ARLINGTON, Va.—Educational choice programs have rapidly expanded in recent years, with many states creating new programs and many others expanding existing programs to all students in their state. At the same time, opponents of these programs have latched onto a narrative that the movement for school choice has racist roots and segregative effects. A new law review article from the leader of the Institute for Justice’s (IJ) educational choice team reveals the true intellectual roots of the modern school choice movement and shows that existing programs promote integration rather than discourage it.
“Today’s educational choice programs are rooted in 18th- and 19th-century classical liberal thought, not 20th-century racism,” explained IJ Senior Attorney Michael Bindas. “And empirical evidence shows that, consistent with the classical liberal values of liberty and equality, these programs promote integration, not segregation.”
Bindas’s article “School Choice is Racist (& Other Myths)” appears in the latest edition of the Syracuse Law Review. He writes about how a theory first put forward by educational choice opponents in the court of public opinion has worked its way into courts of law, and he demonstrates why that narrative is untrue both in historical terms and regarding the real-world effects of educational choice programs.
In 2017, the Center for American Progress published a report titled The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers. The report traced the roots of school choice to the methods state governments used to defy Brown v. Board of Education. Several states in the South reacted by closing public schools, opening “segregation academies,” and then providing students with vouchers to attend them.
Bindas shows that the roots of educational choice long predate the resistance to integration. Economist Adam Smith proposed policies to inject competition into schools in The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Paine proposed a school voucher policy in his Rights of Man. John Stuart Mill, too, proposed vouchers in On Liberty, urging the state to help “pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children” while “leav[ing] to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased.” It was the thought of such theorists that prompted economist Milton Friedman to promote school choice starting in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, the advocacy efforts that led to the first modern school choice programs were led by Black activists and politicians. Programs established in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, DC, were seen as a way for Black students to escape from public schools that had been failing them for decades.
“School choice programs have now helped an entire generation of poor and minority children escape from failing public schools,” said Virginia Walden Ford, a leading advocate of DC’s school choice program. “Through vouchers, some of our inner cities poorest students can now attend schools that are more challenging and more integrated than those offered by the public schools.”
Another theory of educational choice opponents—that choice programs will make schooling more racially segregated—has already been put to the test. Of the ten studies done on the effects of these programs on racial integration in schools, eight showed that the programs had a positive effect on integration, and one showed no impact. Only one showed a slight negative effect on the private schools that students transferred to, but even that study showed that the program had a positive integrative effect on public schools.
IJ has defended educational choice programs throughout its history and has won four cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Those cases revolved around religion: the extent to which government may, or must, allow religious options in such programs. In the wake of those decisions, opponents of educational choice have retrained their focus from religion to race, insisting that the programs are racist in origin and segregative in effect. Recently, IJ successfully defended West Virginia’s program against such allegations, and it is currently defending against similar challenges in Arkansas and Ohio.
According to Bindas, “The efforts of school choice opponents to weaponize race in their legal attacks is destined to meet the same fate as their efforts to weaponize religion: failure.”
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