Stop the Social Engineering
School choice is the way to promote diversity – not government mandates.
This summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision banning race-based student placements has left hundreds of public schools – and some colleges – scrambling to find alternative affirmative-action formulas that will pass court muster.
One idea that’s gaining popularity is “wealth integration,” also called economic integration.
But don’t be fooled – it’s a quota system by another name.
Only this time it’s based on family income rather than race. Take, for instance, the Wake County, N.C., public school system, which is touted as a groundbreaking model for this idea. To reach the required percentages of income levels, “officials have to move some families, involuntarily, from their neighborhood school,” acknowledged a CNN reporter two years after this program began.
Parents have protested. But that hasn’t stopped liberal politicians and media pundits from lauding it as the salvation of endangered diversity.
It “can be a backdoor way of achieving more racially integrated schools,” announced The Washington Post this month. It also gives low-income children – many of whom are minorities – access to middle-income resources, argue proponents, which in turn improves their academic performance.
Those arguments sound great – until you realize that school-choice initiatives are already accomplishing those benefits. And that, despite years of quotas, racially imbalanced public school classrooms are actually on the rise. Even Leftists have been forced to acknowledge the latter point:
“At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968,” wrote a liberal education activist writing for The New York Times on July 11.
Meanwhile, empirical studies show that private schools participating in school-choice initiatives are significantly less racially divided than their public school counterparts.
In Milwaukee, for instance, school-choice programs “led to greater integration, because you’ve got poor black kids accessing what were formerly all-white private schools,” pointed out Dr. Howard Fuller, an African-American researcher, who was also superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools.
Data also show that school-choice programs significantly increased the academic performance of minority students in places like Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio,
That’s why Latino and African-American parents in New Jersey have joined together in a lawsuit against the public school system, seeking to rescue their kids from consistently failing public schools and obtain funding to send them to private academies. They got tired of waiting for the top-down solutions to work.
So did Maurice Revell, an African-American pastor in South Carolina.
“Unfortunately, opponents of reform who are desperate and frightened about losing control over our children are playing the race card – saying that ‘school choice’ is code for ‘re-segregation,’ ” wrote Revell. “Thankfully, blacks across the state aren’t buying this argument.”
But these leaders find themselves in a quandary – they are opposed by the very people who claim to have their best interest at heart, who continue to promote old Band-Aid solutions like quotas and socialistic redistribution methods. But the bottom line is, those formulas have been tried and have failed – it doesn’t matter which way you calculate them or what you call them.
How many children must be sacrificed in failing schools before we acknowledge this? As one African-American columnist eloquently pointed out, 50 years ago, white segregationists were blocking school doors to keep black kids out. Now liberal elitists are blocking the doors of failing schools to keep black kids in.
It’s obvious that a new solution is needed – one that is proven to work. One that empowers minority parents, instead of demeaning them by assuming they can’t pick the best schools for their kids.
The answer is school choice.
Candi Cushman is the Education Analyst for Focus on the Family's Government and Public Policy division.
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