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Nine Lies About School Choice Press Release and School Choice Full Report
School Choice in the District of Columbia
School Choice in the Cleveland, Ohio
School Choice in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin
A recent study finds that America's public schools "remain largely segregated and are becoming more so. . . More than 70% of the nation's black students now attend predominantly minority [public] schools."
"Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, July 2001.
At the same time, evidence from voucher programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee suggests that expanding school choice for low-income families will foster higher levels of racial integration. The means-tested choice programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee let low-income parents, mostly of color, choose private schools for their children. In the process, thousands of black and Hispanic parents have enrolled their children in schools that previously were attended mostly by white students. The result is more integration at many private schools participating in choice programs.
Analyses of a national sample of 12th graders collected by the U.S. Department of Education show that private school students are, in fact, more likely to be in racially mixed classes than are public school students. According to that sample, more than half of all public school 12th graders (54.5 percent) are in classes that have more than 90 percent or fewer than 10 percent minority students. In private schools, just 41 percent of students are in similarly segregated classrooms. And more than a third (37 percent) of private school students are in classes whose racial composition is within 10 percent of the national average. Just 17.8 percent of public school students are in classes that are similarly mixed.
Jay P. Greene, "Civic Values in Public and Private Schools," Learning from School Choice, Washington, DC, Brookings Institute Press, 1998, pp. 96-97.
"Of all students observed in private school lunchrooms, 63.5 percent were in an integrated setting. That is, 63.5 percent of private school students were sitting in a group where at least one in five students around them was of a different racial group. In public schools, 49.7 percent of all students were in a similarly integrated lunchroom setting. This difference is both substantively and statistically significant. Private school students are more likely to be sitting in racially heterogeneous groups than public school students."
Jay P. Greene and Nicole Mellow, University of Texas at Austin, "Integration Where it Counts: A Study of Racial Integration in Public and Private School Lunchrooms," August 20, 1998, p. 13.
"Slightly more than a third (36.5 percent) of private schools students sit in groups where everyone is of the same race. A little more than half (50.3 percent) of public school students sit entirely surrounded by people of their own racial group.
Jay P. Greene and Nicole Mellow, University of Texas at Austin, "Integration Where it Counts: A Study of Racial Integration in Public and Private School Lunchrooms," August 20, 1998, p. 13.
"In short, if we are serious about the benefits of racially heterogeneous school experiences, we need to consider abandoning or modifying the long held view that the traditional public schools is equivalent to the ideal of the common school."
Jay P. Greene and Nicole Mellow, University of Texas at Austin, "Integration Where it Counts: A Study of Racial Integration in Public and Private School Lunchrooms," August 20, 1998, p. 20.
"With more than 96 percent black enrollment and free lunch participation, Dixon and Bibbs [Florida's two failing schools] are two of the most poor and least racially diverse schools in Escambia County."
Heidi Hall, "Humiliated But Defiant, F Schools Fight Back," Sun-Sentinel, March 4, 2000.
"[At Dixon elementary school] not even a third of last year's fourth- and fifth-graders read, wrote or did math on grade level."
Heidi Hall, "Humiliated But Defiant, F Schools Fight Back," Sun-Sentinel, March 4, 2000.
Of the 49 choice students with test scores who are currently participating in the program, only 12 have reading scores above the national average, nine have math scores above this level, and five have Florida Writes scores at the "acceptable" (3.0) level or higher.
Wes Davis, "An Empirical Study: The Impact of Voucher Departures and Transfers Upon Test Scores at Bibbs and Dixon," September 2, 1999, p. 4.
"The fear was that the state's new voucher program would trigger a mass exodus of the brighter students from the two F-rated Pensacola schools that are pioneering Florida's school voucher program. That exodus has not happened. The Escambia County School District on Friday released a study that created an academic profile of all the students who left the Spencer Bibbs Advanced Learning Academy and A.A. Dixon Elementary. They examined test scores for each of the students-whether they left to go to another public school or to a private school. Their conclusion? It appears to be a wash. Some high-performing students left. Some low-performing students left. Many average students left."
Stephen Hegarty, "Study Doesn't Back Voucher Exodus Fear," St. Petersburg Times, September 11, 1999, p. 1B.
"Nearly a fifth (19 percent) of recipients of a voucher in Cleveland attend private schools that have a racial composition that resembles the average racial composition of the Cleveland . . . . Only 5.2 percent of public schools students in the Cleveland metropolitan area are in comparably integrated schools... And when we combine all public schools in the Cleveland metropolitan area, we see that around three-fifths of all public school students (60.7 percent) attend schools that either have more than 90 percent white students or fewer than 10 percent white students.... The average choice student attends a private school where 54 percent of the students are Catholic. Yet 43.1 percent of choice students attend schools with fewer than 50 percent Catholic students.... When considering all the choices available to parents and their students-private religious schools, private secular schools, charter/community schools and magnet schools-overall attendance at private religious schools in Cleveland amounts to 16.6 percent of all students enrolled in Cleveland schools."
In all, "the amount of integration is not great in either system, but it is markedly better in the choice program."
Jay P. Greene, "Choice and Community: The Racial, Economic, and Religious Context of Parental Choice in Cleveland," The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, November 1999.
"Choice students, on average, have significantly lower family incomes than do Cleveland City public school students ($15,769 vs. $19,948), are significantly more likely to be raised by only their mother (68.2 percent vs. 40 percent), and are significantly more likely to be African American (68.7 percent vs. 45.9 percent)."
Paul E. Peterson, William G. Howell, and Jay P. Greene, "An Evaluation of the Cleveland Voucher Program after Two Years," Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University, June 1999, pp. 16-18.
Howard Fuller of Marquette University compared racial isolation in Milwaukee public schools with private religious schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. He found that less than a third of students at private religious schools attended "intensely segregated" schools, compared to half of MPS students. Using a standard employed by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, Fuller defined an "intensely segregated" school as one where 90% or more of the enrollment was white or minority.
"The Impact of School Choice on Integration in Milwaukee Private Schools," Marquette University Institute for the Transformation of Learning, June 2000; and "The Impact of School Choice on Racial and Ethnic Enrollment in Milwaukee Private Schools," December 1999.
Commenting on Fuller's research, Investor's Business Daily observed, "Critics of school vouchers defend public schools as a source of social integration, warning darkly that private schools breed elite isolation. Have these critics been to Milwaukee recently?. . . [R]eligious schools in. . . the city's private school choice program enjoy a higher rate of racial integration than do its public schools. . . [V]ouchers are serving as a catalyst for racial harmony in Milwaukee schools once beyond the reach of minority parents."
"Vouchers Promote Diversity," Investor's Business Daily, July 6, 2000.
"Contrary to fears that a majority of choice students would turn out to be white, the racial composition of the choice program is almost identical to that of the Milwaukee Public Schools. The report says 62.4 percent of choice students were black, compared with 61.4 percent in MPS."
Joe Williams, "Audit Dispels School Choice Myths," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 3, 2000.
"Milwaukee's experience with the nation's longest-running program of school vouchers directly contradicts the claims of voucher opponents regarding public and private school admission practices. It illustrates that a targeted, tax-supported school voucher program for low-income parents can be designed to provide essentially an open admission policy."
Howard L. Fuller and George A. Mitchell, "Selective Admission Practices? Comparing the Milwaukee Public Schools and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program," Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University, January 2000, p. 14.
"In Milwaukee the number of secular private schools participating in the voucher program more than tripled between 1990 and 1999, from 7 to 30."
Jay P. Greene, "Choice and Community: The Racial, Economic, and Religious Context of Parental Choice in Cleveland," The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, November 1999, p. 15.
". . . .[T]he momentum is with choice. On the one side you have flesh-and-blood kids trapped in a bureaucratic school system that doesn't work for them, for whom choice is an escape to a decent education. On the other side you have only theoretical objections that may or may not pan out. In fact, one fear [NEA vice president Reginald] Weaver raised-that choice schools would cream the best students-has not materialized. Choice schools tend to attract kids who run into trouble in public schools."
"Reform zest must transfer to classrooms," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 22, 1999, p. 18.
"[T]he Choice students were not achieving well in [Milwaukee Public Schools] (MPS) . . . . For the Choice students on which we have prior test data, achievement was very low prior to their enrolling in the private schools . . . . On the last test they took in MPS, only 25 percent were at or above the median in reading and 36 percent in math."
John F. Witte, First Year Report - Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, ("First Year Report"), 1991, pp. 8-9.
See also Who Chooses, and How.
School Choice Facts
compiled by
The Institute For Justiceand
Marquette University, Institute for the
Transformation of Learning, Office of Researchand
Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation