There’s been no shortage of progressive policy proposals in the 2020 Democratic primary to date. Whether it’s eliminating all private health insurance or guaranteeing everyone a job, the candidates are trying to outdo one another with the scope of each successive proposal. One issue, however, is conveniently left unaddressed by most of the candidates: school segregation.
Public school segregation is still a serious problem, with 75% of African American students attending majority-minority schools. This issue stems from other factors such as housing segregation, which is still about as pervasive today as it was in the 1960s.
While racial segregation seems like the type of issue Democratic candidates would seek to solve, they’ve done little so far. Unfortunately, this lack of action is not an accident, it is the direct result of the preferences of affluent (and often liberal) white voters who live in the most segregated states. Their preferences all but ensure that Democrats will take no substantive action to address pervasive school segregation in blue states.
According to the Washington Post, the most segregated school systems in the United States are in the traditionally Democratic Northeast, with New York having the most segregated school system in the country. Parents in these supposedly progressive bastions have lobbied against changes to zoning laws that would integrate schools. Academic data have also shown that as the percentage of African Americans in a neighborhood increases, white families unfortunately attempt to find other schooling options. These trends were especially clear for highly-educated whites — many of whom have become core Democratic voters.
More visceral evidence of these trends emerged in 2018, when parents in wildly liberal New York City were caught berating education officials about a desegregation plan for the city’s middle schools. It’s easy to imagine a similar reaction by affluent white voters to a Democratic presidential candidate who proposed similar policies.
All of this opposition is prevalent despite the fact that the achievement gap closed far more rapidly during the school integration efforts of the late 20th century. Given the ample benefits of more diverse schools, it becomes clearer than ever that we must not restrict a child’s schooling options to the zip code they were born in.
Some promising options include the introduction of school choice options, such as vouchers or a lottery system, which if constructed with these issues in mind, have the potential to address the staggering level of racial segregation in our schools.
For instance, a Manhattan Institute study examining school choice programs in Washington, D.C., found that the programs were reducing racial segregation and decreasing the percentage of students attending racially homogeneous schools. Another study from the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans found that in Louisiana, school choice programs greatly reduced the degree of racial segregation in the students’ previous public schools.
It’s no surprise that many minority groups clearly see school choice as the right path, and it polls very well among African Americans and Hispanics. But for any meaningful reduction in education segregation to take place, Democrats have to buck their voters and adopt school choice policies. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Jacob Asch is a rising fourth-year at the University of Virginia and is executive editor of The Cavalier Daily student newspaper.
