Education Choice
by Tom Tripp

Over 58,000 students “crisscross” Jefferson County, Kentucky (Louisville and environs) on school buses everyday. The intent is to achieve improved educational results for black children, who are not doing as well scholastically as white children, and improved social comity among blacks and whites by mixing the races when they are young. Educational parity and racial integration are clearly socially valuable—yet they cannot be achieved effectively by the means being employed, and Louisville’s experience shows that.

The problems experienced in Kentucky (which are not unique) could as easily be resolved at much less cost, with much less disruption and far more effect by simply giving these children and their parents the choice of what school to attend, instead of spending millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours sending kids involuntarily across the county and back (the average child’s bus ride is forty-five minutes).

Several things happen when school choice is offered:

1. As parents become involved in making the choice for, or even with their kids they look at the school options, public and private, much more carefully. They will make personal assessments of how any given school is educating children. If the school system makes the choice, parents are not partners, they are subjects.

2. When parents meaningfully assess school performance, both before and after they choose a school, and are free to choose any given school—public, private, charter, magnet, religious—all schools that under-perform see enrollment go down. At the same time, the teachers and administrators within those schools where enrollment goes down begin to assess their own ranks, and those who do not measure up begin to have pressure applied to improve, or leave. In public schools where choice is introduced, performance increases simply because competition exists.

3. Busing of children is reduced, or even eliminated in many areas, because the level of performance at all schools is gradually increased, thus parents are allowed to begin to send their children to school closer to home.

4. Once parents understand they have an opportunity to make a substantial difference in their child’s education, they actually begin to make that difference. They watch homework assignments for completion, they monitor school attendance, and classroom behavior. Black parents are no different from parents of any other color—they understand opportunity when it is presented, and they know it will make a real difference in their kid’s lives if they take every advantage of it.

In the Louisville school system as a whole, black children make up about 1/3 of the students. The politically correct ratio of blacks to whites, according to the Louisville cognoscenti, is supposed to be, at each school, no less than 15% black, no more than 50%. However, this appears to be nothing but a numbers game, and a smoke screen for what isn’t happening—the education of Louisville’s black student population.

The question that presents itself, is there more good than harm in this system, appears, unfortunately, to be beside the point. The primary goal of a scholastic institution is education, not racial integration—education, not social engineering. If racial integration can be achieved simultaneously with educational parity, and it can be if real educational success is in place, then whatever system will bring this about should be the one implemented. The plain fact is that educational improvement can be achieved by means of the same incentives than run the rest of our individual lives—competition and freedom of choice—and with no increase in cost (actually a reduction in the costs now incurred).

The Louisville school busing program is in court at this time. The argument is about racial quotas—sending kids to one school or another either wholly or largely based on race—in order to achieve racial ‘balance,’ or ‘diversity,’ or even ‘equity.’ This obviously has less to do with education than racial politics.

People who are opposed to busing to achieve racial balance are focused on the disease, not the symptoms. The disease of continued black underachievement in society, not just school, cannot be rectified by moving child-pawns across the educational landscape, it can only be improved by making the education itself better. Who is in any given classroom is far from the magical ingredient the educational administrators claim it is. This is window-dressing for the real issue, why are black students, a half-century after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education (which decreed that separate, segregated schools are inherently unequal), still so far behind whites?

The educational system in any school district will improve only when and where there is an incentive to improve. Incentive is in effect when there are consequences for failure to perform. When parents can choose the schools their children will attend, then schools will have to compete for students. That is called free-market education. Free-market economics has, for centuries, produced the magnificent progress human beings have achieved across the globe, and free-market education will produce the same results in American education. It is just as sure that without competition, schools will not fundamentally change.

There has been much discussion in Louisville and elsewhere about the merit of ‘diversity’ in and of itself. There is no doubt diversity is valuable as an ultimate social goal. But wouldn’t it be more valuable, if after receiving a good education, black children could become successful participants in our economic system, so they could then choose what neighborhood in which to live—and achieve racial integration economically, which is the only lasting way it will happen?

The Louisville “educators” pride themselves in their achievements in diversity and busing—because they can’t have much pride in how they’re doing their primary job.

What is happening in Louisville is the classic mistake of social engineers—looking at a short term solution to a long-term problem, and feeling good for what little has been achieved (black and white students sitting next to one another in class). The Louisville solution is designed to protect the educators who want no competition that will point up the deficiencies in their program, not its participants. This is the Big Lie. In the 1950s the Big Lie was that there was a Communist under every bed, today it is that there is something wrong with the society, not the educational system. It is the failure of the educational system that keeps the society stuck where it is. Change must be effected from outside, because it hasn’t been achieved from within.

Who has the greater incentive to get a good education for children—parents, teachers, administrators, politicians? The question obviously answers itself. If parents and kids become partners with the schools every incentive to create a successful system is in place.

In Louisville the unfortunate proof is in the pudding. In commenting on the “success” of Louisville’s involuntary busing as regards the educational progress of black children, an article in TIME Magazine (12/4/06) notes:

Thirty years of seating black students next to white ones has failed to close Jefferson County’s achievement gap. Black high school students still trail their white counterparts by 25% in reading…and 34% in math. The gap is closely linked to factors like parents’ education level and income, which no amount of school balancing is likely to fix.

The Supreme Court of the United States, which faces the supposedly Solomon-like decision that has to be made in the Louisville case (busing for diversity vs. educational excellence by competition) should step out of its robes, as it did in the Brown case, and simply order school choice. Remove the teachers union’s monopoly on bad education and let’s see what happens. TIME’s article says that “…racial integration reduces prejudice and prepares students to enter a diverse workforce.” Is this a joke? Who can create a diverse workforce with kids who are 25% deficient in reading and 34% deficient in math? Exactly how does that reduce racial prejudice? What diversity are we going to achieve by offering these poorly educated students to employers—who’s going to hire them? Clouding the issue and making it black vs. white harms everyone, but moreso one group in particular—black students, black parents.

Will such a significant change be easy? No, but how important are the goals—racial comity and an equally educated black and white population? Charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, etc., are springing up all over the country—and the entrenched bureaucrats and unions fight all of them tooth and nail, making the change even more difficult than it might be. Yet, a little discomfort and a few fits and starts will make any of these programs work. Imagine the scheduling and financial finagling that exists in moving those 58,000 kids to and fro each day—and also think about how many far more complex goals the people of this country have accomplished under much more difficult circumstances.

If the goal is to further integrate blacks into the mainstream of economic and social opportunity, then this is not about race, it is about education. Can’t someone please tell this to the educational monopolists in Louisville?

Tom Tripp is the chair of FirstPrinciples.US, a public policy institute, and a vice chair of the American Conservative Union Foundation.