The Choice We Face: The Origins of School Choice and the Demise of Public Education

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. (Aug.)