Jo Freeman Reviews Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement
Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement
By Steve Suitts
Published 2020 by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, AL: 127 pages
By Jo Freeman
This is a very short book about a very long topic. Its essential theme is that "school choice" — the idea that every parent can decide what school is best for her or his child — began in the South as a way to maintain as much racial segregation as possible in the schools. Furthermore, Suitt argues, while the rationale has changed over time, the results have not.
The South looked for ways around the Supreme Court’s 1954 proclamation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that racial segregating violated the 14th Amendment. For the next decade private schools for whites only, known as "seg academies" were opened all over the South. Schools are expensive. Instead of paying (much) for public schools, Southern legislatures provided for tuition vouchers for parents to send their children to the school of their choice. White parents sent their children to white private schools. Negro parents were "persuaded" to keep their children in underfunded public schools.
In the meantime, two other arguments for school choice emerged. Prof. Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, apostle of "free market economics," argued that competition between private and "government" schools would increase quality. He saw education as another consumer good and vouchers as a way to increase choice. Publicly he deplored racial segregation but he didn’t change his theory to encompass that reality.
His argument became popular when Ronald Reagan adopted it in the 1980s. The 1984 Republican Platform touted a variety of public supports for private schools under the rubric that diversity created opportunity.
The second argument was religious freedom. Many of the white private schools called themselves Christian academies and quoted the Bible to justify limiting attendance to whites. Over time, private schools "merged racial segregation, quality education, and religion into one rationale."
The Court eventually ruled that it was not permissible to create racially specific schools, even though they were technically private, not public. The schools switched to virtual segregation, which is another name for token integration. A few non-whites (not always black) were allowed in. Private schools remained overwhelmingly white, and not just in the South.
Suitts concludes that shifting more resources from public to private schools, by whatever rationale, won’t result in a better education for those who need it most.
To find out more about what happened and why, read this book.
© Copyright 2020 by Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
Editor's Note: Jo has all but finished her new book on working for SCLC in 1965-66 and is tweaking it. Stay tuned.