SCHOOL VOUCHER PROGRAM May Foster Racial Separation - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), April, 2000

Proponents of school choice maintain that parents would make choices based on school quality and school preferences, not on racial bias. A study by two Temple University, Philadelphia, Penna., researchers challenges that position. Professor of sociology Annette Lareau and Salvatore Saporito, assistant director of Temple's Social Science Data Library, found that racial factors, independent of measures of school quality, appear to have a powerful and independent effect on high school selection. They based their findings on research involving a voluntary school voucher transfer program in a school district in the Northeast.

According to Lareau, "White parents avoid black schools even when the SAT scores are higher. Since urban districts all over the country tend to have many all-black schools, the pool of schools white parents would seriously consider is vastly smaller than choice proponents suggest."

The researchers examined the applications of more than 2,000 eighth-graders--1,794 African-Americans and 294 whites --who participated in the voluntary transfer program. (Asian and Latino applicants were not computed because there were few transfer requests.) They calculated the percentage of black and white applicants separately to determine how the applicants differed in their choice of schools.

"We wanted to know if white students avoided schools with high proportions of African-Americans, or if they preferred schools with measures of academic quality. We wanted to know the same for African-American students," Saporito explains.

"The view that racial bias is unimportant in school choice is not supported by our data," he argues, noting that the study reveals emerging behavioral patterns among white families in terms of school choice. "We are finding that white families are more likely to leave a school or avoid a school that has many African-Americans." Not only are white students leaving the schools with a high number of Latinos, Asians, and blacks, they are also selecting schools based on their racial composition.

Black parents and students, on the other hand, were not as sensitive to the racial composition of the student body as they were to the number of enrolled students from disadvantaged families. "Our interpretation is that poverty is the only factor which varied with school selection among African-Americans," indicates Saporito. "Race appeared to be a less powerful factor for African-American families than white families. However, some parents stated that they sought racially diverse settings....

"The assumption has always been that school choice will allow the poor or [ethnic] students to leave the worst schools. We found that the white and wealthier parents were leaving black or poor schools. Our findings suggest the need for conceptual changes in the field." This shows that the school selection process is flawed, he maintains, because choice advocates are presuming that a standard procedure can be used for families of different racial and class backgrounds.