Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Yale Law & Policy Review

Abstract

In the past year, school choice has emerged as a leading proposal for addressing the current crisis in American education. President Bush has made choice a cornerstone of his educational reform plans, and a growing number of educational theorists are promoting choice as a remedy for the problems of the nation's schools. As one education law scholar recently observed, "choice is hot." It is understandable that choice proponents would be reluctant to invoke the emergence of segregation academies throughout the South when they discuss the historical antecedents of parental choice. This era of Southern "massive resistance" to school desegregation was an ugly period in American history, and clearly no model for reform. Moreover, it is easy to dismiss the segregation academy movement as a mere historical anomaly because of the extreme racial animus that motivated it, and to conclude that it has no relevance to today's choice debate. This Article, however, will take a different view. It will suggest that parental choice-even if not racially motivated-is likely to have many of the same structural consequences for public education today as it did in the South during the rise of the private academies. It will do this by examining the rise of private academies in a single school district: Choctaw County, Alabama. There, parental choice has led to the creation of a dual school system that has had a devastating impact on the public schools and the children left behind in them. This Article will look at these effects of parental choice, and it will suggest that Choctaw County's experience poses difficult questions for policymakers who would ignore the racial and economic consequences of a market approach to education. It will contend that school choice raises a set of concerns that any plan must address if it is to avoid the educational problems experienced in Choctaw County. The Article will proceed in three parts. Part I will discuss how parental choice produced private academies in Choctaw County in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It will examine how the market for educational services worked and look closely at its adverse consequences for the county's poor and minority children who remained trapped in the public school system. Part II will suggest that the harm that parental choice did to education for poor and minority children in Choctaw County is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a predictable outcome of a market-based approach to schooling. Part III will attempt to derive general lessons from this school district's experience with school choice. It will conclude that Choctaw County provides a cautionary tale about school choice and its likely impact on poor and minority children.

First Page

1

Volume

10

Publication Date

1992

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