School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetoric of school choice, however, resemble those of segregationists who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Suitts illustrates how school choice has been used to systematically drain funding and support away from public schools, delivering on segregationists’ promise of preserving white supremacy by educating their children at white-majority and white-controlled institutions ... This brief treatment will likely seem cursory to scholars of race, racism, and education in U.S. history, but those unfamiliar with the topic will emerge with a new understanding of how indelibly racism has shaped our collective attitudes and policies regarding the public provision of education for all.
A civil rights activist and attorney convincingly demonstrates that Brown v. Board of Education barely put a dent in unequal public schooling ... A powerful argument against the 'virtual segregation' of schoolchildren enabled by vouchers, credits, and other instruments.
... slim but persuasive ... Writing without rancor but with an urgent sense of the risks involved, Suitts presents a damning portrait of the historic motivations behind privatization. Teachers, policy makers, and progressive activists would do well to take heed.
