The last of the major efforts to use choice for desegregation was called, appropriately enough, controlled choice. A fully developed controlled choice plan was first implemented in 1981, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right across the Charles River from Boston, which had experienced tremendous conflict in its 1974 school integration plan, which mandated the transfer of students to schools across racial boundaries. Controlled choice was designed to move decisively away from both a neighborhood school system and a mandatory transfer plan by requiring parents to look across the district and rank their top school preferences. Because all parents with school-age children were required to participate, making a choice did not require special initiative or knowledge of the policy. Students were assigned to their highest-ranked school that was compatible with the city's desegregation goals. The great majority of families received one of their top choices, giving them a sense of control and minimizing conflict without abandoning integration goals.46 There were, of course, some who did not get a top choice and protested the plan, but the number of involuntary assignments was much lower than in mandatory plans. There were a number of other provisions designed to ensure equity, such as an information center that parents were required or strongly encouraged to visit to receive information and counseling about their options (this was also often an element of desegregation and magnet plans).
Controlled choice encouraged competition among schools and addressed the normal exclusion of parents who did not choose from good transfer opportunities. Boston and a number of other districts subsequently implemented it.47 This was the last of the choice plans that were designed with civil rights goals in mind. In districts that had controlled choice for a considerable period of time, parents’ preferences for neighborhood schools declined sharply as they learned about other options. When the mandatory Boston court order was dropped after a more conservative Supreme Court authorized ending desegregation orders and there was a move to return to assigning students to their neighborhood school, strong opposition arose because a large majority of Bostonians saw these schools as weak, did not consider them a first choice, and did not want their children stuck in them.48 As with magnet schools, the controlled choice experience showed that it was possible to use choice—with clear efforts to strengthen information dispersal and recruitment and put limits on segregative choices—to produce a good deal of integration with a minimum of community conflict and, at the same time, to create desirable schools.
FORGETTING THE LESSONS OF CHOICE PROGRAMS
If the central justification for choice in the late civil rights era was to create voluntary desegregation and equalize education through innovation, the choice programs that have come to the fore in a more conservative era have often been hailed not as means to an end but as solutions to failing urban schools without any reference to segregation or systemic barriers to choice. Conservatives who denied that the problem of failing schools was rooted in social inequality and systematically unequal schooling shifted the blame to families and school bureaucracies.49 In contrast to civil rights advocates, who defined the central barriers to opportunity as racial discrimination, isolated poverty, and unequal education, the backers of newer plans—vouchers and charter schools—rested their claims on theories about the inherent inferiority of public schools run by large bureaucracies with strong teachers unions.50 A school outside a public school system would, by its nature, be better. Bill Gates, whose foundation strongly supports charter schools, spoke to the National Charter Schools Conference in 2010, hailing the “great progress” of the movement and calling charters “the only schools that have the full opportunity to innovate” in a country where “the way we educate students ... has not changed in generations.” He said that public schools had received more funding over generations but had “poor results.” The country needed “brand new approaches,” and “that's the one thing charter schools do best.” As in a market, “it's imperative that we take the risk to make change.”51
Race and poverty were largely considered irrelevant, and many charter schools were intentionally established in impoverished minority neighborhoods, where families were desperate for any option and public schools were far less powerful than in the suburbs. Some were set up to serve only a particular racial or ethnic group, challenging basic elements of civil rights policy with the claim that they had special empathy for minority students, justifying segregation by race and poverty.52 The operators of charter schools also claimed that educational entrepreneurs—such as themselves—could solve educational inequality using competition and freedom from bureaucracies and unions. They ignored the related facts that choice without civil rights controls would increase segregation and that segregated schools were systematically less successful, the realization of which had been central to the development of choice policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Segregation was simply accepted as a given and not seen as a serious limit to equal opportunity. Free markets and ending public regulation and the power of teachers’ organizations would solve educational gaps.
From Magnets to Charters
Charter schools, invented in 1991, appealed to conservatives because of their autonomy and to moderate Democrats because they could help block the drive for vouchers, keeping funds in the public sector.53 They had the advantages of little additional cost and none of the threat to the middle-class status quo that desegregation efforts posed, although the press often treated them as successful attacks on the status quo.54 During the three Bush and two Clinton terms, as noted above, the priority in funding and advocacy shifted from magnets to charter schools, with funding for the former frozen during much of the George W. Bush administration. This continued under the Obama administration, in spite of the popularity of magnet schools and significant research showing that they resulted in gains on test scores even after controlling for the differences between their students and similar ones in regular public schools. In contrast, a series of major studies of charter schools conducted by the federal government, the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and other researchers showed no such advantage for charters, as discussed in chapters 6 and 7.55
Minnesota wrote charter schools into law in 1991, which, by coincidence, was the same year the Supreme Court authorized the termination of all kinds of school desegregation plans and segregation began to climb steadily across the country.56 The first U.S. charter school opened in St. Paul, in 1992. The idea rapidly spread, and by the 2009-10 school year there were more than five thousand charter schools in the United States.57
The charter movement gained great popularity both because its basic assumptions were in tune with the times and because it avoided much of the political conflict produced by a long and futile fight over vouchers. Conservatives wanted choices outside the regular public schools and liberals wanted to protect the separation of church and state and avoid subsidizing private schools, four-fifths of which were religious. Charters were a new form of nonsectarian autonomous public school outside the established public school system, managed by nonprofit or for-profit groups. At first they represented a modest movement that strongly appealed to business executives and their foundations, which had started playing a large role in education policy, but nonetheless appeared to pose little threat to the regular system. One reason why this experiment seemed marginal was that research, even from conservative institutions such as the Bush administration's Department of Education and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, found no evidence of significant educational benefits in charters. In a period when conservatives placed enormous pressure on schools through test-driven accountability measures including No Child Left Behind and many state reforms, the failure to show benefits should have mattered greatly. NCLB produced a vast amount of data showing the poor performance of segregated impoverished schools, and many charters fell directly into that category and had similar outcomes.
As the charter movement grew, however, the owners and operators of these schools emerged as a highly organized and effective political lobby. Some talented and charismatic young educators had been attracted to the movement, and their schools were widely publicized. The charter drive received extensive philanthropic support, and the lobby was influential in a number of states and highly successful in Washington, most spectacularly in the Obama administration, some of whose top staff in the Department of Education were drawn from this movement. They wrote pro-charter priorities into the