Poverty, Desegregation, and the Contradictory Origins of School Choice Reform

• In Event: 153 - Regular Session. School Choice and Market Models of Schooling

Abstract

This paper examines the political origins of the school choice reform agenda that has risen to prominence in national, state, and local education policy circles over the past two decades. Contemporary school choice policy strategies can be traced back to a set of reforms, including the spread of magnet schools and the relaxation of public school admissions policies, that were developed to satisfy desegregation mandates. These reforms, and not the private school voucher schemes advocated by early school choice proponents, laid the institutional foundations for the ascendance of the school choice agenda (Henig, 1994). While proponents of school choice celebrate its historical connection with the civil rights struggle against racial segregation (Pedroni, 2007), this paper argues that the policy foundations for school choice laid during the post-civil rights period were motivated by an expert discourse that dismissed black and Latino critiques of school inequality. The logic underlying the predecessor policies of the current school choice movement, I argue, accepted the stratification of students by class and encouraged the establishment of privileged educational spaces for high academic achievement. School choice continues to ignite controversy and scholarly debates around issues of equity and equal access, and this history contributes to these debates by interrogating the design and rationale of the prototypical school choice policies and highlighting internal contradictions in the objectives of contemporary urban school reform.

Author

• Fithawee Tzeggai, University of California-Berkeley