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Choice Theories and the Schools

Gary Orfield

School choice has become so important in American educational policy discussions because it resonates strongly with the basic beliefs of many Americans and with important aspects of American social and political ideology. Wealthy business leaders who insist on data rather than theories in their own businesses pour money into charter schools based on a simple faith that markets relying on individual choice have transformative power and that governmental regulations and unionized work forces are the only basic obstacles to educational equity. Eli Broad, the Los Angeles billionaire whose foundation has had a great impact on current educational policy debates and trained many current school superintendents and administrators, has often expressed the views that public schools should be closed down, that teachers’ unions are a big problem, and that business principles could radically improve education. His foundation and the Gates Foundation contributed sixty million dollars to a 2008 public policy campaign to help shape the presidential debate, and their organizations have had large impacts on Barack Obama's education agenda.¹ They are applying their political ideology of sweeping deregulation to education reform even as the nation struggles to recover from the extremely destructive impacts of excessive deregulation of banking and financial institutions. Sometimes the groups they fund attack researchers who present data that challenge these assumptions, targeting them with emotional attacks that claim they do not care about minority or poor students. Often these foundations seem uninterested in research and certain that choice is a powerful educational treatment for inequality. For example, proponents define charter schools as good in and of themselves because they are not part of public school systems and further justify them by the fact that many parents enroll their children there—regardless of whether they actually improve educational outcomes. This broad free market theory of choice has a strong hold on current policy debates and is the central focus of this chapter.

There was a dramatic shift in theories about school choice in the 1970s and 1980s, directly reflecting changes in politics and law. The discussion changed from the use of choice as a tool for pursuing integration and diversity to the idea that choice itself was the treatment for educational inequality. This chapter explores the roots of these theories and some of the basic logical and factual questions about them. Obviously, in developing a policy it is important not only to have a theory about how it might work but also to critically examine the evidence about the theory's logic and the validity of its premises. Since any theory leading to a value judgment or action prescription must have both value and factual premises, both will be discussed here. This chapter begins with the dominant theory of the present generation and then looks back at the evolution of theories about the relationship between choice and equity, ending with a series of hypotheses about choice systems that the rest of the book explores.

It is important to note that both what I call the market theory of choice, which has been dominant in the past three decades, and integration theory, which emerged in the civil rights era, share a constantly expressed central goal or value: providing better educational opportunities for students in inferior neighborhood public schools. The fundamental differences between these two theories are in their factual premises and in the relative primacy they give to individual versus group and community goals.

The market and integration theories both have fervent supporters and fervent critics. Some opponents of choice are simply opposed to choice, seeing it as inconsistent with equality and a uniform set of educational offerings and describing it as a strategy to undermine teachers’ rights and public schools more broadly. In many districts, students in regular schools and their parents complain of what they see as the preference given to magnets and charters. Jonathan Kozol, who has been a leading observer of U.S. schools for half a century, for example, points to the extreme stratification developing in Manhattan, where small “boutique” schools that serve elite populations are proliferating while a great many poor children attend weak schools.² These are issues well worth debating but are not the subject of this book, which is devoted to examining more closely the kinds of choice, not questions of whether school choice should exist. In our society—where extremely unequal schools perpetuate and even intensify severe inequalities in opportunities and income, no significant forces are working to ameliorate underlying economic inequalities that are the most extreme among modern democracies, and school reform agendas are usually limited and unsuccessful—making the right use of choice is very important. While interventionist civil rights and social policies have been defeated in recent decades, choice is still an open policy alternative, and the debate over divergent choice theories is a priority. This does not mean that a much broader agenda of social and economic reform is not necessary. It clearly is if we are to have a more just and equal society.

Some theorists and policy makers treat choice as highly beneficial exactly because it creates what they describe as a market, and they believe markets by their nature produce better results than government. Paul Peterson, for example, writes, “Public education in the United States seems incapable of self improvement,” noting that expenditures have risen but test scores have changed little. He quotes another leading critic (and fellow Hoover Institute member), Eric Hanushek, who concludes that “productivity [the ratio of achievement gains to dollars spent] in schools has fallen by 2.5 to 3 percent per year.”³ Other theorists see choice as a two-edged sword. They favor certain kinds of choice not as ends in themselves but as means to correct inequality in education and rectify the clear inferiority of schools often educating minority and poor students. At the same time, they view unrestricted choice as a threat likely to compound inequalities and stratification. To them, choice is a potentially powerful tool for good or ill that must be channeled.

These contrasting beliefs and the theories that grow from them matter very much in policy decisions about choice. These different philosophies are based on divergent assumptions about the nature of markets, rights, government, race, and society but a shared conviction that predictable results will follow the adoption of certain kinds of policies. Because these assumptions are often decisive in motivating policy decisions and shaping the discourse about choice policies, it is important to examine them.

Though these theories arise from philosophical or ideological assumptions, the predictions that flow from them can be assessed though research. If data confirms the predictions, the theory is strengthened. But if the predicted results do not occur or very different results are found, the theory is undermined and the argument must be reformulated. A theory whose premises are disproved is not a reliable basis for policy, and a theory with contradictory premises needs clarification. This book is an effort to examine the conflicting propositions of these two outlooks and offer a theory that fits the observed facts, providing a basis for developing and implementing the most effective school choice policy.

AMERICA'S TRADITIONAL IDEOLOGY OF EDUCATION

Choice was virtually irrelevant to educational policy for the great bulk of U.S. history. The dominant ideology in American education from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s was that expanding the free, nonsectarian common school system and opening it to all would provide an equal opportunity for the improvement of all. Schools have been seen as a central institution for social mobility, for inculcating an understanding of national institutions and democracy, and for creating a common culture.⁴ While they have always fallen short of these ideals, these goals have been widely shared. The struggles to open opportunity to minorities, women, the handicapped, non-English speakers, and others have always included a focus on full and fair access to schools. The claim that educational opportunity preserves the possibility of fair outcomes if students work hard enough has often justified the obvious conflicts between American belief in individualism, individual responsibility, and a real possibility of success, and the deep and persisting inequalities among groups.⁵ U.S. society is therefore seen as morally good, not because it produces equality but because it provides a fair pathway to possible success for everyone. Each person is responsible for his or her own response to opportunities and success or failure in the market. When the educational system is challenged by critics, one response tends to be proposals for an expansion of opportunity.

Though U.S. public schools were remarkable in bringing together European immigrants (and later their children) from nations that differed profoundly in many dimensions, their record with nonwhites has been a massive disappointment. Indians, African Americans, and people of Mexican origin in the United States received little education until well into the twentieth century.⁶ Rectifying this profound inequality has been a central issue in civil rights struggles.

For the two centuries after the first census in 1790, nonwhites constituted between 10 and 20 percent of the United States population, and the percentage of immigrants reached a historic low in the mid-twentieth century, before the 1965 immigration reform. Then the proportion of nonwhites exploded, particularly among the young, greatly raising the educational stakes.

The mid-1800s common school reforms that created public school systems were motivated by a belief that all students should be offered an adequate curriculum established by the state government. The idea of providing prescribed equal educational experiences was so strong that there was, in fact, a struggle in some parts of the country in the name of equal preparation to ban private religious education (the private sector of U.S. education has always been largely religious schools). In its classic 1925 decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court rejected an Oregon initiative that required all children to attend public schools, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to choose a private school. It held unanimously that “the fundamental liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”⁷

More than 80 percent of private school students attend religious schools, but private schools educate only a small minority of American students—now about a tenth, down from a sixth in the mid-twentieth century. Even after the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris breached the legal prohibition on public subsidizing of religious schools, there was little movement in the country to adopt school vouchers, and many states still forbid aid to religious schools.⁸ Public schools operating under state law and the policies of state governments and local districts are clearly the dominant force in American education. As a result, the most consequential choice debates concern public schools.

From the mid-1800s, when they became widely established in the United States, until the 1960s, there was little provision for choice in public schools. All children were required to go to school, which was assigned by where they lived (and sometimes on the basis of their race), and they either went there or paid for a private school, which was also required to offer the basic state curriculum. In theory everyone was exposed to the same kind of educational opportunity. The common school ideology emphasized uniformity and universalism, at least for whites. Everyone was going to be introduced to the same basic learning by qualified teachers. There were decades of struggle to build systems of public education with adequate standards of teacher training and curriculum and to eliminate politics and partisanship in school operations across the country. Schools were seen as essential for the development and progress of communities and were expected to infuse millions of immigrants from divergent backgrounds with a shared culture and civic understanding.⁹

Until the mid-twentieth century, the federal government had almost no role in education policy, so the focal point for the development of public schools was state governments. Their efforts were highly uneven.¹⁰ Additionally, in the mid-twentieth century seventeen states still had duplicate school systems serving the same areas, one for black and one for white students. Indian and Latino students also had separate schools or classrooms in some states. Linda Brown had to walk past a white school to a more distant black school, prompting her father to become the lead plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, which the Supreme Court decided by outlawing systems of schools intentionally segregated by race, generating decades of struggle.

Until the 1970s, most of the civil rights battle was about access to the same schools in the same neighborhoods. When it turned out that residential segregation in the increasingly urbanized South was producing segregated and unequal schools even without state segregation laws, the Supreme Court ordered mandatory desegregation across neighborhood boundaries in 1971.¹¹ It extended desegregation to northern and western cities in its 1973 Keyes decision but drew a line between city and suburban schools the very next year in Milliken, making desegregation impossible in many places with city school systems with few remaining white students.¹² Courts began dismantling desegregation orders seventeen years later, when the 1991 Oklahoma City v. Dowell decision allowed cities to have segregated neighborhood schools after a period of desegregation.¹³

Tasked with taking action against segregation, cities faced tension over the mandatory reassignment of students and teachers by courts, which led to a strong focus on new forms of race-conscious choice combining magnet programs with desegregation policies. Today, however, color-blind choice has become a central part of the discussion of educational reform, based on a theory that challenges the American tradition of public schools controlled by local elected boards and assumes that semiprivate schools are superior and unregulated individual choice will solve inequalities. As schools become ever more segregated by race and class and the links between segregation and inequality are more fully documented, the issue of segregation, of course, will not go away. The policy shift is often justified by claims that schools outside the public school bureaucracy will solve the problem because the need to compete makes them superior.

MARKET THEORY

The theory of school choice that has been most widely adopted in the past three decades in the United States, the market theory, argues that giving parents the right to chose schools for themselves and giving educators the opportunity to create or transform autonomous schools of choice will have a powerful educational impact.¹⁴ The goal of this theory is equal opportunity to make a choice, assuming that parents know what is best and will equally understand and take advantage of broader opportunities without assistance. Obviously this theory starts with the individual, sees regulation by public agencies and legislatures as barriers to opportunity rather than guarantees of equal treatment, and assumes that a broad scope of individual choice will produce greater equity and higher levels of achievement.

The complicated part of this theory is that although the claim that choice will improve opportunities seems to be a factual premise subject to empirical investigation, it is also a central value premise in the broader theory of market economics and the political philosophy of individualism. That market competition creates value is a central premise of both the discipline of economics and conservative ideology, which therefore see markets as good by definition. Classical economics postulates that if both buyers and sellers are free to compete, there will be the most efficient outcomes, providing good products at good prices and strong incentives for improving them. In education the dominant version of this theory argues that if parents can choose to move their children, families and educators can create new schools exempt from regulation, they will not be trapped in inferior settings, and students will have much better opportunities. Children will be able to move out of settings where education reform rarely succeeds. The theory also holds that if educators are no longer limited (or protected) by school bureaucracies and union contracts, which by their very nature limit market competition, they will create new and better schools offering much richer opportunities, and those that do this the best will be rewarded with growing enrollments and public funds. According to this theory, rigid bureaucracies and self-aggrandizing unions, which conspire to block educational innovation and protect incompetence from the consequences of failure, are responsible for inferior schools, which consistently fail to meet standards.¹⁵ Without competition, poor parents lacking money to buy themselves better alternatives through the housing market have nothing to bargain with because they have no ability to reject their local school. Teachers and administrators—as well as the unions and public school systems they're part of—can use their monopoly power to exploit helpless communities, protecting and enhancing their own status and resources regardless of the harm done to needy students.

In contrast, according to this theory, schools of choice have to be better to compete and survive.¹⁶ And beyond their benefits to the parents who choose to transfer students to them and their contribution to breaking the chains of bureaucracy and teachers’ organizations, the theory continues, these new schools—combined with the threat that parents will pull their children out of weak schools—will force traditional schools, which are locked in ineffectual bureaucratic cynicism, to transform themselves as their existence and budgets are threatened, thus improving education for the children whose parents do not choose to transfer them.

The market theory is not a zero-sum theory, where some lose and others win; it is an optimistic, positive-sum theory. It posits both the opportunity for strong individual benefits that motivate the choice process and, at no additional cost, competition pressures that will improve the schools not chosen. This is the application of Adam Smith's “invisible hand” to educational reform. Smith's ingenious insight, leading to the founding of modern economics, was to understand the ways in which individuals competing to buy and sell things in open markets, all seeking their own advantage, can, with no intention of doing so, increase overall efficiency and productiveness. The market rewards producers who are effective and efficient and destroys those who are not, thus encouraging growing efficiency and fair prices. It also brings together the information and energies of both buyers and sellers and directs profits to where they will be most productively invested. Smith explained:

The invisible hand works without any awareness by the individual pursuit of profit. He [the individual buyer or seller] generally... neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it.... By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this ... led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention .... By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the social more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.¹⁷

The dominant theory of educational choice is an effort to directly apply this classic view of economic markets to the operation of public school systems, where the invisible hand will do things public decisions cannot. Anyone who has seen the vast selection of goods and services generated by worldwide competition or examined the difficulties encountered in the centrally planned command economies of Communist countries has to concede that markets can accomplish some remarkable things. Likewise, bureaucratic planning is a very complex task that has often produced goods of poor quality. These economic experiences are central to the argument of the market theory of school choice. But they are, of course, about commodities and products, not schools. And in all advanced societies, markets are highly regulated to prevent dishonesty, to assure fair competition, and to ban products that would cause harm to their buyers. As Smith himself recognized, government has essential functions to perform in administering and facilitating commerce and providing education.¹⁸ American conservatives tend to favor a more radical version of unregulated markets than did the founder of modern economics.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freedman was a leading exponent of this theory of educational reform for half a century. Friedman, whose views have had an enormous impact on American conservatism, advocated school vouchers beginning in the 1950s, seeing them as equalizing opportunity through competition and choice. His statements were a mix of pure economic theory and a kind of antigovernment attitude that often flows directly from the basic premise that markets are inherently superior. “Our goal,” he said, “is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go.... If we had that system of free choice we would also have a system of competition, innovation which would change the character of education.”¹⁹

Calling the public school system “the single most Socialist industry in the U.S., leaving aside the military,” he said it was “a monopoly” whose harm was “exacerbated by the fact that it has been largely taken over by teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.” He concluded that “reform has to come through competition from the outside and the only way you can get competition is by making it possible for parents to have the ability to choose.” Competition would lead to “the same kind of change in the provision of education as you have had in industries like the computer industry, the television industry and other things.”²⁰ Failing schools, in this view, are like failing factories.

Friedman argued that markets would be particularly helpful to the disadvantaged: “The people who live in Harlem or the slums or the corresponding areas in LA or San Francisco, they can go to the same stores, shop in the same stores everybody else can, they can buy the same automobiles, they can go to [the] supermarket but they have very limited choice of schools. Everybody agrees that the schools in those areas are the worst[:] they are poor.” He also noted that “those of us that are in the upper income classes have freedom of choice for our children in various ways[:] we can decide where to live and we can choose places to live that have good schools or ... [pay] tuition at a private school. It seems to me utterly unfair that those opportunities should not be open to everybody at all levels of income.”²¹

Though it was inconsistent with the tradition of American education, the market theory linked widely shared antigovernment and free enterprise values. In a society where there has been little educational progress for several decades and where increasing numbers of students are locked into schools where few succeed, it is easy to understand why this theory has great appeal both to business-oriented conservatives and to families with children in failing schools.²² Since the civil rights era ended, almost all of the attention to choice policy has focused on the market theory, largely ignoring earlier theories relating inequality to exclusion and segregation. There was a change from presuming that inequality was based on social stratification and could only be remedied by a consciously integrationist use of choice (supported by other social policies to improve conditions for families) to assuming that inequality was caused by bureaucratic rigidity and the excessive power of teachers’ organizations and could be changed simply by offering unregulated individual school choices.

Assumptions of the Market Theory

The classic assumptions in market economics, which specify the necessary preconditions for true markets working efficiently, have to be tested against what is known about the actual conditions of choice in urban American schools. The idea that markets are both fair and efficient in allocating resources and opportunities is based on the assumptions that (1) all potential customers have equal and accurate information, (2) there is broad competition among many suppliers and therefore a strong incentive for each to offer a better product, and (3) all buyers have an equal chance to buy. With many buyers and many sellers, and especially with simple, standardized, easily understood products like bushels of wheat or bales of cotton, sellers are forced to compete on price because no one has significant control of the overall market. If all these conditions exist, the theory holds, the better providers will prosper, the worst will fail, consumers will get better products at lower prices, results will be fair, and political forces and special connections will not matter. Under this theory applied to education, the previous monopolistic institutions (public schools) will have to compete for students and become better because otherwise they will lose per-student funding and staff.

Key assumptions of the market theory were clear in the Friedman argument. According to him, the basic problem with education for poor and minority families in Harlem and elsewhere was the “socialist” monopoly controlled by unions and bureaucracies, which stifled innovation in public schools. The cure was competition and “freedom of choice,” which would make educational opportunity “open to everybody.”²³ The union stranglehold would end and innovation would flourish.

John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe's controversial and influential 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, purported to show statistically that public schools were systematically inferior to nonpublic schools and that this was because they were subject to the political control of elected officials. This book, which used data from a national longitudinal study, quickly became a leading justification for voucher supporters. Private school vouchers would mean that students and schools were matched by the informed market choices of parents, whose only real interest was good education for their children. Although many researchers harshly criticized the book, it became a sensation in the policy world, partly because of the extraordinary claims Chubb made, for example, in his article “America's Public Schools: Choice Is a Panacea.”²⁴ The idea that there was a simple, choice-based way to accomplish what government had failed to do for generations had great appeal in an era of business dominance.

Though the arguments of Friedman, Chubb, and Moe aimed at supporting private schools and came before the invention of charter schools in 1991, they are widely cited by charter school leaders, many of whom believe they are offering the same kind of challenge to regular public schools. Charter schools enjoy strong support from business leaders who see them as entrepreneurial institutions creating a market and encouraging innovation. The foundations of the billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family of the Walmart fortune, as well as the Wall Street private equity billionaire Theodore J. Forstmann, are just a few of the prominent supporters.²⁵

Limits to the Market Theory

The fundamental problems with applying market theory to education are that the basic assumptions do not hold even in the realm of buying and selling much simpler products and services and that, even if they did, a market for schools has very complex products. The ideal model of unrestricted markets has a limited connection with reality. Almost all of the world's major successful market economies are heavily regulated to protect workers’ and buyers’ health and safety and to prevent anticompetitive trusts and financial conspiracies—in short, to prevent the major abuses that occur in uncontrolled markets. The goal of those selling goods is to make as large a profit as possible, and without regulation this can often be done in ways that mislead, endanger, or cheat customers, limit competition, or degrade the environment. The truth is that those who cheat will often make more profit, at least in the short run, and competition can produce a race to the bottom. The corporate structure, which offers huge compensation to executives who make short-term profits, often rewards the most rapacious behavior, which achieves quick results. It shields leadership from personal responsibility. Such massive prizes and minimal risks too often incentivize not the wisest and most ethical long-term investment but quite the opposite. When markets are deregulated, as were the banking and financial industries in the United States before the Great Recession, very profitable business can wreck the economy and threaten the entire world.²⁶ Markets can be a powerful force for better choices, but they can also be corrupted and distorted. Those without rules are risky and inefficient for everyone. How can you know that you are receiving the right amount of something if the weights are not regulated and checked, or that your money is safe in a bank if the bank is free to wildly speculate with its depositors’ money? How could anyone reasonably buy a stock if companies could simply make up false business reports?

Getting the best results from competition requires enforcement of the rules of the game by government. When one uses the promise of private gains as the basic engine of change, one must channel that great force to produce real gains and limit harm. The drive for profits is a powerful motivator, and if it is possible to get more while doing less by cheating, the market will be corrupted. America's founders had no delusion that men were angels. That is why they designed a system of government full of limits, with institutions balancing and checking one another and with federal power offsetting the tendency toward local tyrannies.²⁷ It is ironic that the same ideology that assumes people are inherently inclined toward evil and corruption in politics and therefore need to be watched and limited somehow believes that people in markets are not subject to the same temptations. What we see in many discussions of school choice is a school produced by an ideal type of market instead of the real situation facing the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Examples abound about the necessity of limits on markets. Nuclear power produces a vast amount of electricity, but it can devastate the environment if not controlled properly. And while its profits are short term, it produces by-products with very long lives, thousands of years, whose cost to future generations must be considered. Everyone wants cheap flights, to cite another example, but very few people would want to fly through uncontrolled airspace in planes not regulated for safety. Modern capitalism is competition within rules of the game set by law and regulation. But those who favor school choice often strongly oppose regulation, having embraced a romantic version of markets.

The classic products of markets are objects, subject to regulation, not institutions that can capture their regulators. One of the differences between commodities markets and competition among schools is that the largest system of choice schools outside public control, charter schools, are not passive objects of choice produced by private markets but instead almost entirely government subsidized and very active politically, often succeeding in controlling the rules of the game to favor themselves.²⁸ They aren't really private anymore: any institution almost totally dependent on public dollars inevitably becomes quasi-public. And such institutions virtually inevitably organize lobbies whose objectives are to get more funds and minimize regulation, since their very survival depends upon a continuing flow of public dollars within a political process that distributes the permissions to create schools and decides on their funding.²⁹

Market advocates assume that nonpublic institutions can remain independent from government and nonpolitical even when they are completely dependent upon public funds, forgetting the saying that is often called the golden rule of government: he who has the gold makes the rules. Government has vast leverage over the institutions it totally funds, which usually must win battles for appropriations every year. Whether the group is composed of scientists, green industries, or artists, if it depends on public dollars, it will organize associations to promote its mission and attempt to influence decisions about governmental resources. Totally dependent “private” institutions can become subject to many of the demands for accountability that public institutions face. Many “bureaucratic” rules have their origin in such demands. These groups must mobilize ideological and political support to protect themselves and to assure their continuity, and they typically do this through the creation of interest groups and lobbies. They may be private and nonpolitical in theory, but the logic of their situation makes them public and political in important ways.³⁰ The choice and charter lobbies are sometimes powerful enough to control the institutions that fund them, which is truly the antithesis of market competition.³¹ This is doubtless a reason for the continued public funding of many charters with dismal or mediocre results. Such actions, of course, directly limit the power of market discipline.

The fact that voucher schools and charter schools have been able to secure public funding—often taken from public school systems that have many unmet needs—and to largely prevent effective regulation or sanctions reflects their political mobilization more than their educational benefits. Conservative support mobilized by the market metaphor has helped them to win policies that subsidize their expansion without demonstrating any academic advantages. Foundations and wealthy donors finance public relations and supplemental funding for the schools, and school founders and owners at the local and state levels mobilize to create powerful pressure groups.

It is impossible to explain school choice policy simply as a market mechanism, since charters have been able to define themselves in public as inherently good while avoiding the kinds of accountability and sanctions that public schools with similar achievement statistics often face. Market advocates are intensely critical of the political power of teachers’ organizations but seemingly blind to the way the political power of charter schools severely limits market forces. In fact, they often fund charter school lobbies, frequently using foundations to reap tax subsidies while doing so.

Politics aside, there is a theoretical problem of equating efficiency with equity. Markets, by their nature, produce losers as well as winners, and market theory does nothing to guarantee equity of opportunity or outcomes, since many lose their resources in the long run even under perfect market conditions. The unequal rewards that come to the best producers and the losses of those who fail may drive competition and produce more efficiency, more bushels of corn, but they do nothing to assure that all buyers have an equal or even a sufficient supply of grain. Competition in true markets produces winners and losers—the creative destruction of capitalism. Some schools would succeed and grow, and others would lose everything. In a parallel way some students would make good (high-profit) decisions, and others would lose their school or even end up in a worse one. Creative destruction is supposed to result in more effective producers and lower prices but not to guarantee uniform standards or equality of outcomes for buyers.

A perfect market is not an empirical reality; it is a Platonic ideal type, like perfect honesty or perfect racial integration or a perfect defense policy. In reality, imperfections abound. The theory of perfect markets should be tempered by the skepticism about perfect governments that is so characteristic of American political philosophy. If we had a perfect democracy, all citizens would have an equal chance to participate, be treated equally by others, and confront no barriers, and all would willingly obey the decisions reached by the majority after full and fair consideration. But these ideal conditions do not exist in real societies. Power without limits is power that will be abused. James Madison sagely notes in the Federalist Paper number 51, written during the national debate over the adoption of the Constitution: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”³² Since neither of these has ever been the case, Madison argues, we need to regulate and limit each of the government's branches so it preserves freedom and can meet national needs but not harm its own citizens. One of the distinctive characteristics of American political philosophy is that it balances power with real constraints. In economic thought, however, particularly in times of business dominance, there is a tendency to assume that participants in markets will behave like angels rather than use whatever opportunities they have to maximize their interests, whether these reflect market ideals or not. It would be healthy if people applied the skeptical attitudes toward governmental power in political philosophy to markets and were more concerned about what actually happens rather than what the theory suggests. There are tremendous profits to be had in limiting competition, getting and exploiting inside information, and making people believe that products are more valuable than they are.

Further, in a perfect market, the theory argues, all potential buyers and sellers have an equal chance to participate. But if one group of competitors unfairly controls the rules of the game, they threaten the whole idea. If new schools outside the system can tap public school resources, attract the better students, send those with low scores or special needs back to public schools, avoid accountability, and create the belief that they are superior to regular public schools, a negative-sum game of increasing stratification and inequality can result, with the schools left behind demoralized and defunded. The students in public schools would be not beneficiaries of increased competition but the special victims of a distorted market. Something like this may well be happening in cities such as Detroit, which closed half of its public schools as students transferred to charters in other districts, and New Orleans.³³ Similar trends were apparent in other cities. Los Angeles School Board Member Tamar Galatzan in 2012 asked, concerning a wave of charters serving middle-class and white students in her part of the nation's second-largest district, “Will traditional public schools become a repository for the poor and the special education students of our city, with everyone else fleeing the traditional public school system? What does that mean for the future of California?"³⁴

Even if, on average, the overall set of choices in a market improves, there is nothing to guarantee that the results for all groups of consumers will be more equal, or to prevent them from becoming more unequal. Indeed, in an arena— such as the real estate market—that has features of a true market, with a great many buyers and sellers and no one controlling much of the total market, some well-intentioned buyers lose everything, while some with a more shrewd sense of timing become rich, taking advantage of the losses of many others. Inequality is an essential product of market competition; in fact, it is a basic driving force. People with better information about and understanding of the system will get the best choices. This is why there have to be rules for markets to be fair: true information must be provided, competitors who cheat must be excluded, contracts must be enforced, and intimidation must be forbidden. Getting the balance right is a complex task.

Market theory is most directly applicable to the buying and selling of simple interchangeable products among thousands of independent producers and potential buyers and a simple and clear way to buy and sell the products. Under those circumstances, comparing prices is the only thing a consumer needs to do. Obviously, under modern economic conditions—with specialized and complex products, high entry costs, often limited competition, limited consumer understanding of differences, massive advertising designed to inflate the value of products, and a tremendous inequality of power between sellers and buyers— things are different.

The theory of market choice in schooling assumes that the customers (the parents) understand the different offerings and have meaningful choices. Unfortunately, this and other key parts of the theory don’t hold in school choice. Schools are not a standardized or easily understood commodity. Even experts struggle to assess the real opportunities and impacts of individual schools. The only generally available information, test scores, mostly reflect out-of-school factors and can be manipulated in many ways.³⁵ Schooling is a highly complex commodity supplied in many forms, with high costs of entry into the market, and schools usually provide little useful comparative information to parents. How does an immigrant single mother who is not an English speaker, for example, acquire information and make good choices for the education of her children in a large city? (Twenty-one percent of U.S. children are growing up in homes where they speak a language other than English.)³⁶ What does choice mean in that context, and what forces influence choice or failure to choose? Is it fair that those who do not understand the system and do not choose often end up in the weakest schools, or that schools of choice often find ways to exclude the most expensive and low-scoring students?

There are rarely multiple suppliers of public schools in a given geographic area. Except in school districts with broad school choice programs and free transportation supporting them (conditions usually produced by desegregation plans), the options are seriously limited. Often there is only the neighborhood public school. Charter schools often do not offer either distinctive curricula or parent recruitment and transportation, so they may serve only a segmented market. Magnet and charter schools may have admissions criteria and may or may not provide free transportation. Schools in danger of losing students typically make few efforts to inform parents of transfer policies, if such exist. Such policies often don’t provide for transportation anyway. Segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods might have a public school, a neighborhood charter school with equally low-scoring students and inexperienced teachers, and, in a few places, a voucher private school, all of which tend to be likewise segregated and impoverished. Many students with an unambiguous legal right to transfer, such as those in schools consistently failing to meet No Child Left Behind progress requirements, have few good choices, because most of their districts have few high-performing schools of any type.³⁷

Two of the most important limits on the school market are jurisdictional boundaries and lack of transportation, both of which radically curtail choice. Metropolitan regions are the natural market area for most economic decisions in a society where more than four-fifths of the population lives in or near cities. No one hesitates to cross a municipal boundary when shopping, when buying a home, when seeking entertainment, or in many other aspects of life. In fact, a massive part of advertising is to inform people about their opportunities and to draw them across those borders. In all but a handful of choice plans, however, school district lines become absolute walls, which separate the students most in need of strong schools from the vast majority of schools with the most resources, the best teachers, and the strongest curricula and paths to success in college.

Districts with significantly stronger schools often don’t provide free transportation, which limits choice on the basis of income and wealth, reinforcing inequalities. In these areas, families without the resources to provide their own transportation can only watch as better-off children enjoy them. The school choice theories and policies that have been dominant since 1980 almost totally ignore these very real market barriers. A choice system that cuts off the vast majority of the strongest schools from the children who need them most and instead preserves them for students with many types of home advantages is not a market system in any meaningful sense. Many critics who agree with Milton Friedman’s complaint that poor students do not have the same chance as affluent students to access better schools strongly oppose policies that would enable many of these students to enroll in the schools in the critics’ own suburban districts. It is a curious fact that market models are rarely applied to the mainstream schools in the predominantly middle-class suburban communities where many of their advocates live. If markets create such gains, why do affluent areas not also seek to use them? Why do suburban communities wall off their schools and prosecute parents from other jurisdictions who try to access them? In fact, most such communities not only provide no choice in schools but also do everything possible to limit their housing market in ways that exclude families who are not affluent but might wish to send their children to these neighborhoods’ schools.³⁸ Suburban districts simply assign children to the nearest school, and their schools, of course, report high achievement, graduation, and college-going statistics. Suburban housing and land-use policies, which exclude affordable and subsidized housing while taking no significant action against housing discrimination, produce dramatic contradictions with market theories. Though school opportunity is tied to housing, there is no metropolitan housing development market, and local land-use and zoning regulations forbid builders from producing affordable rental housing for families in most areas with excellent schools—facts that are also almost completely ignored in choice discussions.³⁹ Yet it is clear that subsidized housing, for example, has long been and continues to be developed in ways that exacerbate school segregation and unequal educational opportunity.⁴⁰

The fact that individual municipalities have the right to exclude students from other school districts is the basic but overlooked cause of school inequality. Suburbs with strong schools often use their housing and building-code policies to exclude all but the upper-income fraction of families. Few of these communities have serious policies to deal with the continuing housing discrimination, documented in housing market audits, against nonwhite families who have enough income to live there. These policies give affluent suburban communities the advantages of access to the economy of the metro region while shifting many of the costs back to the cities and denying city students access to their schools. When Milton Friedman, Abigail Thernstrom, and many others argue that choice should provide poor children with the same opportunities their own children receive, they don’t really mean the same middle- and upper-class suburban schools connected to good colleges; they mean the choice of a charter or a voucher school that serves other poor minority children. They certainly don’t discuss the extreme control of the housing market, which prevents any of the children they express sympathy for from living in suburban communities where good public schools already exist. They use the market metaphor selectively. Claiming that unequal schools reflect individual choice and not systemic problems can shift the blame from a general system of racial and class segregation to the “antimarket” teachers’ organizations and school districts that resist charter schools.

It could be argued that suburban residents don’t need schools of choice because they can choose their schools through the housing market. There is, of course, some truth to this. White and Asian families with substantial incomes can, of course, exercise broad choice in where they live and what school district they have access to. Being able to choose housing, to get favorable loans, and to live in a costly community is linked to improved schooling opportunity. The frequent use of school test scores in marketing housing is a reflection of widespread concern for at least one aspect of school quality in housing searches.⁴¹ (Interestingly enough, there is also evidence that whites are moving to whiter areas, regardless of school quality.)⁴² Given the other forces that affect housing searches even for the middle class, however—such as amount of equity, previous location, job and institutional commitments, transit and freeway locations, location of relatives, and ability to obtain mortgages—even families with the ability to choose often confront limitations accessing strong schools. And from 2007 to 2012, a severe housing market crisis locked millions of families in place regardless of their desires, stuck in underwater mortgages on residences they cannot afford to sell. But in spite of these limits on choosing schools through housing decisions, there is a striking disinterest in and even hostility toward the expansion of charter schools in many suburban communities. The reality is that these communities tend to be satisfied with their schools and often see charters as threatening the financial base of a healthy and desirable system. Federal policy squarely focuses intense external pressure to expand charters on places with low-scoring schools, which include most segregated low-income schools. There is very little external pressure on affluent suburban communities to create them. We force poor communities to implement forms of choice their school officials do not want because of the belief of others that it will be good for them since choice is inherently superior. In the communities where business leaders, policy makers, and other advocates often live, however, there is little choice.

The truncated school choices for city residents are very different from what an actual market would offer. Often, in paying more attention to the theory than to the situation on the ground, advocates treat the choice that is available (such as a neighborhood charter school not significantly different from the local public school) as a major solution. To call this a market and to suggest that these choices are somehow similar or equal to what affluent families get through their choice of communities is to stretch the market metaphor to the breaking point. What is valuable about a market is real choices, among all available goods, at prices that are lowered by widespread competition. What we have in school choice programs today is limited choice, little information for parents, and an unsupported theory that any nonpublic school will produce educational gains simply because it is nonpublic. The fact that parents seek this limited choice is taken as evidence that choice is better, and data to the contrary is ignored.

Market theory assumes that people know what they are buying and make decisions based on comparisons of offerings from many providers. If people do not know what they are buying or have false information, markets are inefficient. Theorists of school choice often simply assume that parents have good knowledge and that their decisions show that the chosen schools are better. The actual state of parental knowledge and how it relates to school quality are, of course, researchable questions. What we know is troubling. Empirical studies show that rates of both knowledge about and the use of choice programs strongly skew toward the more educated, the more affluent, and the better-connected families.⁴³ This pattern is stark and clear. If unequal knowledge reflects family inequalities, choice can become a mechanism to reinforce rather than overcome stratification.

The school choice market theory assumes that educational quality will be the basis of choice. But if the chooser has little valid information, this cannot be true. Additionally, it is clear that white families often make choices not on educational information but on issues such as race, a major nonmarket factor that, if not dealt with, will increase the already severe racial separation in unequal schools and undermine the stability of integrated schools and neighborhoods.⁴⁴ The fact that unrestricted choice led to white families leaving integrated areas half a century ago was a major reason why civil rights policies restricted choices that increased segregation. When whites leave or stop moving into a neighborhood, resegregation is often rapid and usually triggers a similar change in school population, producing a situation where families who accept or prefer stable integration lose that choice. When desegregation policies were dropped, the result was frequently rapid resegregation of the choice schools.⁴⁵

Another question in market theory is whether all potential customers are treated equally. In an ideal market, anyone who can pay the market price (in the school market, anyone whose tuition costs can be covered by private funding or per-student public funding) is treated equally. Often in school choice situations, however, there are additional requirements or screening methods for students, or a lack of information intelligible to, for instance, non-English-speaking parents, which introduce nonmarket factors and may screen out the most disadvantaged students.

Classic microeconomic theory focuses overwhelmingly on individuals and choice. It assumes that choices reflect a rational comparison of services and result in good and efficient outcomes, and it pays little attention to impacts on communities and institutions or to barriers to real choice. Recent awards of Nobel Prizes in Economics to scholars in behavioral economics who believe that it is important to understand how people actually make choices rather than to assume rationality reflect contemporary challenges to these assumptions.⁴⁶ Much of this book is devoted to explorations of these assumptions and to research that is essential to either sustain or challenge the premises of both market and integration theories. If something is to be done to change the opportunities of the children whom both theories purport to serve, it is important to move the discussion from dogma to experience.

INTEGRATION THEORY

Integration experiences provide a very different theory of choice, which shares the market theory’s stated goal of improving education for disadvantaged students but sees the root of inequality not in schools’ governance structure but in social and economic stratification perpetuated by schools that are segregated by race, class, and language. It sees choice not as an end in itself or as a substantive educational treatment but as one important means, if properly regulated, to accomplish something more basic. Choice in this theory is a noncoercive framework of policies using incentives and other mechanisms to enforce minority rights in a broadly acceptable way and attain the benefits of substantial, lasting desegregation. It was implemented on a large scale a generation before the current market theory became dominant. Integration’s basic goal is to get highly disadvantaged and isolated students into classrooms and schools with higher-achieving students and teachers while allowing for as much family choice for all groups as is compatible with this aim, and many schools were designed on these principles to elicit choices through superior educational offerings and have been enthusiastically chosen across racial lines for generations. This theory assumes, as the Supreme Court concluded in Brown and subsequent research has confirmed, that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” in a society with a history of racial exclusion and subordination and deeply rooted practices and beliefs that perpetuate them.

One of the properties of markets is that under some circumstances, each individual trying to maximize his or her own benefit can result in no one getting to have what a great many would prefer. The economist Thomas Schelling has explored this dilemma for a variety of activities, such as residential integration.⁴⁷ It is clear, for example, that nearly everyone in a city on a sea would like to have the option to walk and swim along the beach without paying an entrance fee, but no individual would have the incentive to pay to acquire and maintain a free public beach, so the likely outcome is that the vast majority will have no access to something that almost everyone would prefer. This is, in fact, a central reason why government is necessary: to resolve the conflict between the aggregate impact of individual choices and the common needs that no individual or group of individuals acting separately can fulfill. Given the facts that the spread of segregation is deeply rooted in features of the housing markets, that most people would accept stably integrated but not racially transitional neighborhoods, and that there are different preferences for level of integration, the market is unlikely to provide the option that most people in diverse communities would prefer but is likely to produce neighborhood resegregation in a changing neighborhood and decline in the absence of policies to limit market forces.⁴⁸ In that case, almost no one gets what he wants.

When the options are all well-integrated schools, many choices are acceptable to people of various racial, social, and ethnic groups. In most choice plans that are part of desegregation strategies, the great majority of families get their first or second choice, so controversy is often limited. Without desegregation standards and controls, individual schools tend to resegregate, and the intense demand for the remaining handful of well-integrated, well-performing schools produces many losers, a good deal of conflict, and lost support for the public schools. In the integration theory, the use of choice and the creation of educational options diminish community conflict while expanding opportunity. Magnet schools, for example, often accomplished voluntary integration and were oversubscribed, so they had to use lotteries (with desegregation guidelines) to deal fairly with excessive demand.⁴⁹ Integration theory sees controls on choice as a precondition for fostering lasting integration, by blocking the segregative effect of neighborhood change, and views unrestricted choice as an instrument of resegregation that undermines the kinds of choices most people would prefer. By limiting individual choices, the system provides better options for most people and the community.

Since choice for integration, unlike pure market approaches, often requires change in the schools of privileged groups, opening them to some less-privileged families, it is far more controversial than market approaches. Families who believe they have an absolute right to their first choice are angry when they do not get it. Choice in the integration context is basically a tool to try to replace conflicts over student assignments with situations of mutual advantage by offering tangible educational incentives to powerful groups of parents while also subordinating their choices to a common goal. In the integration theory, the basic sources of school inequality are not bureaucracies and unions but the underlying social inequalities that separate and unequal schooling by race and class reinforce. The policy goal in this theory is to create diverse schools where formerly excluded, disadvantaged students learn more by being in contact with better-prepared and more privileged students and teachers, and privileged students lose nothing in achievement and gain in many other ways.⁵⁰ The broadened curricula that come from some forms of curriculum-driven choice, such as magnet schools, are important side benefits. But the main goal is bringing students and teachers to integrated schools in a positive way. The belief is that this has the potential to help transform the students’ life chances and the community’s race relations.

It is relatively easy to ask practical questions about the sweeping claims of Milton Friedman’s market theory, but it is also not difficult to point out practical limits to the integration theory in the current legal and political context. The Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley drew a strong legal wall between central cities, where millions of black and Latino students attend failing schools almost totally segregated by race and poverty, and the better suburbs, where most white students and strong schools are. This decision also had the unanticipated consequence of making regional approaches to the rapid resegregation of a growing number of suburban school districts very difficult, if not illegal. Many suburbs that strongly opposed regional solutions a generation ago now need them to prevent resegregation, but there are no tools to achieve them. This means that there are critical limits on the possibility of integration under current law.

A second key restriction is that achieving the maximum benefits of integration theory requires not merely getting students into more diverse schools but also avoiding classroom segregation and ensuring equal treatment within the schools. Typically, however, choice plans focus simply on getting students into more-advantaged schools and not on changing schools and faculty in ways that would maximize benefits, such as integrating faculty and providing appropriate training for teachers in techniques to create equal-status interaction, which research across the world shows facilitates successful intergroup relationships.⁵¹ Faculty should also be taught to understand and respect the diversity of children’s backgrounds and assure they feel welcome and receive fair treatment. Decades of research have documented that such conditions are necessary for maximizing gains.⁵² Changing the internal operation of schools and the beliefs and practices of teachers requires serious help. The Reagan Administration canceled the Emergency School Aid Act, the major federal desegregation assistance program, in 1981 in spite of evidence of its substantial educational and race relations benefits.⁵³ This generation’s policy debates have ignored the challenge of creating successful diverse classrooms with teachers who can work well across lines of race/ethnicity.

American political philosophy and ideology are closely linked to legal developments. The integration theory of choice developed out of the experience of attempting to realize the goals set forth in Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights law. The Supreme Court’s later decisions, which in 1991 led to the ending of most large mandatory desegregation plans and in 2007 forbid the most common forms of voluntary desegregation, have eliminated most of the infrastructure for pursuing the policies of the integration theory and forced school districts committed to diverse schools to come up with new approaches.⁵⁴ After legitimating race-conscious plans for decades, the court has now adopted a much more individualist approach and says that most of these plans are unconstitutional. The parents who brought the cases against voluntary plans devised by local school boards claimed that the primary right in choice plans must be individual choice, even if it resegregates the schools. The Supreme Court agreed, holding in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 that no student could be given or denied an assignment on the basis of his or her race in a voluntary desegregation plan. In his concurring opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy adopted the goals of the integration theory, calling integration a compelling interest, but forbade the means that had worked to achieve it; he did not reconcile this contradiction.⁵⁵

Current legal limits block integration choice approaches in a number of settings. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to devise policies that would produce considerably more integration and make the desegregation that does exist, often because of blacks and Latinos moving into previously all-white suburban communities, more successful and stable. Nor do these legal barriers prevent discussing what would be necessary to seriously pursue the integration theory in the future or examining the settings in which desegregation across city-suburban lines was implemented. And districts that have never desegregated or that commit new forms of discrimination are still liable to court-ordered integration plans.

A 5–4 Supreme Court decision does not mean that the legal battles are permanently settled: a number of school districts are seeking indirect ways to preserve diverse schools, and theories have long lives. Even as Friedman could develop his theory at a time when there was no significant support for it, theories of integration can be further developed and perhaps pursued in indirect ways now—and more directly in the future if the law changes back.

The premise underlying the integration theory is that inequality of opportunity is linked to social stratification, which means that normally the most-privileged students receive the best schooling opportunities and historically excluded populations receive the worst. This theory draws from both the historic record of unequal opportunity in racially and economically stratified schools and evidence of the impact of peer groups on educational success articulated in the 1966 Coleman report and many other studies of schooling.⁵⁶ A peer group’s family and community background and the distribution of qualified and experienced teachers and challenging classes strongly shape a school’s impact. Family influences are more powerful for middle-class students with resources and education, while school is more decisive for students isolated in families and neighborhoods with far less social capital. This theory says that schools as they have normally been organized tend to reflect and perpetuate the relative status of their students.⁵⁷ Changing this outcome requires getting disadvantaged students access to the strongest and most-respected schools.⁵⁸ Integrationist choice plans aim to do that by creating win-win situations in which both privileged and disadvantaged students gain in a variety of ways.

Desegregation, however it is accomplished, is powerful because it connects students from excluded groups to the information and opportunity networks that exist in better schools and that greatly enhance their prospects for later success in mainstream institutions and relationships.⁵⁹ Choice systems that produce magnet schools with authentically distinctive curricula not only enrich the system’s educational offerings and capacity to meet the needs of individual children, whatever their race, but also help keep middle-class families in urban communities and retain their support for public schools.⁶⁰ Ironically, the very success of this strategy sometimes gives birth to attacks on desegregation policies. The intense parental demand for access to excellent magnets originally created to produce integration can lead to struggles over their admissions methods. Since an important part of the attraction of these schools is that they are stably integrated, successful attacks abetted by conservative courts following an intensely individualist theory of opportunity can kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Stable integration is a clearly positive attribute for most families but rarely happens by accident, and removal of the controls that create and maintain it in schools usually means that no one can have what a great many want.

But integration theory goes beyond the creation of a diverse student body, also emphasizing the importance of an integrated faculty, multicultural curriculum, and equal-status treatment in all aspects of school operation. It is about producing stably integrated and equitable institutions in a segregated and unequal society and sees schools as critical not only for educational opportunity but in preparing young people to effectively live, work, and be citizens in a highly diverse society.⁶¹ In a society with no racial majority, these skills will be important for white children also.⁶² This is a theory of deep institutional change.

Integration theory also includes elements of competition, but of a different kind than those in market theory. The basic idea is that students learn from one another, that contact and competition with high-achieving students stimulate learning, and that teachers operate at a higher level when there are more well-prepared students in a class. Educators in general prefer to teach well-prepared groups of students in well-regarded and well-supported schools.⁶³ Accountability systems, which tend to brand as failures and sanction a great many schools serving minority and poor communities, only speed the departure of the teachers who can find jobs elsewhere.⁶⁴ Schools with a critical mass of privileged students offer more competitive courses and tend to provide a clear, default path to college. If desegregation is implemented well, the impacts on children’s lives can be substantial and they can face and learn to deal with the kind of experiences they will encounter in today’s diverse colleges.

Integregation theory is much more, of course, than an educational reform strategy, though it is that as well. It has a broader social goal: to change the beliefs sustaining prejudice and discrimination and to help both students of color and white students function more effectively and fairly in a diverse society, most of whose children will not be white. This theory is strongly connected to the creation and maintenance of diverse neighborhoods, since racial change and resegegation are much more likely in communities with segregated or resegregating schools than in communities with good integrated schools. Choice, with appropriate regulations, is a way to attain these diverse neighborhoods.

Is Integration Impossible? The White Flight Hypothesis

Some argue that integration is attractive in theory but impossible to achieve in reality because whites will simply leave the school district and a desegregation plan will just accelerate their departure. This argument has its source in James Coleman, Sara Kelly, and John Moore’s famous 1975 study of white flight, which triggered a tidal wave of research and instantly became part of court battles across the country.⁶⁵ It followed the first years of mandatory urban desegregation, in the early 1970s, when courts suddenly implemented massive involuntary reassignments of students and teachers in almost all of the cities in the South and several big northern cities. The research claiming large effects was almost exclusively about black-white settings that were in the early stages of kinds of plans that have not been implemented for more than three decades. Most of this research is unrelated to situations of choice-based desegregation plans in multiracial cities.

The agreed-upon results of many studies include the following:⁶⁶ (1) White flight, which basically reflects housing patterns, exists since it began long before there was desegregation and continues after desegregation efforts end, and exists in places where that were never desegregated. It began in earnest with the construction of massive suburban development marketed only to whites. (2) It usually accelerates significantly for a time at the beginning of new mandatory plans limited to central cities. (3) The highest and most stable desegregation comes in metropolitan-wide mandatory plans. We also know that whites, Asians, and middle-class African Americans and Latinos have all relocated to suburbs in most metropolitan areas, leading to the resegregation of city neighborhoods and schools, and that whites still have a tendency to move away from concentrations of black students.⁶⁷ Such trends are ongoing in growing sectors of suburban rings, which are experiencing soaring nonwhite enrollment growth and typically have no desegregation plans.

The truth is that diverse neighborhood schools have had a tendency toward resegregation for generations, since the housing market offers what many whites see as a choice only between resegregating schools and overwhelmingly white middle-class schools in more segregated outlying white areas. Both conditions and attitudes are changing, however. Black-white residential segregation has been declining for at least two decades, and there are now multiracial communities in which the largest minority group is Latino.⁶⁸ The question is whether we can slow the transitions from diverse to segregated communities and increase the number of communities with lasting integration. Many communities now use magnet schools, the nation’s largest system of choice, as part of an effort to hold and expand white, Asian, and middle-class enrollment in diverse schools.

Ironically, research clearly shows that the most dramatic school desegregation plans—those which included central cities and their suburban rings and produced the deepest and longest-lasting desegregation by integrating all the schools, many for a third of a century—were often well accepted by locals (see chapter 11) and had a clear tendency to increase stable residential desegregation.⁶⁹ In other words, individual choice in the face of a segregated and discriminatory housing market produces widespread instability and resegregation, denying even many middle-class minorities the opportunity to attend good schools, while drastic desegregation mandates create more positive school and housing conditions, lasting neighborhood integration, and neighborhood economic and social desirability. Unfortunately, the courts have severely undermined the possibility of implementing the most successful solutions, which is why educators and civil rights groups are struggling to figure out what forms of choice plans will work today to guarantee substantial and lasting diversity in school enrollments, in spite of all the limits inherent in boundaries, districts, and the inability to directly consider individual students’ race. Color-blind choice plans permit whites to transfer out of integrated communities and into more-segregated white communities, speeding white flight just like the urban open-enrollment plans of the 1960s (see chapter 1). There are no easy or comprehensive solutions available within the existing constraints, but doing nothing is no solution. And some forms of choice do provide important educational and social alternatives.

Markets and Integration: The Dimensions of Difference

In the market theory, equality comes simply from giving students in weak public schools a choice to go to some school (in practice, usually a segregated charter school) that is outside their local public school system and is governed differently. The governance structure is expected to produce the educational benefit. In integregation theory, the idea is, as much as possible, to give students from segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods access to predominantly white and Asian schools, which, research shows, are likely to be better in crucial respects.⁷⁰ In the market theory, choice itself is the educational treatment. In the integration theory, choice is one strategy to decrease conflict and increase voluntary participation in programs that intentionally cross lines of race and class to foster successful integration. Its goals are community-wide.

Although these two theories have fundamentally different philosophic and intellectual roots, they both contain testable assumptions about the nature of social and educational realities. The market theory derives from economic theory’s ideal type of markets and basically believes that people operate as autonomous individuals and that the sum of individual choices will provide better opportunities for all; therefore, no systemic limitations on choice are needed to produce good outcomes. The integration theory is strongly rooted in sociology and law and is based on a philosophy that recognizes that the social order is highly stratified and discriminatory on the basis of race and ethnicity and that the effects of a long history of overt discrimination are still powerful. It sees individuals as deeply limited by isolation and unequal knowledge and views positive governmental action to use choice with integration requirements as a key part of a solution.

Three decades ago there was a profound shift from following the integration theory to following the market theory in formulating choice policy and programs. We can now examine the evidence on the assumptions and outcomes of each theory to determine the best way to use choice to accomplish the goal affirmed by both sets of advocates—improving the education of disadvantaged students in obviously unequal schools. Though both theories support programs called school choice, they rest on divergent and incompatible assumptions.

CONCLUSION

Often choice is described as something that is simple or clear, but it can have profoundly different meanings and results. It seems like such an easy-to-understand and positive concept, but the vast differences among theories of choice are often lost in superficial claims.

The currently dominant market choice theory is based on unexamined assumptions derived from a simplified version of an economic model that does not exist in any society. Such a theory can raise important propositions, but only good research can evaluate whether they are true and whether the theory works. Market theory can be understood largely as a subset of the belief in unregulated markets and the ideology that any institution that is not subject to public control is likely to be better by its very nature than one that is. It follows that creating more nonpublic schools will somehow transform all educational outcomes, without regard to what programs they implement. The fact that many interests and leaders powerfully support these beliefs does not make them true.

Policy discussions in recent decades have largely forgotten integration theory, though it was developed as the result of experience with different kinds of choice in many hundreds of school districts. But the fact that something is ignored for a time does not make it untrue.

Exploring the validity of differing assumptions about choice is central to this book. Its analysis accepts the claim that the schools available to many students in segregated urban settings are shamefully inadequate and that choice mechanisms must be part of the solution. We created this book in good measure out of concern that the movement from the integration theory to the market theory of choice happened without an adequate examination of either their premises or their results. This book is not antichoice and does not see either of these approaches as a panacea for educational equality. It does, however, critically examine the evidence in a number of contemporary contexts and in its final chapter offers a policy framework on the basis of what it sees as the most compelling evidence about using choice to increase school equity.

Choice is meant to disrupt the status quo and is defended as a great creator of opportunity and positive change, but fundamentally different theories and philosophies are at war under its broad umbrella. Praising choice in abstract terms is affirming something that has many contradictory realities and consequences without thinking through the many different kinds of processes that can either open opportunity or increase stratification. Not all choice mechanisms are good. Some may cause additional harm. Depending on the nature of the choice offered and the validity of the assumptions on which it rests, something may sound good but turn out to be deeply disappointing, or what looks like a simple pathway to opportunity may turn out to be a complex path with many turns and dangers but also with the possibility of real gains. Much of the discussion of choice issues has been painfully shallow, full of vague concepts and unsupported claims. By the end of this book we hope that people will know what they are talking about when they speak of educational choices, and what assumptions underlie their arguments. We hope that thoughtful consideration of the studies in the chapters that follow and a critical understanding of often unexamined theories about how choice can help or harm profoundly excluded families will enrich the debate. We assume that both sides in this debate are sincere in their desire to help the millions of children who do not have a fair chance at education—which is often their only chance for social mobility—and hope that this book can help us move from good intentions to better results.

NOTES

1. Warner, “Why Are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?”; Riley, “‘We’re in the Venture Philanthrophy Business.’”

2. Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

3. Peterson, “School Choice: A Report Card.”

4. Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America.

5. Hochschild and Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools.

6. Weinberg, A Chance to Learn: A History of Race and Education in the United States.

7. Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, at 534–35.

8. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris; Anrig, “An Idea Whose Time Has Gone: Conservatives Abandon Their Support for School Vouchers.”

9. Weiss, ed., American Education and the European Immigrant: 1840–1940; Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880.

10. Folger and Nam, Education of the American Population, 152–55.

11. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

12. Milliken v. Bradley.

13. Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell.

14. See, for example, Thernstrom and Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning; Carter, No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools.

15. Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.

16. Ibid.

17. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 194.

18. He himself was appointed a customs official in Edinburgh at the age of fifty-five. Ibid., vi.

19. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, “Milton Friedman on Vouchers.”

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Godwin and Kemerer, School Choice Tradeoffs: Liberty, Equity and Diversity, 232–34.

23. Friedman, who lived in one of the most hypersegregated housing markets, Chicago’s South Side, ignored these markets that treated families of different races with the same incomes in extremely unequal ways. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, “Milton Friedman on Vouchers.”

24. Critics pointed out, for example, that there were inadequate measures for key variables and that, at best, the public-private difference explained a very small part of the variance in test scores. Fundamental difficulties in the comparisons include a serious problem of selection bias: by their nature, choosing a different school and persisting in transferring a child distinguish parents who do these things from those who do not, whether or not they have the same income and race. There are often unmeasured but important differences in motivation, organization, etc., among parents who make choices in a complex system, and those differences are likely to impact student achievement. Further, schools of choice exercise varying types of control in selecting their students and dropping those who do not conform, something that is far less possible in regular public schools, and they are less likely to have to deal with students and teachers who don’t want to be there. In any case, and even ignoring these unmeasured differences, a raging debate over two decades has produced no compelling evidence of any academic achievement benefits of private schools. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: The Limits of the Market Metaphor; Cookson, School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American Education.

25. See, e.g., Bill Gates, remarks at the National Charter Schools Conference; Walton Family Foundation, “Education Reform: Overview.”

26. Ritholtz and Task, Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy.

27. Madison, Jay, and Hamilton, Federalist Papers nos. 10 and 48.

28. See, for example, Solochek, “Critics Say Florida Lawmakers Are Too Cozy with Charter Schools.”

29. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that a number of charter schools and related organizations are formally registered as federal lobbies. See the search result at www.opensecrets.org/lobby/lookup.php?type=c&q=charter+school (accessed December 21, 2011).

30. Ripley and Franklin, Congress, the Bureaucracy, and Public Policy; ibid., “Interest Groups and the Policy Making Process: Sources of Countervailing Power in America.”

31. See, for example, Kimberley, “Hedge Fund–Funded Charter School Lobby Buys Elections, Destroys Education.”

32. Madison, Jay, and Hamilton, Federalist Paper no. 51.

33. Associated Press, “State Orders Detroit to Close Half Its Schools.”

34. Galatzan, “A Wave of Affiliated Charters: What Does It Mean?”

35. Koretz, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.

36. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, “Language Spoken at Home and Difficulty Speaking English.”

37. Sunderman, Kim, and Orfield, NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field, 39–56.

38. Rury and Saatcioglu, “Suburban Advantage: Opportunity Hoarding and Secondary Attainment in the Postwar Metropolitan North.”

39. Ihlanfeldt, “Exclusionary Land-Use Regulations within Suburban Communities: A Review of the Evidence and Policy Prescriptions.”

40. Pfeiffer, The Opportunity Illusion: Subsidized Housing and Failing Schools in California.

41. Wells et al., Both Sides Now: The Story of Desegregation’s Graduates.

42. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation.

43. Fuller, Elmore, and Orfield, eds., Who Chooses? Who Loses?: Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice; see also chapters 10 and 11.

44. Clotfelter, After Brown; Holme, “Buying Homes, Buying Schools: School Choice and the Social Construction of School Quality”; Charles, “Can We Live Together? Racial Preferences and Neighborhood Outcomes.”

45. Reardon and Yun, “Integrating Neighborhoods, Segregating Schools.”

46. Daniel Kahneman, for example, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. His work includes studies on the limits of rationality in choice, such as Kahneman and Tversky, eds., Choices, Values and Frames.

47. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior.

48. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass; Bobo, Schuman, and Steeh, “Changing Racial Attitudes toward Residential Integration.”

49. Goldring and Smrekar, “Magnet Schools: Reform and Race in Urban Education,” 13–15.

50. This goal was reported in 1966 in Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity, and in scores of subsequent studies, e.g., Schofield, “Review of Research on School Desegregation’s Impact on Elementary and Secondary School Students”; Rumberger and Palardy, “Does Resegregation Matter?: The Impact of Social Composition on Academic Achievement in Southern High Schools.”

51. Pettigrew and Tropp, When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact.

52. Frankenberg and Orfield, eds., Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in American Schools.

53. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 eliminated the ESAA, which often funded Robert Slavin’s extensively documented Student Team Learning program. See G. Orfield, Congressional Power; Slavin, Student Team Learning: A Practical Guide to Cooperative Learning.

54. Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell; Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.

55. Parents Involved, at 788–89 (Justice Kennedy concurring). See also chapter 1.

56. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity; Linn and Welner, eds., Race-Conscious Policies for Assigning Students to Schools: Social Science Research and the Supreme Court Cases; Brief Amicus Curiae of the 553 Social Scientists in Support of Respondents in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. and Crystal D. Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education et al.; Mickelson, “Twenty-First Century Social Science Research on School Diversity and Educational Outcomes.”

57. Rumberger and Palardy, “Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Social Composition on Academic Achievement in High School.”

58. Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Education Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.

59. Wells and Crain, “Perpetuation Theory and the Long-Term Effects of School Desegregation”; Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties.

60. The Supreme Court discussed these issues as the basis for upholding affirmative action in the context of higher education in its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger; see also G. Orfield and Kurlaender, eds., Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action, 111–219.

61. Frankenberg, “America’s Diverse, Racially Changing Schools and Their Teachers.”

62. Yen, “Census Shows Whites Lose US Majority among Babies.”

63. Sunderman, Kim, and Orfield, NCLB Meets School Realities, 81–104.

64. Wells and Crain, “Perpetuation Theory and the Long-Term Effects of School Desegregation”; G. Orfield and Kurlaender, eds., Diversity Challenged; G. Orfield and Lee, Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality; G. Orfield and Reardon, “Race, Poverty, and Inequality.”

65. Coleman, Kelly, and Moore, Trends in School Segregation, 1968–1973. A number of scholars at a symposium that Coleman attended soon after this book’s publication challenged its claims. See Orfield, Symposium on School Desegregation and White Flight.

66. See, e.g., Orfield, G., “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation,” 314–18.

67. Frankenberg and Orfield, eds., The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education; Clotfelter, After Brown.

68. Roberts, “Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds.”

69. Siegel-Hawley, “City Lines, County Lines, Color Lines: An Analysis of School and Housing Segregation in Four Southern Metropolitan Areas, 1990–2010.”

70. Orfield and Lee, Why Segregation Matters.