Sheff v. O'Neill: Balancing Private Interests and the Public Good

• In Event: 16.031 - The Pursuit of Equal Educational Opportunity for Students of Color and the Competing Purposes of Schooling in the United States: Colonial Times to Today

Abstract

In 1996, the Supreme Court of the State of Connecticut in the Sheff v. O’Neill case found that the extreme racial and ethnic isolation of Hartford public school students deprived those students of an equal education. In this paper, I argue that the core tension between public aims and private interests of schooling discussed by Labaree (2011) is impeding the goals of Sheff v. O’Neill. The desegregation remedies, the creation of inter-district magnet schools and the Open Choice program, further contain the competing aims of inclusive and exclusion. As Labaree (2011) argues, “We focus on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage.”
The primary data sources for the paper are The Sheff v. O’Neill decision, the Memorandum of the decision, newspaper articles, and reports about the decision. I analyzed these data by coding for tensions between public aims and private interests and between inclusion and exclusion.
The findings detail how the goals of the Sheff v. O’Neill decision balance the competing public aims and private interests of schooling. The public aims present in the decision are 1) promoting economic growth and 2) shoring up the republic. The latter is evidenced in the decision, for example, when the opinion reads, “We have recognized the public schools as a most vital civic institution for the preservation of a democratic system of government” (Sheff v. O’Neill, 1996, p.44). The private interest present in the decision is the interest of the individual educational consumer. For example, the decision notes, “Education provides the basic tools by which individuals might lead economically productive lives” (Sheff v. O’Neill, 1996, p.44).
In response to the Sheff v O’Neill decision, the State of Connecticut created magnet schools as one remedy for racial isolation of students in the Hartford public schools. Magnet schools could promote access as they create new “seats” within new magnet schools that draw a diverse student population from diverse communities surrounding and including Hartford.
The school choice program was another remedy stemming from the Sheff v. O’Neill decision. The school choice or “Open Choice” program allows Hartford students to enroll in suburban schools free of charge. This remedy seeks to balance the competing aims of access and advantage. Only, 2,150 students, however, have seats in suburban schools through the Open Choice program (Thomas, 2015b). The exclusiveness of the Choice program thus provides an option for only a small proportion of Hartford’s over 21,000 students.
The paper deepens our understanding of the struggle to balance the public and private aims of schooling to achieve equal opportunity. Labaree (2011) states, “…the system of schooling that consumers created has not been able to increase social equality, nor has it been able to increase upward mobility.” The remedies of the Sheff v. O’Neill decision are mired in this struggle. Pursuing equal educational opportunity through private choice secures access for only a portion of the students who continue to live in racially isolated urban cores.

Author

• Shannon Holder, Central Connecticut State University