School choice and racial integration

by Alan Bonsteel

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education ended the “separate but equal” racial segregation of the south. In 1962, Milton Friedman’s book, Capitalism and Freedom, for the first time advocated school vouchers.

Although the two events were separated by only eight years, hardly anyone at the time saw them for what they were — two very different visions of achieving quality education for all, one through compulsion and coercion, and the other through freedom of choice, including the liberty to choose religious schools. In 1954, the conventional wisdom of the news media was that the Brown decision would, in time, mean equal education for our minorities. And in 1962, hardly anyone other than the visionary Friedman himself could foresee when many people throughout the U.S. would come to believe in school choice as a fundamental human right. Few people in those days would have bet on Friedman’s vision emerging triumphant.

But consider where we are 57 years after Brown:

• The nationwide high school dropout rate among blacks in now conservatively 40 percent.
• One-third of our black men without high school diplomas are in prison.
• Sixty-seven percent of African-American families are headed by single parents and 72 percent of African-American births are out of wedlock.

At a time when the public schools are widely perceived in areas as being overly segregated, and the black middle class has experienced a unique growth through those that are single and living alone rather than through families, the notion that our public schools are capable of achieving racial equality in education now seems almost quaint. By contrast, our schools of choice, whether private or charter, have greater opportunities for better integration and offer a superb education to minorities. Further, the racial integration in those schools exists on a far deeper level than a simple counting of whites versus minorities would suggest.

In 1998, researcher Jay P. Greene authored the study, “Integration Where it Counts.” In it, he and his associates secretly observed whether students of various races in public and private schools sat next to each other in their lunch rooms. He found that in private schools, students of varying races were far more likely to sit next to each other than in public schools.

Further, private religious schools outperformed private non-religious schools. Greene hypothesized that the mission of the religious schools — of teaching that we are all children of God — played a role. To take this thought to the next higher plane, it is the difference between teaching that racial equality is endorsed by the local school board versus loving thy neighbor as thyself being God’s will.

The American Center for School Choice, of course, has taken on a special guardianship of private religious schools, and the results of Greene’s study, now more than a decade old, will come as no surprise to our members. Freedom of religion — including the right to choose a religious school — is a fundamental human right, even without any need to demonstrate tangible benefits. But it is certainly gratifying when religious freedom and tolerance can be shown to produce worldly benefits to our children and our communities.

The notion that the public school establishment, operating through compulsion and coercion when assigning most students to school, can bring about racial equality in education has now been decisively thrown on the scrap heap of history, and, in fact, no one is now advocating any credible way out of the damage that has been caused to minorities other than through school choice.