By Virginia Walden-Ford, Executive Director, DC Parents for School Choice
As a child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, I witnessed firsthand the first battle over racial segregation in public schools. The US Supreme Court had ruled “separate but equal” to be inherently unconstitutional, but several southern states, including my home state of Arkansas, had refused to integrate their schools. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus and other officials refused to obey the Supreme Court and allow African-American students to attend Central High School in Little Rock. It was quite a shock to my young eyes to see federal troops move into my hometown to force the integration of Central High. After the initial integration battle, my father served as the first African-American assistant superintendent of the Little Rock district (as a result, the Ku Klux Klan threw bricks through our windows and burned a cross in my family’s front yard), and my mother was one of the first four African-Americans to teach in Little Rock’s traditionally all-White elementary schools. In l966 I was in the largest group of African- American students to enter Central High (since its reopening in l960 until that time, only a very small number of African- American students had attended).
Despite all of that, we pressed on. Those were dramatic times, with a cast of characters that even a child could easily follow: heroes like the brave “Arkansas 9” who, to promote integration, endured death threats and villainous racists rioting in the streets. This first battle occurred in 1957, and although we integrationists won that battle, we are losing the war. Now I live in Washington, DC, but I recently returned to Little Rock to find that the district in which my heroes fought to integrate and for which my parents dedicated their professional careers is still gripped by segregation. Today, people of all races are allowed to attend school in the district, but those with choices have gone elsewhere. It is hard for me to describe the heartache I feel when I see the school in which my childhood heroes fought to get into transformed into a school from which the relatively well-to-do are now long gone.
The wealthy choose their schools carefully, but the system denies choice to the rest of us by assigning our children to some of the worst public schools in the nation.
In a war that is still going on today, Little Rock was the first battle—the battle for school choice. My childhood heroes wanted to attend a particular school, and because of their color, the system was not set up to allow them that choice. Today, I serve as the Director of DC Parents for School Choice, and I’m still fighting segregation—economic segregation rather than explicitly racial segregation. DC, like much of the rest of the country, effectively has two school systems: one for the rich, and the other for the rest of us. The wealthy choose their schools carefully, but the system denies choice to the rest of us by assigning our children to some of the worst public schools in the nation. On a daily basis, I come into contact with the families that get left behind. Some low-income DC parents start volunteering at good public schools years before their child is old enough to attend, with the mere hope of improving their chance at a transfer. Others have languished on waiting lists for charter schools (although the DC public school system continues to find ways to limit the number of new charter schools it will open). These people want the best for their children but are denied better options by a system that regularly discriminates against low-income parents.
Upper-income families in our society can effectively choose the school their child will
attend, either by buying a house in an area with good public schools or by paying private school tuition in addition to their property taxes. Upper- and middle-income parents, in other words, exercise what we might call “checkbook school choice” by paying a financial premium for housing in areas that offer quality education or paying private school tuition. Segregated housing patterns (to paint with a broad brush, Whites concentrated in the suburbs, minorities concentrated in central cities) have led to segregated public schools. Essentially, we have a system that allows higher income families to exercise choice in education, but a system that leaves behind hundreds of thousands of low-income, predominantly minority children in terrible schools with low academic achievement and high rates of crime. Recent studies in urban areas have found that private schools are better racially integrated than public schools despite the fact that private schools are obligated to charge tuition. While the result surprises many, the private schools draw on families from much wider geographic areas than public schools. Racially segregated housing patterns translate into racially segregated public schools.
While Little Rock represents an especially painful defeat, the full scope of our failure to integrate becomes evident only when you look at national statistics. The Harvard Civil Rights Project recently published a study, finding that public school racial segregation increased during the 1990s. The study found that racial segregation had increased substantially in the South since 1988, but that New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California were the four most segregated states in the nation.
Today’s segregationists are much harder to spot than Orval Faubus or George Wallace. They tend to present their motives in terms of defending public education. They don’t wear white sheets or throw rocks. I don’t believe that preserving racial segregation motivates them, but their actions produce similar results. No one seemed to think about racial segregation, for instance, when President Clinton vetoed a school choice bill championed by Senator Joseph Lieberman in 1998. This bill would have allowed thousands of primarily African-American students to attend disproportionately white private schools, and the veto had a huge impact on maintaining racial segregation in our nation’s capital. Speaking as an African-American Democrat from Arkansas who voted for Clinton, I can only guess why the president vetoed the bill, but I can guarantee that Faubus would have been pleased with the result. If we are serious about closing the racial gap and promoting desegregation and diversity in education, it is imperative that we embrace the concept of school choice. In the 1950s, people of good conscience simply could not continue to ignore the evil of racial segregation. The day is coming where we will no longer tolerate economic segregation.
The Meantime Volume 1 Number 2