With all of the concerns about public education across the nation, one concern revolves around parental choice. That concern is focused on whether or not students have access to schools that parents think are best for their kids. In many cases, this involves asking the state to pay for tuition to private schools through state funded vouchers or voucher-like programs such as Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).
In America, public schools have been the standard in education for years. Public schools are all-inclusive regardless of race or social status, cover subjects that kids need to know for a well-rounded education, and are supported in every state with taxpayer dollars.
Historically, the public school system in the U.S was segregated. Based on the doctrine of “separate but equal”, outlined in the famous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) court case, schools were separated into black schools and white schools throughout the country.
In 1954 all of that changed with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483 ). The Brown decision upended the doctrine of separate but equal and called for a more unified educational system where black and white kids would attend school and learn together.
While Brown is often heralded as a profound shift toward civil rights for black people, not everyone was happy with the Supreme Court’s decision. Throughout the South primarily, private schools emerged to allow white parents the opportunity to evade the dictates of Brown and avoid sending their kids to school alongside black children. These private“segregation academies” were not subject to the rules mandated in the Brown decision. In Virginia, Prince Edward County closed their public schools from 1959-1964 rather than allow their white students to attend school with black students. The only schools available during that period were segregation academies. By 1965, nearly a million white students in the South were enrolled in private schools.
“What is notable is that taxpayer dollars financed these all-white schools at the cost of simultaneously creating poorly funded all-black public-school systems in the South” wrote segregation researcher Noliwe Rooks in an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2018. “To put it simply, as the financial drain of taxpayer dollars from whites attending segregation academies decimated school systems educating black children, black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites.”
While “parental choice” advocates today mostly deny any desire to segregate their children based on race, there is no denying the history of the South with regard to the issue. It seems apparent that these Southern parents felt that it was in the best interest of their children not to attend school with black kids. The question then is raised, “Should taxpayers be forced to pay for an educational system that excludes black kids?”
The answer is – not according to the US Supreme Court in the past. In Runyon v. McCrary (1976) the Supreme Court ruled that private schools that discriminate on the basis of race or establish racial segregation are in violation of federal law. According to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, states may not engage in “state sponsored segregation.”
Any state sponsoring programs that shift taxpayer funds to private schools must ensure that they aren’t fomenting such state sponsored segregation and any private schools receiving such funds must ensure that they aren’t creating barriers to students of color through tuition hikes, lack of adequate transportation, etc. According to Kevin Welner, Director of the National Education Policy Center, “If school choice is approached as a tool for accomplishing larger educational goals, then anti-discrimination policies make a great deal of sense.” Welner says, “The federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program offers an exemplar of how a school choice policy can incorporate such protections. Applications for funding under the MSAP are required to include assurances that the applicant will:
(C) not engage in discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, or disability in
(i) the hiring, promotion, or assignment of employees of the applicant or other personnel for whom the applicant has any administrative responsibility; (ii) the assignment of students to schools, or to courses of instruction within the schools, of such applicant, except to carry out the approved plan; and (iii) designing or operating extracurricular activities for students.”
While Welner and others advocate for such accountability in the design of any school choice program, many opponents of school choice decry the lack of accountability in such programs. According to education author Peter Greene, several states include clauses in the laws establishing their ESA programs that allow private schools to discriminate against students who may have a divergent philosophy. Greene opines, “The intent is clear enough—to provide education service providers (private schools, tutors, education materials publishers, etc) with the ability to use taxpayer dollars however they see fit. No officials can ask them to alter their “creed, practices, admission policy, hiring policy or curriculum,” meaning that a private school could be free to discriminate as it wishes, even as it uses taxpayer dollars to deliver religious instruction.”
Voucher advocates and opponents alike will need to keep this issue, as well as the racially exclusive history of some schools using state funding in mind when any such bill is proposed. Whether or not vouchers or voucher-like programs such as Education Savings Accounts are racially exclusive depends on who you ask and seems to depend on their design. There is certainly a history of many such programs in the South being racially exclusive.
