Chalk up another point for advocates of greater parental choice in schools through vouchers and another point against their critics.
The critics have long claimed allowing parents more choice in the schools their children attend would encourage resegregation. A new empirical study by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and the Buckeye Institute, however, finds just the opposite to be the case.
Specifically, the methodologically transparent study found that:
» Private schools participating in Cleveland’s voucher program were “18 points less segregated than Cleveland public schools on the segregation index, which compares the racial composition of schools to the racial composition of school-age children in the greater metropolitan area.”
» For the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, “the difference between segregation levels in public and private schools is trivial — less than two points on the segregation index.”
As the study author points out, these results flatly contradict familiar claims by anti-voucher critics like the Urban League’s Hugh Price, who claims vouchers “will wind up subsidizing segregation.”
These results should have particular poignancy for minority parents in high-profile public school districts that have stoutly resisted all forms of increased parental choice. That opposition has often stifled efforts to give minority parents even the limited option of a charter school.
The terrible irony is that by keeping parental choice out, opponents trap minority students in underperforming public schools that have exhausted millions of tax dollars for decades on failed efforts to close the academic achievement gap. Year after year, minority kids are cheated out of good educations.
In the Montgomery County Public Schools, for example, the average mean SAT score for black students during the last two years of Superintendent Paul Vance’s tenure was 216 points lower than the score for white students. By the second year of current Superintendent Jerry Weast’s reign, the gap increased to 238 points. By Weast’s fifth year, the gap was up to 246 points. For the current year, the gap is 254 points.
The situation is similarly discouraging when the performance of black male students iscompared with other student groups within MCPS. On the Maryland State Department of Education English Proficiency tests, 63.7 percent of black males in MCPS scored at only the basic proficiency level of achievement. That’s actually lower than the 67.2 percent of black males scoring at Basic Proficiency in Prince George’s County Public Schools.
Weast rightly touts increased SAT participation rates for MCPS minority students, but the bottom line on scores is getting worse, not better. Clearly, it’s time for some new thinking and approaches, which is most readily encouraged when parents have more choices about their where their children go to school. That such choice also appears to result in more, not less integration is the added bonus.
