Northern Choices: Open Enrollment and Optional Zones
Another choice-based approach was common in big-city school systems, especially for students located in diverse or racially changing areas. In northern and western U.S. cities with significant black and Latino school enrollments, segregation had also been the norm. It was accomplished mostly through housing segregation, locating schools to maximize racial separation, drawing school-attendance boundaries and adopting transfer policies that segregated students, and assigning teachers in a segregated way. Virtually every city ever examined by a federal court in a desegregation case—including Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Omaha—was found guilty of such pro-segregation practices.29
Although they claimed to be operating neighborhood schools, districts often drew boundaries along racial lines, ignoring the proximity of certain residences to particular schools, and changed the lines to preserve segregation as neighborhoods changed. Black or Latino children in overcrowded schools were regularly denied access to nearby white schools with space. As nonwhite populations in cities expanded, the Supreme Court struck down both laws that overtly segregated neighborhoods by race and laws that enforced restrictive covenants.30 Minority communities expanded into sectors of previously white neighborhoods, leaving isolated pockets of whites inside minority neighborhoods and schools. To permit white students who happened to live in specified areas with heavily minority schools to transfer to white schools, many cities implemented optional attendance zones. Open-enrollment policies permitted families to transfer from those areas even if this increased segregation. These policies, of course, undermined integrated neighborhoods and sped the resegregation of their schools. Similar patterns occurred when unrestricted choice programs were adopted after the civil rights era.31 Earlier, federal courts had found the dominant forms of choice across the United States to be fostering or maintaining unconstitutional segregation. Choice was a strategy strongly linked to segregation.
Vouchers for Segregation
The first significant use of vouchers by local officials came when Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its entire school system in 1959 to prevent integration. The Virginia state legislature had enacted a law that called for the closing of any school that began integration and the governor had closed schools in several districts to prevent desegregation, actions that both federal and state courts eventually held to be illegal. This left the leaders of rural Prince Edward County facing the likelihood that some integration would be mandated in their district. In response they implemented their plan that completely shut down public schools in the county and provided private school vouchers. New private white academies promptly hired faculties made up almost completely of former public school teachers and resumed teaching whites. The black community lacked the money and power to create and fund its own schools, so the black children in the county went without schools for five years. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices ordered the reopening of the public schools.32 During the oral argument on the case, Chief Justice Earl Warren responded to the county lawyer's arguments by saying that Prince Edward had provided African American children the “freedom to go through life without education.”33 One could argue, as the county's lawyers did, that there was no racial problem, since anyone could have a voucher for whatever private school where they could enroll. The fact that there was no school for blacks showed one of the great flaws of the market approach. The vouchers were perfectly effective in preserving segregation and took away the only option black students had. It turned out that the market had an absolute barrier and provided them with no replacement options, creating absolute inequality.
Two fundamental lessons of the early civil rights era were that producing integrated schools almost never happens by accident in highly segregated communities with deeply rooted racial and ethnic stereotypes and fears, and that unrestricted choice or voucher systems are more likely to compound than to remedy segregation and inequality. If the burden is put on the victims of segregation to change the situation and the involved institutions are absolved of any significant responsibility, very little will happen. This was why strict conditions about choice procedures, transportation, and related matters were put into operation in enforcing the Civil Rights Act and why mandatory desegregation orders were found to be necessary to actually integrate the schools in many communities.34
Magnet Schools: Combining Educational Choice with Desegregation
In the mid-1970s, however, educators invented ways to use choice to produce diverse schools and to minimize the conflicts that often came at the beginning of mandatory desegregation. The most effective combination of choice, educational innovation, and desegregation came with the development of magnet schools. The Supreme Court confronted the nation's cities with a massive challenge in the mid-1970s. In Keyes v. Denver in 1973, it ruled that if civil rights plaintiffs could prove intentional segregation in substantial parts of a city, there should be a presumption that the entire city was illegally segregated, and the courts should issue an order to desegregate it.35 It turned out that there was enough evidence to trigger such orders in virtually every city where a suit was filed.36 The Denver case also ruled that Latino students were entitled to desegregation remedies. But the court's decision came too late, at a time when many central cities’ schools were already heavily minority and had rapidly declining white enrollment as the white birthrate fell and many all-white suburbs were being built. This meant that full desegregation was not going to be possible within central cities—simply mandating that white students transfer to impoverished nonwhite schools was likely to speed their already well-advanced flight. The next year, in the Detroit (Milliken v. Bradley) case, the Supreme Court reviewed the finding of the lower courts that the only feasible remedy for intentional segregation would be a plan including the suburbs, which would increase the possibility for substantial desegregation, involve the region's strongest schools, and make white flight far less likely. When the court rejected this remedy 5-4, it left central cities facing massive problems.37
The top answer that emerged was magnet schools. Educational leaders in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and elsewhere came up with the idea of using special schools with unique programs, combined with active recruitment, to increase integration. The plans included free transportation and policies that tried to guarantee a specific and stable level of desegregation. Senators John Glenn of Ohio and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, both of whose states had city districts that were ordered to desegregate, succeeded in enacting a federal aid program, the Magnet School Assistance Act, which helped rapidly spread the magnet school idea across the country. Massachusetts was an early promoter of magnet schools.38 One of the key conditions for receiving help was that the proposed school was part of a desegregation plan. Magnet programs expanded rapidly, even in the conservative 1980s, reaching 2,400 schools and more than a million students by 1991, and were highly concentrated in large cities.39 Magnets came a generation before the charter schools of the 1990s and were (and remain) by far the nation's largest program of school choice. Magnets with civil rights policies provided answers to the segregating tendencies