Why School Choice Can Promote Integration

By Jay P. Greene

Some people oppose school choice because they fear that it will foster racial segregation, cultural divisiveness, and social fragmentation. Concern for these social outcomes of education is sensible despite the greater attention that test scores often receive. After all, the ideal of the common school, where students learn respect for their fellow citizens by mixing with students of different backgrounds, was and continues to be central to the justification of the public funding of education.

Private schools are often seen as antithetical to this ideal of the common school, as havens for homogeneous groups of students. Expanding access to private schools through vouchers or other forms of publicly sponsored school choice, critics argue, would only exacerbate the problem of segregation created by private schools. David Berliner, a former president of the American Educational Research Association, warned that "voucher programs would allow for splintering along ethnic and racial lines." "Our primary concern," he said, "is that voucher programs could end up resembling the ethnic cleansing now occurring in Kosovo." The Harrisburg, Pa., superintendent of schools was even more alarmist when he told a television audience that school choice would help create "Hitlerian regimes."

Yet the facts suggest that private schools are nothing like the places depicted by such critics. Far from being segregationist enclaves, private schools, on average, are better integrated by race than are public schools. Expanding access to private schools is likely to ameliorate segregation in U.S. education, not lead to race wars,...