Opponents of parental choice in education argue that school choice increases racial segregation. But a new review of the research evidence suggests that giving parents the freedom to choose their children’s schools has actually increased racial integration.
More than fifty years have passed since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in American public schools. Many policies, including school busing, were implemented to promote integration in public education in the decades that followed. Yet many American public schools remain segregated along racial lines.
Even with years of improvement in race relations, this result shouldn’t be a surprise. The public school system assigns students to schools based on where they live, which means that a public school is only as diverse as its community. The combination of segregated housing patterns and location-based school assignment has created an environment in which millions of children attend largely segregated public schools.
But not all schools are stuck. In a new report from the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, Dr. Greg Forster reviews the research on school choice and integration and concludes that school choice improves school diversity. He also explains why the “claims made by voucher opponents are empirically unsupportable” in two specific ways.
First, empirical research finds “no substantial difference between segregation levels in public and private schools.” Instead, “at the classroom level, a preferable level of analysis, the research indicates that private schools actually are less segregated than public schools.” And “even at the school level, the research finds no substantial difference between public and private schools.”
Second, school voucher programs do not lead to segregation. In fact, the opposite is true. In Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., voucher students’ private schools are more racially integrated than the public schools the students would otherwise have attended.
