Could be, writes Greg Anrig (who also has an article in TAP Online today) in a wonderful Washington Monthly essay on the history of the private school voucher movement and its utter failure to accomplish its goals. The problem with American urban schools, Anrig writes, isn't bureaucracy (as voucher proponents claim), but rather that they're largely segregated by race and class. Voucher programs don't fix this because, as I wrote yesterday in my piece on John McCain's education platform, they provide only enough tuition assistance for at-risk kids to attend poverty-stricken inner city parochial schools. Let's not fool ourselves: Voucher recipients aren't enjoying what Dalton or the University of Chicago Lab School have to offer. Here's how Anrig puts it:
Ultimately, the voucher experiments confirmed what their critics had asserted all along. The heart of the problem with our urban schools is neither the education bureaucracies nor teachers unions, as Chubb, Moe, and many other voucher advocates have contended, flawed though those institutions may be. Instead, as the sociologist James S. Coleman found in the 1960s, a student's family's income and the collective social and economic background of his classmates are by far the most important influences on his academic future. Not only do lower-income students tend to score relatively poorly, children of any background who attend high-poverty schools are far more likely to produce worse test results than they would in schools with primarily middle-class students. America's urban school systems remain almost universally dysfunctional, primarily because the country as a whole is about as segregated by race and income as at any time since the civil rights revolution.
So how do we integrate our schools? By instituting public school choice and charters that keep more involved, affluent parents in the system; by regionalizing school districts to the extent possible; and by creating urban magnet schools and suburban transfer programs that move kids across race and class boundaries.
--Dana Goldstein
