Public-school apologists claim that we need these schools to prevent education from becoming segregated again. They claim that school choice would create a separate-and-unequal system of segregated schools. Yet current enrollments in Catholic schools don’t support this assertion. Since 1970, the percentage of minorities in Catholic schools has more than doubled to 26 percent. For the 2003 school year, 11.2 percent of students were hispanic, 7.8 percent black, 3.7 percent asian-american, and 2.0 percent multiracial.
Just as for-profit supermarkets serve Hispanic, Asian-American, African-American and other minorities, for-profit schools, both secular and religious, accept students of every race and color. Like most other businesses, the color most private schools are interested in is green, the color of money. If these schools reject eligible applicants because of their race, they only reduce their profits and hurt themselves.
In contrast, many public schools, particularly in crowded urban areas like Chicago and New York City, are as segregated today as Southern schools were before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. As we saw in Chapter 4, our public-school system has created thousands of segregated inner-city schools throughout the country. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found that:
“70 percent of the nation’s black students now attend predominantly minority public schools, with 36 percent of the nation’s black students attending schools with a minority enrollment of 90 to 100 percent. Researcher Jay Greene found in a national study that 55 percent of children in public schools attended classes where 90 percent of students came from a single ethnic group. In comparison, 41 percent of private school students attended schools with similar conditions. The alleged resegregation caused by school choice is occurring in places where vouchers are still just a rumor.
As we saw previously, public schools resegregate because they continually fail minority students, year after year. Inner-city, low-income parents who work hard to move up the economic ladder, quickly relocate and move to middle-class suburban neighborhoods to find better schools for their kids. This process leaves behind poor minority families, and low-income neighborhoods then become even more segregated. This resegregation is reflected in the local public schools, where neighborhoods with 90 to 100 percent black or hispanic residents then have public schools with 90 to100 percent black or hispanic students. Also, the lack of real school choice for minority and low-income parents means that students have no alternative but to attend these segregated and often violent public schools.
Tags: minority studetns, public schools
