where their children enroll and, in gentrified neighborhoods, communicate a message of success, innovation, and diversity. They also provide the flexibility to offer progressive, hands-on, student-centered, and project-based pedagogy, such as the magnets that operate as part of the public Montessori program.15 Magnet schools represent some of the best that public education has to offer and are subject to the same public oversight as traditional public schools. Magnet schools and the controlled choice options they add to the menu connect to a view put forth by education researchers Gary Orfield and Erica Frankenberg. They argue that “there is a much richer and more beneficial practice of choice possible, deeply rooted in the experiences of the civil rights era, and there are ways to use its power for much more positive outcomes, for students, families, and our society.” When school districts have structured choice and incorporated integration as a guide for choice, mutually beneficial results can occur.16 The reality has often belied the potential, however.

  The use of magnet schools in Charleston, South Carolina, is telling. Magnets in that city emerged as a solution to a desegregation case that persisted throughout the 1990s. The Department of Justice, joined by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, sued the Charleston County School district for segregation and discrimination, alleging that the county had intentionally drawn district and attendance zones to maintain racial separation. Schools downtown were segregated, while the suburbs were mostly White.17 The courts upheld that Charleston County was an example of de facto segregation, following the pattern established with the Milliken v. Bradley (1974) case, and consequently ruled that suburban schools that maintained a modicum of desegregation would not have to desegregate further.18 In response to the trial, Charleston County constructed two downtown magnet schools, Academic Magnet High School (AMHS) and Buist Academy, an elementary school. Both were meant to foster integration, accept kids from across the county, and draw White families back downtown. The judge encouraged such programs to avoid busing and other “forced” desegregation methods. Academic Magnet High School was initially housed in Burke High School, the oldest historically Black high school in the city that had never fully desegregated. At the start of the court case, only one of Burke’s thirteen hundred students was White. Though the county was evenly split between the Black and White population, eighteen public schools were at least 90 percent Black.19

  Magnets became a viable path toward integration in Charleston since courts there established a racial quota at the new magnets that reserved 60 percent of the total enrollment for White students and 40 percent for African American students.20 Still, within the first few years of the program, at a time when 60 percent of the Charleston school system was African American, 68 percent of students at Academic Magnet were White.21 Physically locating the magnet school within the premises of Burke High School, while maintaining separate teachers, staff, lunch hours, and students bodies, created an “us versus them” dichotomy and essentially segregated students by program—segregation that carried with it deep racial and class divisions.22

  Then district officials moved AMHS to a different location, a site in North Charleston, and the school became increasingly White. Racial imbalance was addressed only after Charlestonians took issue that race was used as a factor in the admissions process. Larry Kobrovsky, a local attorney and former school board member, filed a suit to remove race from the admissions process at Buist. “In America, you deserve to be treated the same,” Kobrovsky noted, drawing upon the pervasive color-blind rhetoric of the post-Brown era, “not depending on what you look like.” Kobrovsky contended that maintaining a racial quota at Buist and other magnets was unconstitutional.23 In response, the district eliminated all racial quotas, and the suit was dropped. More than a decade since the board reversed its race-based admission policy, the population at Buist in 2009 was over 75 percent White and only 10 percent African American. 24

  Academic Magnet High School and Buist Academy are highly valued and coveted schools among parents in Charleston County today. Admission is very competitive, and the waitlist is long. Students are required to take a difficult entrance exam and have a B average. Given the number of applicants and the sparse availability, admission into the Charleston magnets has been likened to getting into our nation’s prestigious Ivy League universities.25 Like all freedom of choice plans, magnets have been and will continue to be about race. Like other choice plans, the burden is placed unduly on students of color and their families to get in. Moreover, the very concept of “magnet” here means attracting Whites—not students of color—back to the urban areas White families have fled. Whites, again, are privileged by this system, and it is their needs that are placated.26

  Magnet schools can present one of the best options on the menu, but they also have problems. Successful magnets can be the first to sell out and fill up, access to them is severely limited, and genuine integration is not guaranteed. Magnet schools are an elusive option and, though they espouse the values of “diversity,” do little to address the systemic nature of inequity that still defines the educational landscape today.

  School vouchers are the most direct, if not the purest, application of school choice. They are also one of the most controversial options on the menu. School vouchers embody the idea that per-pupil allocation should be spent directly by individual families. Families, in turn, decide how and where to spend their school voucher. With families as consumers, vouchers provide the means to enact Friedman’s ideal marketplace, as individuals can directly influence the market with their purchases. Whereas magnets are designed to attract middle-class white families back to the public school system, the purpose of vouchers is in some ways the exact opposite: to provide a way out for families who would like to choose private schools but would otherwise be encumbered by their tuition. The quintessential pro-choice organization EdChoice—founded as the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation—defines vouchers as the mechanism to “give parents the freedom to choose a private school for their children, using all or part of the public funding set aside for their children’s application.”27

  Like the concept of school choice in general, vouchers originated with racism and the politics of segregation in the aftermath of Brown. Vouchers were one of the earliest manifestations of choice and the first option selected by southern segregationists to avoid integration. As early as 1944, defenders of segregation in South Carolina had been calling for the complete abolition of public schools if they were going to be desegregated and replacing them with private school alternatives. Within months of the Brown decision, Georgia and Mississippi built upon the threat and passed legislation that earmarked public funding to cover the cost accrued by White families enrolling in private segregation academies. They were tantamount to tuition grants, or vouchers by another name.28 Such legislation was permissible until the Supreme Court struck down “freedom of choice” plans in 1968 and the direct subsidization of private schools was stigmatized and eventually overruled by the 1980s. Yet the concept of vouchers was far from abandoned.

  Vouchers enjoyed support outside the South among education reformers who sought to improve if not completely restructure public education. Christopher Jencks, an education professor at Harvard, and the Center for the Study of Public Policy in Cambridge drafted plans for federal vouchers, lending institutional weight. As opposed to the views of segregationists, Jencks’s and others’ support for vouchers was part of larger efforts to improve education for all students. Jonathan Kozol and the supporters of “free schools” saw vouchers as a way to support an alternative small school movement. State education officials in New Hampshire advocated for a statewide voucher system to foster a competitive statewide system of schools of choice—public, private, or magnets—that benefited rural areas.29 Much of the rationale
for vouchers in the North was built on a different sentiment than that of southern segregationists. Jencks, for instance, thought that reformers should “follow the Catholic precedent and allow nationalists [referring to Black advocates] to create their own private schools, outside the regular school system, and to encourage this by making such schools eligible for substantial tax support.”30 Seeking to empower African American calls for community control, vouchers presented the means to advance the ongoing civil rights struggle, drawing on the same methods of privatization but with very different goals. These advocates sought nothing less than the radical reorganization, community empowerment, and reconstruction of public education in the wake of Brown.

  By “Catholic precedent,” Jencks referred to Catholics’ advocacy for vouchers in the 1950s to bolster their parochial schools. Rev. Richard Blum, a Catholic priest and professor at Marquette University in Wisconsin, published Freedom of Choice in Education in 1958, just three years after Milton Friedman published his work on the topic.31 Blum helped popularize the argument for the subsidization of Catholic education in addition to vouchers outside the South. By the time of the Brown decision, Catholics had already established a strong network of parochial schools across the nation since the nineteenth century, embedding them in the education landscape. As historian Robert Gross notes in his analysis of school choice, Catholic schools transformed the education landscape to a marketplace, where private religious schools were an integral part of meeting larger public goals. These institutions received public support for their service, including property tax exemptions, which reduced the cost of enrolling in and maintaining private schools.32 Alongside the common or public school system developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, Catholic parochial schools became a mainstay in the United States, and tax exemptions were critical to their founding and expansion across the country. Their presence was contested and controversial after Brown, however, as private religious schools endorsed the same voucher legislation as southern segregationists.

  In spite of a professed commitment to the ideal of separation of church and state suggested by the First Amendment, Catholic schools were primed to advocate for vouchers to expand the educational services they had been providing. Two cities in particular, Milwaukee and Cleveland, became critical test sites for the constitutionality of voucher programs. In Milwaukee, White flight, failed desegregation attempts, community control experiments, and conservative Republican leadership at the state level coalesced to create a ripe ground for vouchers, which came to a head when Governor Tommy Thompson signed the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program into law in 1990.33 In Ohio, White flight from the urban “crisis” depleted investment and resources for public education in Cleveland. The state had a long history of petitioning for public subsidies to support private education. With the rise of Republican leadership in the state legislature and governor’s office in the 1990s—and some Democratic allies—vouchers enjoyed wide support. Legislators implemented the controversial Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program that funded the vast majority of private school tuition for low-income families.34

  Teachers’ unions, civil rights organizations, and other traditional public education advocates across the nation bitterly opposed vouchers. Not only did the programs violate perceived understandings of the separation of church and state; they also circumvented traditional teacher licensure processes and undermined the viability of teachers’ unions. The controversy came to a head in 2002, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of vouchers in a 5–4 vote in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. The court found that the voucher programs as practiced in Ohio were constitutional because public funding was not going directly to religious schools. Rather, the money was going to individuals who then elected to invest in religious programs. Writing for the majority opinion, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote: “Entirely neutral with respect to religion, it provides benefits directly to a wide spectrum of individuals, defined only by financial need and residence in a particular school district. It permits such individuals to exercise genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious. The program is therefore a program of true private choice.”35 Voucher advocates received a morale boost with the decision, and the boundaries of the educational marketplace expanded.

  Though vouchers unnerved the most ardent defenders of public education across the nation—not to mention the teachers’ unions—the Zelman decision affirmed the fundamental right of parents to send their child to private schools or a constitutional claim to choose.36 Since the test cities of Milwaukee and Cleveland were firmly outside Dixie and maintained minority-majority school systems, voucher advocates achieved a critical symbolic victory as well. Vouchers were no longer the tools of racist segregationists. Vouchers at the turn of the century, to the contrary, theoretically benefited those most in need. And in a largely Christian country, many still welcomed the idea of publicly supporting parochial schools, such as Catholic schools, that made it their mission to improve the education of disenfranchised students.

  The Zelman decision opened the door for voucher support at the federal level. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, which designated $20 million for vouchers to be used in District of Columbia schools. It also established the groundwork for Betsy DeVos to advocate for a school choice agenda predicated on vouchers and federal support for religious schools. Prior to her role as secretary of education, DeVos developed political acumen through philanthropy to advance a choice agenda, a goal to which she remained faithfully committed in 2020. She donated millions of her and her husband’s fortune—from the Amway Corporation, a “multilevel” marketing firm for health, beauty, and home-care products that in 2015 reported a $9.5 billion profit—to school voucher and private school scholarships. She served on the boards of two national nonprofit organizations—Children First America and the American Education Reform Council—devoted to expanding choice through vouchers and tax credits. Based in Michigan, DeVos and her husband financially supported and successfully lobbied for the state’s first charter school bill in 1993, just two years after the first such law passed in Minnesota. In 2000, she was the impetus behind the attempt to change the state constitution to allow tax-credit scholarships and vouchers. When that was defeated, DeVos began the Great Lakes Education Project and chaired the Alliance for School Choice to preserve the fight to alter state constitutional language. In 2010, DeVos established the American Federation for Children, a 501(c)4 nonprofit organization (permitted to engage in political activity) that focuses on advancing school choice, school vouchers, and “scholarship tax plans.”37 The scholarship plans, like the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act, seek to provide dollar-for-dollar tax credits for those who financially support groups or organizations that provide scholarships.38 Federal and judicial support ensure that vouchers will remain on the school choice menu.

  Vouchers pose some of the most serious challenges to public education. Under voucher plans, state legislatures and school districts shift scarce public dollars to private schools, and states incentivize enrolling in private schools by providing tax credits to parents who enroll in them. Voucher plans support the privatization of public education—all in the name of choice.

  Charter schools, the most recent addition to the school choice menu, now epitomize it. Charter schools are public schools funded by taxpayers’ dollars but privately run. The state grants a “charter” to an organization that seeks to manage its own school. Charter schools are nonsectarian and held accountable to the state, meaning they cannot discriminate based on race, class, gender, religion, or ability.

  Ray Budde, a former teacher and education professor in Massachusetts, first proposed the idea of an education charter in the early 1970s. He proposed that school boards should “charter” teachers to launch a program or curriculum that they thought would improve the quality of education for all students. Lasting for a period of three to five years, tea
chers would have the autonomy to direct their classrooms and department as they wished. “No one—not the superintendent or the principal or any central office supervisors,” Ray Budde wrote, “would stand between the school board and the teachers.”39 The idea was also grounded in community control, much like the alternative school movement, as was the larger critique of ineffective, unresponsive school districts.

  Al Shanker, the teachers’ union organizer and leader, endorsed Budde’s idea. As president of the American Federation of Teachers, Shanker garnered union support for the idea and used his platform as a columnist with the New York Times to advance it.40 He referenced Budde’s work to name what he had in mind: charter schools. To illustrate the experimental yet critical nature of his vision, Shanker employed an apt analogy of risk and discovery. “Explorers got charters to seek new lands and resources,” he noted. “Many of our most esteemed scientific and cultural institutions were authorized by charters.”41 At the brink of failure, teachers were going to find a way.

  Shanker held that schools run by a handful of teachers—six to ten licensed educators—could work with parents, school boards, and, of course, teachers’ unions, to implement charters. For Shanker, teachers’ unions were integral to the concept, which centered on the relationships between teacher and student, including additional planning time for lessons, cooperative team teaching, and alternative forms of assessment, among other strategies to improve student learning. His plan called for “faculty decision making, for participative management; team teaching; a way for a teaching team to govern itself.” He also called for teachers to “have the time to share ideas and talk to and with each other.”42 Whatever the pedagogical intervention, the plan called for teachers to implement their best ideas without red tape, restrictions, or interference from the top. He called for charters to run from five to ten years, which would provide ample time to test, revise, and demonstrate the quality of the schools. It was then expected that the good ideas could be incorporated back into the larger public school system.43 Another crucial part of the initial charter school proposal called for diversity. As Shanker noted, “We are not talking about a school where all the advantaged kids or all the white kids or any other group is segregated to one group. The school would have to reflect the whole group.”44 One of the first extensive charter school programs in the nation developed in Minnesota, where the Citizens League, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger civic engagement across the state, committed to implementing Shanker’s vision. The Citizens League worked with Shanker and a progressive coalition of teachers and policymakers from across the state. The report they published, Chartered Schools = Choices for Educators + Quality for All Students, called for integration objectives that cultivated diversity along racial, cultural, and economic lines. It championed a “multicultural and gender fair curriculum” and a racially diverse faculty and staff. It even called for “an affirmative plan for promoting integration by ability level and race.”45