The first major battle over school choice came out of struggles over equalizing and integrating schools in the civil rights era, when it became apparent that choice could be either a serious barrier or a significant tool for reaching these goals. The second large and continuing movement for choice was part of the very different anti-government, individualistic, market-based movement of a more conservative period in which many of the lessons of that earlier period were forgotten, though choice was once again presented as the answer to racial inequality. This book brings civil rights back into the center of the debate and tries to move from doctrine to empirical research in exploring the many forms of choice and their very different consequences for equity in U.S. schools. Leading researchers conclude that although helping minority children remains a central justification for choice proponents, ignoring the essential civil rights dimensions of choice plans risks compounding rather than remedying racial inequality.
Educational Delusions? Why Choice Can Deepen Inequality and How to Make Schools Fair
About the Book
Reviews
"An important book presenting a powerful rejection of the notion that school choice is a path to improving schools. . . . Highly recommended."—S. H. Minner Choice“Orfield and Frankenberg have put together an extraordinary book that ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about our children and the public schools that serve them. If it were only for the powerful analysis of the dangerous charter school phenomenon, Educational Delusions? would be important and eye-opening. But there is also Frankenberg’s dazzling assessment of the carefully designed integration plan carried out in Berkeley, the bitter-sweet narratives on Louisville and Hartford, plus Orfield’s brilliant overview on choice and civil rights and the perils of forgetting history—these are just a handful of examples of the sweep and scope of this essential volume. I hope it will be widely read, and far beyond the walls of academia.”
Jonathan Kozol, author of Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America