President Obama’s administration has been relentless in its ideological hostility to school choice, and seized on every possible pretext to express that hostility.
The White House considers any government funding for private or parochial education, even indirect funding, to be a betrayal of the public schools. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program — which provides federal vouchers for poor kids in Washington to attend private schools — seems to have had some positive results, including higher high-school graduation rates. Yet the administration, not generally known for its tightfistedness, has repeatedly tried to end funding for it.
At least this position was open and transparent. Twice this year, the White House has gone after local school-choice programs — which involve no federal funding — in a more underhanded way.
In April, the Justice Department announced that private schools that participate in a choice program in Milwaukee will be subject to new regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They’ll be treated as though they were government contractors.
Never mind that the schools have contracts with parents, not with the government that aids the parents. Never mind, either, that in the program’s 22 years of operation no complaint about the treatment of a disabled student has ever been filed. Or that a five-year study of the program found that being disabled had no bearing on a student’s likelihood of getting into a participating school.
The decision will nonetheless raise costs for the private schools. It will also make them think twice about participating, both because they want to avoid those costs and because they don’t want to compromise their independence.
The administration’s latest strike against school choice is a lawsuit against a program in Louisiana created by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. The Justice Department is using a 1975 desegregation order to argue that Louisiana should get approval from a federal court before giving scholarships to students in some school districts. Otherwise, the department claims, the scholarships could make Louisiana schools less racially integrated.
The program is open to poor families with kids in public schools that have gotten a C, D or F from the state government. In Louisiana, most of those families are black, not members of the White Citizens’ Council. The Jindal administration says 90 percent of the recipients are black. The state’s Department of Education reports that so far these students are doing better on math and literacy tests than they were in public schools.
The Justice Department cites two public schools to illustrate its concerns. Five white students used scholarships to leave one, “reinforcing the racial identity of the school as a black school.” In another, the exit of six black students made a “white school” whiter.
The Justice Department is measuring school segregation in a perverse way. It treats a school as integrated when it matches the racial composition of the school district. Yet the districts are themselves segregated — and tying school attendance to residency makes that segregation worse. Neighborhoods with good public schools have higher property values, which makes it harder for poor black families to move into them. Americans who have enough money exercise school choice when they buy their homes.
It seems likely that school choice reduces segregation in large part by breaking the link between residency and schooling. That effect would, however, be at best invisible to the counters at the Justice Department. They might even see it as a step backward, given the way they count.
Greg Forster, a researcher who favors school choice, found that of the 12 best studies on school choice and educational outcomes, 11 found positive effects and one found no effect. The racial integration of schools, while a good thing, is not as important as getting students to learn more.
If the Obama administration isn’t willing to embrace school choice itself, it should at least quit trying to squash it in the states and cities that are.