Education - Desegregation

On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (347 US 483), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate schools for African-American children were inherently unequal and that the schools had to be desegregated. Nearly fifty years later, more and more school districts are questioning whether the federal courts need to continue supervising desegregation. Despite regulations and busing, many inner-city schools are still not integrated, and academic achievement for African-Americans is still lagging. Many white students have moved out to the suburbs or transferred to private schools to avoid inner-city schools. Typically, half the white students assigned to new schools under desegregation orders never attend those schools.

School Vouchers

Despite the Court's rejection of segregated schools, many minority students have been relegated to failing neighborhood public schools with little diversity. One proposed solution to this problem is the school voucher, a concept pioneered by Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. A voucher program provides parents with a predetermined amount of money—in essence the tax dollars already collected by a community to be used for education—and allows parents to present that voucher to the public or private school of their choice. Proponents for vouchers believe that not only will minority children benefit, but that public schools, fearful of losing tax revenues, will gain an incentive to improve. Opponents of vouchers maintain that "choice" will simply drain money from the public schools and worsen their condition.

Vouchers have been used on an experimental basis around the country—mostly in Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and the state of Florida—producing mixed results. While some minority children have been able to use vouchers to escape bad schools, many families still lack the money necessary to educate their children outside of the public system. The value of the vouchers, ranging from $1,250 to $3,700, was simply too small to cover the tuition for many traditional private schools, leading a number of parents to opt for Catholic schools. Moreover, there were additional costs, such as transportation and school lunches, that many parents found they could not afford. According to Andrew Stephen, writing in the New Statesman (December 2002), in Florida "a quarter of the kids who were signed up for vouchers this school year have already found themselves back in the public system." The voucher movement received a boost in 2002 when the Supreme Court upheld the Cleveland voucher program, affirming, in the words of Lawrence W. Reed and Joseph P. Overton in USA Today (January 2003), "that it hardly constitutes a government establishment of religion if religious schools are among the choices parents can freely make. By implication, government schools don't have an automatic claim on a child's education superior to the choice of his or her parents."

Charter Schools

Like vouchers, the idea of charter schools has also found many proponents in the minority community. A charter school is publicly financed but operates independent of school districts, thereby combining the advantages of a private school with the free tuition of a public school. Parents, teachers, and other groups receive a "charter" from a state legislature to operate these schools, which in effect exist as independent school districts. They receive public funds and are accountable for their financing as well as educational standards.

The charter school experiment started in Minnesota in 1992. By the end of 2000 there were 2,357 charter schools and 600,000 students in the United States. As with vouchers, results have been uneven, with a number of notable successes offset by charter schools that failed to improve student achievement. Overall, after more than a decade in operation, charter schools remain a marginal reform movement.

One unintended consequence of charter schools is that they are more segregated than public schools. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "seventy percent of all black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority schools compared with 34 percent of black public school students.… The pattern for Latino segregation is mixed; on the whole, Latino charter school students are less segregated than their black counterparts." According to the study, 70 percent of African-American charter school students were attending charter schools composed of 90 to 100 percent minority students. (See Table 7.12.)