May 22, 2000

School Choice and Racial Diversity

The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education (NCSPE) at Teachers College, Columbia University and The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University

On May 22, 2000, The Civil Rights Project co-sponsored a roundtable discussion on school racial diversity. A major concern surrounding school choice policies is that they will lead to greater racial and socioeconomic isolation. The conference addressed the question: Under what conditions do school choice policies increase or decrease racial diversity?

Following you will find abstracts of some of the research presented at this event:

Charter Schools: An Emerging Market for a New Model of Equity?
Carol Ascher and Nathalis Wamba, Institute for Education and Social Policy, NYU

Grounded in market reform, charter schools have freedom from regulation in exchange for performance-based accountability. Often posed against the “one best system” of neighborhood public schools, charter schools are schools of choice that offer differentiated educational programs aimed at specific students. But what are the implications of choice and variations in both educational visions and student populations for equity? To answer this question, we begin by reviewing equity provisions in state charter legislation. We then review research on school choice germane to charter school equity, as well as a variety of studies, including our own, on charter school demography. Finally, we discuss the challenges that charter schools pose to traditional standards of equity, and consider a standard focused on outcomes.

Why Are Schools Racially Segregated? Implications for School Choice Policies
Hamilton Lankford and James Wyckoff, Department of Economics, State University of New York, Albany

A striking feature of the U.S. K-12 educational system is the pronounced racial, economic and social segregation of students. How has school choice influenced this stratification? The answer to this question is crucial to the design of effective school reform. This paper explores the linkages between the choices that parents make regarding the schools their children attend and the racial segregation of students. We employ very rich student-level data drawn from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing to explore behavioral models of traditional public-private school choice decisions. We find that whites are much more likely to leave urban public schools than are minorities, due primarily to their negative reaction to increasing proportions of minorities and other, correlated, socioeconomic attributes of student peers. We believe that these determinants of choice will hold as other forms of school choice are examined because they reveal important aspects of preferences that are likely independent of the specific institutional structure of choice. These results call for caution in the design of school choice policies if racial integration is a policy goal.

Racial Segregation and the Private/Public School Choice
Robert Fairlie, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), I examine ethnic and racial patterns of private school attendance. I find that a high level of racial sorting occurs between the private and public school systems. At both the 8th and 10th grade levels, blacks and Hispanics are substantially less likely to attend private schools than are whites. I also find evidence that racial sorting between the private and public school systems is partly due to preferences over the racial composition of schools. In particular, I find that white and Hispanic students enroll in private schools in response to large concentrations of black students, although the underlying causes are unknown.

I also examine whether ethnic and racial income disparities contribute to the large differences in private school attendance rates. I find that lower levels of income among black and Hispanic families contribute substantially to the underrepresentation of these two groups in the private school system. My estimates indicate that racial disparities in income levels explain 34.9 to 56.7 percent of the white/black gap in the private school attendance rate and 49.7 to 57.5 percent of the white/Hispanic gap in the private school rate. Finally, I find that whites attend private schools that are less integrated than public schools, and blacks and Hispanics attend private schools that are slightly more integrated than public schools.

These findings can be interpreted as providing both evidence suggesting that vouchers will lead to increased segregation and evidence suggesting that vouchers will lead to decreased segregation.The finding of racially motivated flight from public schools into private schools suggests that the introduction of private school tuition vouchers may lead to more segregation as families have increased opportunities to enroll their children in homogenous schools. In contrast, the finding that racial differences in income explain a significant portion of the gap in private school rates suggests that vouchers directed towards low-income families may reduce this gap. A definitive answer, however, to whether private school vouchers will increase or decrease racial segregation in the nation's schools is only possible after several large-scale and long-term experimental programs are implemented and evaluated.

Social Class Isolation and Racial Diversity in Magnet Schools
Claire Smrekar and Ellen Goldring, School of Education, Vanderbilt University

Magnet schools provide school districts with an alternative to mandatory reassignment and busing by providing a choice for parents among several school options—each offering a different set of distinctive course offerings or instructional formats. In magnet schools, enrollments are often managed to ensure a racially balanced student population.

This paper explores magnet schools and racial diversity. We begin with a review of the research on magnet schools that underscores the importance of the unit of analysis. How effective are magnets in reducing racial isolation? How do these data differ across districts? What accounts for these differential effects?

We follow this macro-level analysis with findings from our three-year study of magnets in two major urban school districts: St. Louis and Cincinnati. This section examines the social context of school choice in-depth in order to understand the interplay between choice policies and efforts aimed at school desegregation. We focus specific attention upon issues of social class isolation in the context of magnet school systems that are designed to address racial diversity, and argue that these persistent patterns of socio-economic segregation can be arrested under certain conditions. We conclude with troubling indications that the post-busing era of desegregation and litigation signals a heavy reliance upon magnet schools and parental choice without the commitment to diversity goals that marked earlier decades of social and educational reform.

Choosing Integration
Jay Greene, Manhattan Institute

Research on the effects of school choice on integration is muddled by confusion over how to conceptualize and measure integration. This paper describes some of the more common errors: 1) confusing more minority students with more integration; 2) failing to have an appropriate benchmark for comparing integration; 3) comparing choice program participants to non-participants rather than examining the results of the programs in terms of integration; and 4) taking the racial composition of school districts or systems as a given rather than comparing the racial composition of schools to the broader community. I propose instead that the effect of choice on integration should be assessed by comparing the racial composition of individual schools to the racial composition of the broader community in which schools are located. If chosen private schools, on average, more closely resemble the racial composition of the broader community (and are less racially homogeneous) than are public schools, on average, then choice is positively related to integration.

Studies that are consistent with this better standard for conceptualizing and measuring integration show that free chosen schools tend to be more integrated. Choice promotes integration because traditional public schools assign students to schools based on where they live, thereby replicating and reinforcing racially segregated housing patterns. By detaching where students go to school from where they live, chosen schools tend to be better integrated. Parents may also have greater confidence that integration will be well-managed in chosen schools, reducing the resistance to integration that often faces efforts by traditional public schools.

Controlled Choice and Racial Diversity
Amy Stuart Wells, UCLA and Russell Sage Foundation, and Robert Crain, Teachers College, Columbia University

This paper looks closely at what we currently know about these voluntary desegregation programs and asks what we might learn from these policies that can inform current debates on school choice and racial diversity. We begin with the political context of these programs, which has clearly shaped the way in which they have been portrayed – first as the very necessary alternative to mandatory assignment programs and, more recently, as an unnecessary race-based policy in the era of complete deregulation. We then we review relevant literature on two popular forms of voluntary school desegregation, namely voluntary transfer programs – also called majority-to-minority transfer plans – and controlled choice programs. Although this research literature is rather thin, especially when it comes to controlled choice, we are able to draw some preliminary conclusions about the impact of these programs on racial segregation and diversity in schools.

Despite their political context, many of these choice-oriented school desegregation programs represent attempts by school districts, judges and advocates to strike a delicate balance between individual parents' demands for choice and the broader, societal goal of equal opportunities for all. If for no other reason than to understand this balance, we should pay close attention to what these programs accomplished, how they accomplished it, and whose interests were served.