How School Choice Reinforces Segregation

Vouchers and charter schools are quietly keeping education separate and unequal

“We conclude,” a unanimous Supreme Court wrote in 1954, “that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Despite the Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, schools nationwide did not rush to comply with orders to integrate. And in many parts of the country, schools are more segregated now than they were 40 years ago.

The three lawyers who argued the case against segregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education — from left, George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit — standing in front of the US Supreme Court

The Brown ruling was meant to mark the end of de jure segregation in schools, which is racial separation by law. It did not, however, put an end to de facto segregation, which is racial separation in practice as a result of people’s choices or of subtler, indirect policies.

Following Brown, some white families didn’t want their children to attend integrated schools, and economist Milton Friedman introduced a new concept: tuition vouchers to help parents pay for private schools. Under Friedman’s plan, public money would be diverted from the local school district and given to private schools to offset the cost of tuition. Friedman believed that vouchers would lead to a free educational market that improved all schools, and that they would appease both segregationists and integrationists by allowing everyone to simply go to whichever schools they saw fit.

But many school districts in the South opted to close their public schools rather than comply with integration orders. They included Prince Edward County, Virginia, which remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964.

To address these refusals to integrate, courts began to order that rather than attending their neighborhood schools — which were often racially homogenous because of segregated housing patterns — students had to be bused to other areas within the school district to create racially mixed schools. In the decades following Brown, this mandated busing gradually increased the level of integration.

There was reluctance and pushback across the nation. The Boston Globe explains that, following the introduction of a busing plan in 1974, “more than 400 court orders would be required to carry [it] out.” A Gallup poll from that period, taken in 1981, found that the majority of Black Americans, 60 percent, favored busing, while the majority of white Americans, 78 percent, opposed it. Nonetheless, busing efforts were largely successful — until a legislative shift changed the landscape.

In 1974, Congress passed the General Education Provisions Act, which prohibited the use of federal funds for busing. This shifted the emphasis from the federal and state level to individual school districts. Some remained subject to court-ordered busing plans. Others practiced voluntary busing programs. Then came the 1991 Supreme Court decision in Board of Education v. Dowell to end mandated busing. In a 5-3 decision, the Court ruled that court-ordered integration through busing had gone on long enough.

Mandated busing ended, and voluntary busing dwindled. Around the same time, the “school choice” movement began. And with these changes began the resegregation of American schools.

The rise of charter schools

Beginning in the early 1990s, policymakers started to offer alternatives to traditional public education, including voucher programs and charter schools. But these programs had a drawback. “There is a strong link between school choice programs and an increase in student segregation by race, ethnicity, and income,” reported Education Weekly in 2014, as school choice programs were growing in popularity. “In many cases, school choice programs exacerbate current school segregation.”

This happens in a few ways.

Of particular consequence are the charters. These are free to attend and taxpayer-funded, but run by an entity other than the local school district. Charter enrollment is up 900% since 2001.

Charter schools, because they are public and because of the decision in Brown, must be “available to all on equal terms.” Any parent can enroll their child, and if demand exceeds the number of seats available, students are selected through a lottery. But charter schools can still find ways to “cherry-pick” students. By creating lengthy and involved interview processes, not offering free and reduced lunch options, not offering programs for non-English speakers, or, in some cases, denying students with disabilities, they can tailor their student population.

Some charter schools deliberately seek out a single racial group, like an urban charter seeking out Black families. This can prove to be an effective recruitment strategy — the schools need to fill seats, after all. But they don’t always deliver on promises of a better education, and high levels of segregation have a clear negative effect on academic outcomes. A 2017 Associated Press analysis found that 17% of charters are 99 percent minority, while only 4% of public schools have that degree of racial isolation.

Apart from enabling segregation, charter schools also drain resources and funding from the public schools run by local school districts that many non-white students continue to attend. Former Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch explains: “What people don’t realize when they hear ‘charters’ is that every dollar that goes to charters and vouchers is a dollar taken away from [traditional] public schools.” As a result, charters can have an immediate negative effect on surrounding public schools. Districts have fixed costs that cannot be scaled up or down easily, like school buildings, transportation systems, and legal requirements to serve every student, including those with severe disabilities. The cost of public schools thus does not scale in equal measure with each child enrolled. Charter schools are public, but can still have limited spots and exclusive policies, whereas traditional district-run public schools aren’t in a position to turn students away.

As school choice becomes increasingly popular, it can perpetuate school segregation, even when a city has become less segregated on the whole. This happens because gentrified neighborhoods tend to have more charter schools, and white parents are more likely to take their children out of traditional public schools they consider subpar. A recent study from the University of Kansas found that this has been the case in Washington, DC. White families fled DC in large numbers following the Brown decision in 1954. Between 2000 and 2019, in a streak of rapid gentrification that changed the demographics and culture of the city, white families were returning to DC. And yet, by and large, they weren’t returning to the district’s traditional public schools, with roughly 70% of white students in the district not enrolled in its traditional public schools in 2019. With the prevalence of school choice, DC’s public schools became even more racially sorted than the neighborhoods where people live.

And it’s not just DC. Troubled by the expansion of charter schools in the state of California, University of Connecticut researcher Preston C. Green says we must take seriously “the dangers that privatization creates.” Referring to the entities that run charters, he explains, “If these outside organizations are allowed to develop charter schools without any restrictions, they may create a parallel system of schools that drain the resources from the traditional school systems that serve black and Latino communities, which are already underfunded.”

Vouchers redux

As charter schools have taken off, private schools have also drawn more funds from public education in the form of vouchers. Voucher programs now exist in more than 35 states. In theory, they allow more families to afford the cost of private schooling. But in most cases, vouchers primarily benefit high-income families whose students were already enrolled at private schools before vouchers were introduced.

Even with vouchers, many families with children in private school end up paying thousands of dollars per child per year, making vouchers beneficial only to those who can already or almost afford private schooling. Because voucher programs primarily benefit higher-income families, they disproportionately benefit white families.

The voucher system’s effects are most dramatic in Southern states, where private schools are majority-white, public schools are majority-nonwhite, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been redirected through vouchers from public to private schools.

Historian and education researcher Steve Suitts reports that in 2021, “white students comprised 63 percent of the South’s private school enrollment and only 39 percent of the public schools.” Black and Hispanic students made up 53 percent of the South’s public school enrollment but only 26 percent of enrollment in private schools.

The income gap between families at private versus public schools is substantial in the South; the median incomes of private school households across seven southern states “have been from 170 percent to nearly 200 percent greater than incomes of public school households over the last two decades.” Suitts explains that Southern states have far less funding in their public schools — $5,831 less per student on average — than do states outside the South.

Citing this data, Suitts warns against “establish[ing] publicly financed, dual school systems,” with “one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children.” This de facto segregation will no doubt cause the latter to suffer. “The Southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation,” and today “that inability remains.”

Though the expressly racist intent from times of segregation is absent today, the system that’s been created is still a return to racially divided school systems.

Segregation today

The total effect of charters and vouchers on segregation is stark. According to a team of researchers at Stanford, schools today are experiencing levels of segregation not seen in nearly four decades. (They created an interactive map showing levels of segregation that you can explore here.)

Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford who worked on this analysis, stresses that parents’ having choices isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but “one consequence, empirically, of the expansion of this kind of choice regime is that it leads to more segregation, and that should be taken into account.”

Advocates of school choice often say that they are merely endorsing the neutral option. Not everyone must enroll their own children in charters or private schools, they say, but everyone deserves the choice to do what’s best for their family.

But school funding is a zero-sum game. School-choice policies hurt public schools; likewise, policies that keep public funding in traditional public schools are going to be costly for charters and private institutions. When funding is directed toward one institution, it is pulled from another. School choice creates paths for schooling that are, at the very least, separate, and not easy to make equal — especially when they have to compete for funding.