School Choice Myths

Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom

Corey A. DeAngelis, Neal P. McCluskey

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948647922
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Are there legitimate arguments to prevent families from choosing the education that works best for their children? Opponents of school choice have certainly offered many objections, but for decades they have mainly repeated myths either because they did not know any better or perhaps to protect the government schooling monopoly.

In these pages, 14 of the top scholars in education policy debunk a dozen of the most pernicious myths, including "school choice siphons money from public schools," "choice harms children left behind in public schools," "school choice has racist origins," and "choice only helps the rich get richer." As the contributors demonstrate, even arguments against school choice that seem to make powerful intuitive sense fall apart under scrutiny. There are, frankly, no compelling arguments against funding students directly instead of public school systems.

School Choice Myths shatters the mythology standing in the way of education freedom.

CHAPTER ONE

MYTH: SCHOOL CHOICE BALKANIZES

Rather than pulling us apart, choice is the key to building bridges.

Neal P. McCluskey

It is easy to understand the fear that society would splinter if people could choose private schools on an equal footing with public. If everyone could select the education they wanted for their children, many would choose different things. People of diverse religions might cloister their kids in schools sharing their convictions. Families of different ethnicities might stick to “their kind” out of comfort or of hostility toward others. The rich might remain with people of wealth and away from the riffraff.

This fear cannot simply be chalked up to a ruse to defeat school choice. The evidence is powerful—overwhelming, even—that human beings have a strong inclination to self-segregate.¹ Many people with choice likely would associate with others like themselves.

But that also happens without school choice programs such as vouchers or scholarship tax credits, both in American society generally and in the public schooling system that has long enrolled the vast majority of children. Public schools have accounted for roughly 90 percent of K–12 enrollment for decades,² and while in 1950 only 34 percent of Americans 25 years of age and older had completed high school, by 2016 nearly 90 percent had.³ Despite this fact, Americans today are starkly polarized and stratified. As Charles Murray observes:

The American project … consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. … [Yet] that culture is unraveling.⁴

To challenge the fear of Balkanizing school choice, we must ask two questions: Is greater choice likely to lead to greater physical stratification relative to what we have today. And will choice lead to stronger bridges connecting different groups psychologically? The answers may not be what we expect.

Public Schools, Poor Unifiers

How have Americans come together over the centuries, first as colonists and then as countrymen? What role did public schooling play? There is insufficient space to explore this comprehensively, but the contours of American educational history are powerful: there is little evidence that public schooling unified Americans, and it may very well have been an obstacle.

From the 1607 landing of British settlers in Virginia to the 19th century’s common-school crusade, education was a matter left primarily to private and civil society—free people working voluntarily together. There were attempts to create government-run schools, including the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s famous 1647 “Old Deluder Satan Act,” which required towns of various sizes to maintain either a teacher, or a teacher and schoolhouse. This effort disintegrated. Authorities regularly wrestled with towns flouting the law, and by the Revolutionary War none complied.⁵ Other colonies did not even go that far. The idea that government should control education was largely foreign to people of British extraction, and the schooling was insufficiently useful to marshal broad support.⁶

This did not mean there was a learning vacuum. As historian Bernard Bailyn has written, all of colonial life was educational, as transplanted Europeans learned to live in a new, largely wild land.⁷ But they also undertook more formal education focused on reading, mathematics, and religion, in homes and various types of private schools. The result was, by the dawn of the common-school era, a literacy rate among white adults of about 90 percent—blacks were often forbidden by law to be educated.⁸ “Before Americans generally accepted the idea that schooling should be publicly controlled and financed they clearly believed in education of the public,” concludes historian David Tyack.⁹

Between the end of the colonial era and the beginning of the common-school movement, typically pegged to the 1837 appointment of Horace Mann as the first Massachusetts education secretary, several crucial things occurred that almost certainly reflected increasing American unity. These include claiming independence; doing so through a declaration establishing the nation’s philosophical foundation; erecting a federal system solidified by the Constitution; electing the nationally revered George Washington president; fighting a second war with England; and having an Era of Good Feelings. A civil war would come, but even it likely reflected a big chunk of people no longer seeing themselves as citizens of separate states but wanting to be one nation.

Despite this, the common-schooling movement was substantially driven by fear that people were not sufficiently unified—or, perhaps, not sufficiently uniform.¹⁰ As Horace Mann wrote in his 1845 annual report, “The children of a republic [must] be fitted for society as well as for themselves.”¹¹

In this effort, Mann was often frustrated. Opposition sprang up almost immediately. The overwhelmingly Protestant Massachusetts population saw Christianity as central to education, but there were major cleavages among Protestant denominations. The result was substantial disagreement over what Christian doctrines would be taught.¹² Mann, who needed the schools to be nonsectarian to be broadly accepted, devoted a large section of his last annual report rebutting accusations that he would remove the Bible from the schools. A transformation that enabled the movement to somewhat overcome these impediments was mass Irish Catholic immigration—the Roman Catholic Church was a common enemy—yet conflicts persisted among Protestants. Presbyterians, for example, had established only four parochial schools prior to 1846, but dissatisfied with the common schools, they created 260 between 1846 and 1869.¹³

Conflicts between Protestants and Catholics eventually occupied the center of the arena. Notable political battles were fought in New York City, where Catholics struggled for years to access public school funds for their own schools, which used the Catholic version of the Bible and none of the lessons hostile to Catholics sometimes found in public schools. In Philadelphia, literal warfare erupted with the 1844 “Bible Riots.” The riots, sparked by policies regarding the place and version of the Bible in public schools, ended with dozens dead, hundreds wounded, and massive property damage.¹⁴

It is hard to see this as unifying, except perhaps in the sense that conquering is unifying. And we know from the Balkans themselves that “conquered” does not necessarily mean “unified.” For three-quarters of a century Yugoslavia existed as one country, but as dictatorial power waned the country split, initiating years of calamitous warfare as numerous ethnic groups and regions fought for independence. It was separation that ultimately brought peace.

The same held true for American education. Prior to common schooling it was not unusual for diverse religious schools to receive public money, which largely came under scrutiny only when Catholics sought funds.¹⁵ Peace was further maintained by schools tending to serve small, homogenous communities. The earliest national count of school districts dates to just the 1937–1938 school year. In that year there were 119,001 districts in the United States serving a population of 128,824,829, or 1,083 people on average. The average district almost certainly served even fewer people before that. Today there are only 13,584 districts serving a population of 321,418,820, or 23,662 people per district.¹⁶

When a district did serve diverse communities in the latter 19th century, it would sometimes split schools, either by time or physical buildings, so different groups would have their own schools.¹⁷ And some groups just split, especially Catholics, who set up their own institutions. By their 1965 peak, Catholic schools enrolled 5.5 million students, or nearly 12 percent of all school-aged children.¹⁸

A more egregious way than chosen separation in which public schooling failed to unify was by forbidding togetherness. For decades many public schools were racially segregated by law. And government-orchestrated segregation was not restricted to the South or to African Americans. Some states segregated Hispanics from whites, and some separated Asians. In most Northern states, at least through 1860, African Americans were either excluded from public schools or given separate institutions.¹⁹ And while de jure segregation in the South was under legal siege after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, many Northern governments maintained segregation more stealthily, including by placing new schools in heavily white housing areas, or busing whites to white-dominated schools. The Supreme Court did not demand rectification of stealth segregation until the 1973 Keyes v. School District No. 1 ruling, which declared Denver’s placements unconstitutional because, though they were not on their face segregationist, the intent behind them was.²⁰ The very next year the Court established the limit of coerced integration, in Milliken v. Bradley, forbidding mandatory desegregation across district lines unless all affected districts had had segregationist policies.²¹

Desegregation was seemingly effective, especially in the South, but the story is largely one of retrenchment, and as we will see, little “bridging.” As of 1968, the beginning of federal courts seriously demanding desegregation, 78 percent of African American students in the South attended schools identified by the Civil Rights Project as “intensely segregated,” meaning 90 to 100 percent minority.²² By 1980 that share had plummeted to 23 percent, but it bounced back up to 36 percent by 2014. Other regions saw a similar decrease-and-rebound, except the Northeast, where intense segregation increased after 1968, from 43 percent of black public school students attending intensely segregated schools to 51 percent doing so in 2009–2010.²³ Nationally, 64 percent of black students attended intensely segregated public schools in 1968–1969, hitting a low of 33 percent in 1991–1992, then rebounding to 38 percent in 2009–2010.

“Intensely segregated” school counts can obscure average racial mixes. Looking at the exposure of the average white public school student to African Americans and vice versa, we again see greater integration since the late 1960s. In 1968, 15 percent of public school children were black and 79 percent “majority white,” meaning non-Hispanic white. In that year the average black public school student attended a school that was only 22 percent white. The average white public school student attended a school that was only 4 percent black. By 1972 that had changed considerably: the average African American public school student went to a school that was 34 percent white, while the average white student had 7 percent black schoolmates.²⁴ In the 2009–2010 academic year, the average black public school student was in a school that was 29 percent white—about half of the 55 percent white share of the total national population aged 5 to 17—and the average white student was in a school that was 9 percent black, or 63 percent of the black share of the total population aged 5 to 17, which was roughly 14 percent.²⁵

Where Kids Are Going...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Myth: School Choice Balkanizes
• Chapter Two: Myth: School Choice Has Racist Origins
• Chapter Three: Myth: Public Schools Are Necessary for a Stable Democracy
• Chapter Four: Myth: Private School Choice Is Unconstitutional
• Chapter Five: Myth: Children Are Not Widgets, So Education Must Not Be Left to the Market
• Chapter Six: Myth: School Choice Siphons Money from Public Schools and Harms Taxpayers
• Chapter Seven: Myth: School Choice Harms Children Left Behind in Public Schools
• Chapter Eight: Myth: School Choice Only Helps the Rich Get Richer
• Chapter Nine: Myth: School Choice Needs Regulation to Ensure Access and Quality
• Chapter Ten: Myth: Any School Choice Is Welcome School Choice
• Chapter Eleven: Myth: Students with Special Needs Lose with School Choice
• Chapter Twelve: Myth: Only Rich Parents Can Make Good Choices
• Notes
• Index
• About the Contributors
• About the Editors
• About the Cato Institute