The school choice market theory assumes that educational quality will be the basis of choice. But if the chooser has little valid information, this cannot be true. Additionally, it is clear that white families often make choices not on educational information but on issues such as race, a major nonmarket factor that, if not dealt with, will increase the already severe racial separation in unequal schools and undermine the stability of integrated schools and neighborhoods.44 The fact that unrestricted choice led to white families leaving integrated areas half a century ago was a major reason why civil rights policies restricted choices that increased segregation. When whites leave or stop moving into a neighborhood, resegregation is often rapid and usually triggers a similar change in school population, producing a situation where families who accept or prefer stable integration lose that choice. When desegregation policies were dropped, the result was frequently rapid resegregation of the choice schools.45
Another question in market theory is whether all potential customers are treated equally. In an ideal market, anyone who can pay the market price (in the school market, anyone whose tuition costs can be covered by private funding or per-student public funding) is treated equally. Often in school choice situations, however, there are additional requirements or screening methods for students, or a lack of information intelligible to, for instance, non-English-speaking parents, which introduce nonmarket factors and may screen out the most disadvantaged students.
Classic microeconomic theory focuses overwhelmingly on individuals and choice. It assumes that choices reflect a rational comparison of services and result in good and efficient outcomes, and it pays little attention to impacts on communities and institutions or to barriers to real choice. Recent awards of Nobel Prizes in Economics to scholars in behavioral economics who believe that it is important to understand how people actually make choices rather than to assume rationality reflect contemporary challenges to these assumptions.46 Much of this book is devoted to explorations of these assumptions and to research that is essential to either sustain or challenge the premises of both market and integration theories. If something is to be done to change the opportunities of the children whom both theories purport to serve, it is important to move the discussion from dogma to experience.
INTEGRATION THEORY
Integration experiences provide a very different theory of choice, which shares the market theory’s stated goal of improving education for disadvantaged students but sees the root of inequality not in schools’ governance structure but in social and economic stratification perpetuated by schools that are segregated by race, class, and language. It sees choice not as an end in itself or as a substantive educational treatment but as one important means, if properly regulated, to accomplish something more basic. Choice in this theory is a noncoercive framework of policies using incentives and other mechanisms to enforce minority rights in a broadly acceptable way and attain the benefits of substantial, lasting desegregation. It was implemented on a large scale a generation before the current market theory became dominant. Integration’s basic goal is to get highly disadvantaged and isolated students into classrooms and schools with higher-achieving students and teachers while allowing for as much family choice for all groups as is compatible with this aim, and many schools were designed on these principles to elicit choices through superior educational offerings and have been enthusiastically chosen across racial lines for generations. This theory assumes, as the Supreme Court concluded in Brown and subsequent research has confirmed, that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” in a society with a history of racial exclusion and subordination and deeply rooted practices and beliefs that perpetuate them.
One of the properties of markets is that under some circumstances, each individual trying to maximize his or her own benefit can result in no one getting to have what a great many would prefer. The economist Thomas Schelling has explored this dilemma for a variety of activities, such as residential integration.47 It is clear, for example, that nearly everyone in a city on a sea would like to have the option to walk and swim along the beach without paying an entrance fee, but no individual would have the incentive to pay to acquire and maintain a free public beach, so the likely outcome is that the vast majority will have no access to something that almost everyone would prefer. This is, in fact, a central reason why government is necessary: to resolve the conflict between the aggregate impact of individual choices and the common needs that no individual or group of individuals acting separately can fulfill. Given the facts that the spread of segregation is deeply rooted in features of the housing markets, that most people would accept stably integrated but not racially transitional neighborhoods, and that there are different preferences for level of integration, the market is unlikely to provide the option that most people in diverse communities would prefer but is likely to produce neighborhood resegregation in a changing neighborhood and decline in the absence of policies to limit market forces.48 In that case, almost no one gets what he wants.
When the options are all well-integrated schools, many choices are acceptable to people of various racial, social, and ethnic groups. In most choice plans that are part of desegregation strategies, the great majority of families get their first or second choice, so controversy is often limited. Without desegregation standards and controls, individual schools tend to resegregate, and the intense demand for the remaining handful of well-integrated, well-performing schools produces many losers, a good deal of conflict, and lost support for the public schools. In the integration theory, the use of choice and the creation of educational options diminish community conflict while expanding opportunity. Magnet schools, for example, often accomplished voluntary integration and were oversubscribed, so they had to use lotteries (with desegregation guidelines) to deal fairly with excessive demand.49 Integration theory sees controls on choice as a precondition for fostering lasting integration, by blocking the segregative effect of neighborhood change, and views unrestricted choice as an instrument of resegregation that undermines the kinds of choices most people would prefer. By limiting individual choices, the system provides better options for most people and the community.
Since choice for integration, unlike pure market approaches, often requires change in the schools of privileged groups, opening them to some less-privileged families, it is far more controversial than market approaches. Families who believe they have an absolute right to their first choice are angry when they do not get it. Choice in the integration context is basically a tool to try to replace conflicts over student assignments with situations of mutual advantage by offering tangible educational incentives to powerful groups of parents while also subordinating their choices to a common goal. In the integration theory, the basic sources of school inequality are not bureaucracies and unions but the underlying social inequalities that separate and unequal schooling by race and class reinforce. The policy goal in this theory is to create diverse schools where formerly excluded, disadvantaged students learn more by being in contact with better-prepared and more privileged students and teachers, and privileged students lose nothing in achievement and gain in many other ways.50 The broadened curricula that come from some forms of curriculum-driven choice, such as magnet schools, are important side benefits. But the main goal is bringing students and teachers to integrated schools in a positive way. The belief is that this has the potential to help transform the students’ life chances and the community’s race relations.
It is relatively easy to ask practical questions about the sweeping claims of Milton Friedman’s market theory, but it is also not difficult to point out practical limits to the integration theory in the current legal and political context. The Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley drew a strong legal wall between central cities, where millions of black and Latino students attend failing schools almost totally segregated by race and poverty, and the better suburbs, where most white students and strong schools are. This decision also had the unanticipated consequence of making regional approaches to the rapid resegregation of a growing number of suburban school districts very difficult,