For more than 50 years, it has been one of the major policy goals of the U.S. education
system to reduce segregation levels in public schools. However, even after the removal of legal
barriers to integration, the gradual enlightenment of public opinion on racial matters and decades
of enormous efforts to make school integration a reality, America’s schools still are heavily
segregated by race. While many factors are at work, this is mainly a result of residential
segregation. For various reasons, Americans tend to live in racially homogeneous
neighborhoods, and this fact is reflected in school attendance patterns.
It often is claimed that private schools are heavily segregated by race and that school
vouchers, which allow parents to use their portion of government education funding at the public
or private school of their choice, lead to greater segregation. U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of
Illinois claims that “the underlying political foundation and dynamic of the [voucher] movement
is avoidance of racial integration.”
Hugh Price of the Urban League says vouchers “will wind up
subsidizing segregation.”
Just one month ago, DeWayne Wickham wrote in USA Today that
vouchers are a “recycled” form of the segregationist movement of the 1950s.
Academic researchers make similar claims. Clive Belfield of Queens College has recently
asserted that “consistently, there is greater student segregation as a consequence of vouchers or
choice.”
David Berliner of Arizona State University declares that “vouchers add another means
to segregate our citizens, this time using public money.”
Berliner has even accused vouchers of
leading to genocide: he once testified to the New Mexico state legislature that “voucher
programs would allow for splintering along ethnic and racial lines. Our primary concern is that
voucher programs could end up resembling the ethnic cleansing now occurring in Kosovo.”
These sweeping claims are based on faulty empirical evidence. Most existing studies of
segregation are methodologically inadequate; they define “segregation” in a way that tends to
mask the true level of segregation in schools. This study uses a sound empirical method to
2
Convention