How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America's Most Controversial Educat ion Reform Movement
May 31, 2021
University of Illinois education professor Hale (The Freedom Schools) explores in this pointed study the racist roots of the school choice movement and its damaging impact on public education. He documents how Southern states sought to avoid court-ordered desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education by closing public schools and funding private tuition with vouchers. In Northern cities such as Boston and Chicago, Hale finds the “same mechanisms of racism” in discriminatory housing policies and violent opposition to school busing. Conservative economist Milton Friedman sparked the national school choice movement by linking it to his free-market economic theories, and increasing support from the federal government and wealthy philanthropists made choice one of today’s few bipartisan areas of agreement. But despite some successes, including Harlem Children’s Zone, Hale finds that charter schools as a whole don’t outperform public schools, and that the diversion of state and federal dollars toward private interests has drained resources from public school systems and maintained “larger patterns of segregation. The solution, according to Hale, is for more parents to enroll their children in public schools, and for organizers to work within existing structures to make improvements. Supported with convincing research and illustrative detail, this impassioned history makes a strong case that quality of education—not variety of choice—should be the goal.
July 16, 2021
Hale (educational history, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) adds his voice to a growing number of books on the dangers facing public education. Anyone confused about the differences among magnet schools, private schools, school vouchers, charter schools, and homeschooling will appreciate his excellent analysis of the meaning of "school choice" and its implications. Though school choice is ostensibly simply the option of letting students use public funds to select whatever school they prefer, the truth is far more complicated, as Hale illustrates. Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, he discusses how the idea of school choice developed as a mechanism against desegregation. Thinkers like the economist Milton Friedman became strident and influential spokespeople for school choice and were instrumental in helping it gain acceptance. Hale extensively covers busing in Boston, attempts to desegregate schools in other cities, positive attitudes toward school choice held by Black civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King III, the consequences of legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act, and the effectiveness of grassroots and community mobilization. VERDICT Hale makes the complex history of school choice accessible to all readers.--Jacqueline Snider, Toronto
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