Conflicted choice
Aman wrote to ask why I hadn’t written about the conflict outside Little Rock between the cause of school desegregation and the cause of education reform through school choice.
I called and told him the truth. It was because the issue was hard.
There is the notion that courtordered school desegregation—as morally triumphant as it was in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education—has been rendered a practical failure by the reality of white flight; that forced racial integration is a futile objective in an otherwise free and mobile society, and that trying to get to a system where anyone may go to school anywhere is a more contemporary ideal.
Then there is the notion that not everyone can go anywhere, that access and awareness of opportunity are the issues, and—because of concern about systemic inequity—court protection of racial desegregation is as important now as ever.
This very battle rages currently in southern Arkansas.
The El Dorado School District already has won the right in federal court to remain exempt from the state’s relatively new school-choice law, owing to its ongoing federal desegregation case.
Three other districts in the area—Camden Fairview, Lafayette County and Hope—are in federal court seeking the same exemption.
El Dorado school officials testified that it doesn’t matter that the community has constructed a glorious educational opportunity with the Murphy-endowed scholarship program. Given the choice to let their kids transfer from El Dorado’s half-black schools to Parkers Chapel’s mostly white ones, too many white people would exercise it, Murphy scholarships or no. They would leave behind an artificially re-segregated school district in El Dorado, harming the innocently deassimilated black youth, as well as the nobly striving community itself. Or so the current and a former superintendent testified.
If white people insist on fleeing black people, then they have that right. But the right is to pack up and move, not to stay in El Dorado and parachute their kids into an adjoining white district because they have the means. Or so the El Dorado School District argument further goes.
Aha, says Gary Newton, who heads the Walton Family Foundation-seeded Arkansas Learns program, an advocate for school choice and other competition-oriented reforms.
He says El Dorado now won’t accept black children as transfers because that would disturb the racial composition percentage as presented to the federal court. Newton asks: Isn’t that an ironic outrage?
Yes.
Newton makes good points. The best is that it’s foolhardy for us to continue to base school assignment “solely on the most segregative element of our society— residence.”
In other words, school choice for children can be a way around the embedded race-divided culture of the grownups.
Newton says school choice is no enemy to racial desegregation. He says it can be an enemy to artificial racial quotas.
He says that—in Little Rock, for sure—the main obstacle to thriving school choice is mobility, or lack thereof among the less-privileged.
He talked of a partnership of school buses and regional bus system vehicles, presumably (and this is my description, not his) with buses and vans going every which way every weekday morning and afternoon.
I suspect that a personal Uber driver for every schoolchild would be about as practical. In the end, we must decide. Which do you find more morally reprehensible—that South Arkansas school superintendents tell a federal court and the state Board of Education that school choice will mean many white families will send their children elsewhere simply for racial reasons, or that El Dorado resists outof-district black transfers into the fine educational opportunities the community has built because it worries about disturbing its racial demographic in a federal court case?
White flight is a choice based on skin color that is damaging to the greater good. The other immorality strikes me as lesser, that of a school district feeling procedurally hamstrung by a lawsuit pending in the very place that, more than 60 years ago, forced us out of our collective racist practices in the first place.
Itold the man whose missive prompted this exercise that it was possible that El Dorado could provide a great education for a nearly all-black school system even if all the white kids got parachuted by school choice to the white haven of the countryside.
He replied correctly that I was sounding a little “separate-but-equal,” the abandoned rationalization of the first half of the last century.
A court ordering racial desegregation in our schools is a moral act. Reformers advocating school choice do so morally, as well. The question is which, when in conflict, comes first.
Forced to decide, I know that federal case law comes first. I know that school choice can work best for now in areas where the black-white divide is less stark and embedded. First, do no harm.
School choice can and should work someday everywhere, if a healthier, happier future awaits. John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.