Educational Delusions? - Gary Orfield

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is attractive in theory but impossible to achieve in reality because whites will simply leave the school district and a desegregation plan will just accelerate their departure. This argument has its source in James Coleman, Sara Kelly, and John Moore’s famous 1975 study of white flight, which triggered a tidal wave of research and instantly became part of court battles across the country.65 It followed the first years of mandatory urban desegregation, in the early 1970s, when courts suddenly implemented massive involuntary reassignments of students and teachers in almost all of the cities in the South and several big northern cities. The research claiming large effects was almost exclusively about black-white settings that were in the early stages of kinds of plans that have not been implemented for more than three decades. Most of this research is unrelated to situations of choice-based desegregation plans in multiracial cities.

      The agreed-upon results of many studies include the following:66 (1) White flight, which basically reflects housing patterns, exists since it began long before there was desegregation and continues after desegregation efforts end, and exists in places where that were never desegregated. It began in earnest with the construction of massive suburban development marketed only to whites. (2) It usually accelerates significantly for a time at the beginning of new mandatory plans limited to central cities. (3) The highest and most stable desegregation comes in metropolitan-wide mandatory plans. We also know that whites, Asians, and middle-class African Americans and Latinos have all relocated to suburbs in most metropolitan areas, leading to the resegregation of city neighborhoods and schools, and that whites still have a tendency to move away from concentrations of black students.67 Such trends are ongoing in growing sectors of suburban rings, which are experiencing soaring nonwhite enrollment growth and typically have no desegregation plans.

      The truth is that diverse neighborhood schools have had a tendency toward resegregation for generations, since the housing market offers what many whites see as a choice only between resegregating schools and overwhelmingly white middle-class schools in more segregated outlying white areas. Both conditions and attitudes are changing, however. Black-white residential segregation has been declining for at least two decades, and there are now multiracial communities in which the largest minority group is Latino.68 The question is whether we can slow the transitions from diverse to segregated communities and increase the number of communities with lasting integration. Many communities now use magnet schools, the nation’s largest system of choice, as part of an effort to hold and expand white, Asian, and middle-class enrollment in diverse schools.

      Ironically, research clearly shows that the most dramatic school desegregation plans—those which included central cities and their suburban rings and produced the deepest and longest-lasting desegregation by integrating all the schools, many for a third of a century—were often well accepted by locals (see chapter 11) and had a clear tendency to increase stable residential desegregation.69 In other words, individual choice in the face of a segregated and discriminatory housing market produces widespread instability and resegregation, denying even many middle-class minorities the opportunity to attend good schools, while drastic desegregation mandates create more positive school and housing conditions, lasting neighborhood integration, and neighborhood economic and social desirability. Unfortunately, the courts have severely undermined the possibility of implementing the most successful solutions, which is why educators and civil rights groups are struggling to figure out what forms of choice plans will work today to guarantee substantial and lasting diversity in school enrollments, in spite of all the limits inherent in boundaries, districts, and the inability to directly consider individual students’ race. Color-blind choice plans permit whites to transfer out of integrated communities and into more-segregated white communities, speeding white flight just like the urban open-enrollment plans of the 1960s (see chapter 1). There are no easy or comprehensive solutions available within the existing constraints, but doing nothing is no solution. And some forms of choice do provide important educational and social alternatives.

      Markets and Integration: The Dimensions of Difference

      In the market theory, equality comes simply from giving students in weak public schools a choice to go to some school (in practice, usually a segregated charter school) that is outside their local public school system and is governed differently. The governance structure is expected to produce the educational benefit. In integregation theory, the idea is, as much as possible, to give students from segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods access to predominantly white and Asian schools, which, research shows, are likely to be better in crucial respects.70 In the market theory, choice itself is the educational treatment. In the integration theory, choice is one strategy to decrease conflict and increase voluntary participation in programs that intentionally cross lines of race and class to foster successful integration. Its goals are community-wide.

      Although these two theories have fundamentally different philosophic and intellectual roots, they both contain testable assumptions about the nature of social and educational realities. The market theory derives from economic theory’s ideal type of markets and basically believes that people operate as autonomous individuals and that the sum of individual choices will provide better opportunities for all; therefore, no systemic limitations on choice are needed to produce good outcomes. The integration theory is strongly rooted in sociology and law and is based on a philosophy that recognizes that the social order is highly stratified and discriminatory on the basis of race and ethnicity and that the effects of a long history of overt discrimination are still powerful. It sees individuals as deeply limited by isolation and unequal knowledge and views positive governmental action to use choice with integration requirements as a key part of a solution.

      Three decades ago there was a profound shift from following the integration theory to following the market theory in formulating choice policy and programs. We can now examine the evidence on the assumptions and outcomes of each theory to determine the best way to use choice to accomplish the goal affirmed by both sets of advocates—improving the education of disadvantaged students in obviously unequal schools. Though both theories support programs called school choice, they rest on divergent and incompatible assumptions.

      CONCLUSION

      Often choice is described as something that is simple or clear, but it can have profoundly different meanings and results. It seems like such an easy-to-understand and positive concept, but the vast differences among theories of choice are often lost in superficial claims.

      The currently dominant market choice theory is based on unexamined assumptions derived from a simplified version of an economic model that does not exist in any society. Such a theory can raise important propositions, but only good research can evaluate whether they are true and whether the theory works. Market theory can be understood largely as a subset of the belief in unregulated markets and the ideology that any institution that is not subject to public control is likely to be better by its very nature than one that is. It follows that creating more nonpublic schools will somehow transform all educational outcomes, without regard to what programs they implement. The fact that many interests and leaders powerfully support these beliefs does not make them true.

      Policy discussions in recent decades have largely forgotten integration theory, though it was developed as the result of experience with different kinds of choice in many hundreds of school districts. But the fact that something is ignored for a time does not make it untrue.

      Exploring the validity of differing assumptions about choice is central to this book. Its analysis accepts the claim that the schools available to many students in segregated urban settings are shamefully inadequate and that choice mechanisms must be part of the solution. We created this book in good measure out of concern that the movement from the integration theory to the market theory of choice happened without an adequate examination of either their premises or their results. This book is not antichoice and does not see either of these approaches as a panacea for educational equality. It does, however, critically examine the evidence in a number of contemporary contexts and in its final chapter offers a policy framework on the basis of what it sees as the most compelling evidence about using choice to increase school equity.

      Choice is meant to disrupt the status quo and is defended as a great creator of opportunity and positive change, but fundamentally different theories and philosophies are at war under its broad umbrella. Praising

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