Milton Friedman is best known today as an economist. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1976, primarily for theories outlined in his highly regarded “A Monetary History of the United States,” in which he asserted that the monetary policy of central banks, not failing markets alone, triggered economic collapse. Predominantly formed in reaction to Keynesian models, Friedman argued for smaller government and the reign of free market forces.
Yet his legacy today is arguably most pervasive in the realm of education. By advocating for “school choice,” Friedman called for a system where families select the schools they attend instead of enrolling in assigned schools. He believed that, if left alone, competition would improve the entire “market” and families would rationally choose the best schools.
Friedman fashioned the proposal while teaching at the University of Chicago — as a faculty member in the premier school of economics — putting forth a policy that promised to change the entire public system. It sounds simple but the repercussions of such a theory are problematic and complex.
But school choice was grounded in racism from the start.
Friedman developed the idea in conjunction with Southern racists who wanted to avoid racial desegregation after the historic Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Friedman looked to Virginia, where private, all-white academies were developing as a sanctuary for whites who feared desegregation. Virginia also permitted public schools to close in Prince Edward County, which shut down its schools between 1959 and 1964 rather than desegregate.
Friedman wrote in 1962: “There is also no doubt at all that if the Virginia system were introduced in Chicago, there would be an appreciable decrease in segregation, and a great widening in the opportunities.”
Chicago was like Virginia — and the former Confederacy — in many ways.
School choice allowed Chicagoans a way to avoid desegregation, much like the South. To evade court-mandated integration during the 1960s, Mayor Richard J. Daley and school officials utilized a voluntary desegregation plan based on school choice. Black families were free to enroll in white schools — if they applied and were accepted. The city also created new magnet schools and specialty programs to attract white families to enroll in predominantly Black or Latino schools.
Much like the “freedom of choice” plans in the South, the plans placed the onus of desegregation on Black families. The magnet schools led to token desegregation, at best, and continued to cater to the desires of whites.
By opening the door to the ideas of a free market, Friedman unleashed a new policy that assumed housing policy and the larger “marketplace” was fair.
But housing and schools were anything but equal in Chicago.
We see a long history of redlining and racist housing policy in the city of Chicago. City officials, real estate agents and bankers enforced racially restrictive covenants and denied home loans to potential Black homeowners.
As the demand for fair housing rose among a growing Black population, whites used violence to enforce segregation. The White Circle League, a segregationist vigilante association, rounded up more than 4,000 whites who forced a young Black couple to vacate their new apartment in the an all-white, working-class suburb of Cicero in 1951. Five years later, whites shot into the new home of the famed singer Mahalia Jackson, who had moved into the neighborhood of Chatham on the South Side.
The University of Chicago and neighborhood associations in Hyde Park engaged in restrictive housing policy as well. White residents working in coordination with university, city and federal officials engaged in “urban renewal” projects. They evicted families, demolished homes, and displaced Black residents while cultivating a progressive, “interracial” veneer.
The persistent segregation of Chicago and the violence used to maintain it was not lost on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who remarked in 1966: “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”
Racism and racist policy — not rationality as assumed in Friedman’s economic theories — shaped individual choices about choosing a school. “Choice” did not address racist policy. It ignored it, permitting it to fester.
School choice did little to stem the tide of Northern disdain for desegregation. By the 1990s, Chicago’s non-Hispanic white population declined by more than 100,000. Those who remained often enrolled in elite, selective schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods. These “choice” schools are competitive. The enrollment process is difficult to manage. Seats are coveted, but not forthcoming.
Evading desegregation and using school choice to foster a modicum of desegregation while catering to white families has allowed deep-seated institutional discrimination to go unchecked.
Despite the promises Friedman made in Chicago, the system remains broken.
As parents warily eye school reopenings during a COVID-19 surge, many claim the right to choose whether to home-school their children, to apply to selective schools, or to enroll in a private academy — a dream come true for Friedman.
Yet few of the progressive supporters of “school choice” are aware that it is deeply connected to racial segregation.
How we choose to engage with school choice in Chicago and across the nation will determine how our schools will serve communities disrupted and disenfranchised by the pandemic. The choice we face is ours to make.
Jon Hale is a professor of educational history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His new book, “The Choice We Face,” examines the history of school choice and how this impacts schools today.
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Op-ed: School choice has a less-than-choice history - Chicago Tribune
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