So goes the title of a great post by Shavar Jeffries, Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School.
In a post over at the Black Professors blog, he makes the case of why school choice is so important for Black children, a case that in many ways, parallels why school choice is so important for Latino children. He writes:
The academic performance of Black children in America’s public schools is abysmally poor. Results on the National Assessment of Education Progress, for example, show persistently that a sizable majority of Black children fail even to perform at basic reading and math levels. The picture is even bleaker in urban districts, which disproportionately serve Black students. In many of these districts, more than half of Black students fail even to graduate from high school, let alone to achieve the minimal levels of competency necessary for postsecondary education.
At the same time, many inner-city school districts have witnessed substantial increases in public funding over the course of the last couple of decades. Whether through litigation-related efforts under Brown or correlative efforts under state constitutions, inner-city schools throughout the country have enjoyed considerable increases in government funding. Despite this increased investment of public dollars, the performance of public schools in effectively educating Black students, at best, has stagnated and, in many respects, has worsened. While more money for virtually any public good is undoubtedly a good thing, the chronic incapacity of public schools effectively to educate Black children has deeper and broader antecedents.
Among these is the extent to which, as James Baldwin suggested forty years ago, public schools disproportionately subject Black children to a host of policies reflective of diminished conceptions of their academic and cultural potential. Black children, among other things, are disproportionately referred to and classified as educationally disabled; disproportionately disciplined under public-school suspension and expulsion policies; disproportionately tracked into remedial classes and away from advanced classes; and disproportionately advised by guidance counselors to apply to and attend vocational, technical, and other forms of postsecondary training that do not call for matriculation at four-year colleges. These particular manifestations are simply iterations of a predicate disease: A host of studies suggest that public-school officials simply imagine and expect less of Black students.
It is essentially indisputable that public schools are not systematically serving the educational interests of Black students, and have not done so for decades. I submit that the reason for this systemic failure revolves substantially around the way in which public schools are held accountable for performance. Public schools, particularly those serving poor, inner-city communities, are held accountable only through a political process — containing national, state, and local permutations — that poor people are weakly positioned to influence meaningfully. Educational philosophy, curriculum, and pedagogy are set entirely by political actors with limited, if any, accountability to poor communities generally, let alone communities of color specifically. …
It is in the light that I argue that school choice is an educational necessity for Black families. School choice empowers parents to decide where their child is educated, and thus radically democratizes the way in which public education is delivered. Rather than government making all choices for all parents — or, better yet, all poor parents (folk with money always have choices) — as to where their children are educated, school choice empowers parents not only to select the venue where education is delivered, but correlatively to influence meaningfully the substantive and pedagogical philosophies driving the kind of education provided in that venue. Choice fundamentally alters the political priorities of public schools, which — heaven, forbid — would actually have to perform effectively in order to convince parents to send their child to a public school.
In the current model, public schools have little incentive to respond meaningfully and systematically to the interests of Black parents, particularly poor Black parents, as these parents simply do not have the political capital to impact systematically the way in which public schools deliver education. A choice model, however, consistent with the most basic predicates of freedom and democracy, begins to grant poor people the opportunity to opt out of the public system if it continues miserably to fail their children. At the same time, it empowers Black parents to select educational models less contaminated by diminished conceptions of Black existential capacity — a phenomenon James Baldwin warned us about forty years ago.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
HP - sorry, but I already posted this comment on Rudy’s blog. Consider it a comment rerun. Still a good comment though, if I don’t say so. Hat’s off to you.
Your response made me smile.
Vouchers will change nothing.
The rich will get richer the poor will get poorer.
Once again, this goes back to the home. How will we help the parents to help their children to better in school?
Actually Kelly, one could have made that argument in the past, but with various forms of vouchers being implemented in various states, we have already seen evidence of vouchers success.
In addition, vouchers also helps solve the parent problem, after all, what better way to encourage parents to get more involved in their childrens education than by giving them real power for change? Vouchers give parents something that they have never had, the real option to do something about the failing school in their neighborhood that they were previously trapped in.
You can find imfo on the success of Vouchers from Martin Carnoy, who has refuted most of Caroline Hoxby’s faulty conclusions. HIs article is here
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=878
The evidence at the international level pertaining to “vouchers” does not look good. The work of Martin Carnoy helps illuminate how:
According to Carnoy as he goes on:
The results were:
And finally, as some of us dont find this suprising at all given white flight and the continued resegregation of America:
If we use international examples in both Europe and South America, vouchers dont look to enticing. Before we make a mistake of that magnitude, we should clearly examine all sides and ensure that the claims voucher proponents make…more specifically, those about “especially helping, or benefitting the poor” are going to come through. Otherwise, we run the risk of once again subsidizing (or providing a free) another program for middle and upper class,at the expense of those whom the reform was supposed to principally benefit. IN other words, when you make the case that there are WMD’s in Iraq (hint: vouchers/or my tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the poor, and will undoubtedly improve acheivement) and its proven to be false or a lie, dont turn around later and say “atleast we are bringin freedom/democracy to Iraq” (hint: we didnt have any “intelligence” that proved otherwise), even when they had plans of how the Oil was going to be divided before war was declared with Iraq.
Sorry, for writing so much..Pero una vez al an~o no hace dan~o….
Whenever I see a study on Chile’s ‘voucher program’, I always wonder why a study on Columbia’s voucher program was also not supplied. For example, like this one and this one. Could it be that Columbia’s voucher program proves the very opposite of Chile’s voucher program, namely, that vouchers work, and they work especially well for the poor? I think so.
Secondly, you are drawing the wrong lesson from the Chile experience. The Chile experience does not tell us that vouchers don’t work; they tell us that under funding education is very bad, especially for poor people. The problem with the Chile voucher system is that federal funding dramatically stopped after vouchers was implemented, so that vouchers were only practical in middle and high income neighborhoods, precisely those neighborhoods that could afford to spend more of their own private money. But this is the interesting part, had federal funding remained the same - or even more so, had federal funding increased - low income families would have benefited from high quality private schools as well.
In addition, Chile’s voucher system is not as perfect a voucher system as Carnoy implies. Some would even say that Chile never had a voucher system, what Chile had was federal funding of some private schools on a per-student basis. Parents were not able to apply their voucher to the tuition at a private school of their choice. Also, poorly performing public schools were not shut down, a somewhat important factor in a true voucher system.
Furthermore, what the Chile study looks at is whether aggregate scores (public and private) increased over time as more students attended private schools. The study did not look at whether students who transferred to private schools did better than other students. In addition, the study is consistent with a nationwide decline in public school quality over time, which itself could have accounted for the drop in overall test scores.
In conclusion, we can and should learn valuable lessons from Chile. First, we need to learn that funding for education should not significantly drop to levels where private schools can not operate, and most of all, funding should be progressive, meaning the poor should get more funding than the middle class and especially the upper class. This will significantly help increase equality in education, and will also help change the incentives so that schools would compete for lower -income students, which in turn helps to create more incentive to compete on quality.
And last but certainly not least, we don’t need to look to other countries, or even to Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby’s research to see that vouchers work. Contrary to a decade ago, we now have results on how vouchers work here in the United States, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive, especially for minority students.
For one example,
For other benefits of school choice, see here.