School Choice and Segregation: New Name, Same Game
Why ‘School Choice’ is Rooted in White Supremacy
A new book highlights how the movement to privatize education started with the effort to keep schools segregated.
In Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement, Steve Suitts provides much needed context for the current debate raging over “school choice,” charter schools, school vouchers, and other forms of privately operated schools that compete for public money. At 128 pages, the book is a fairly quick read but full of important content, through documentation and an impressive number of photos.
Suitts, a founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, makes an impressive and convincing case that the phrase “school choice”—a term influenced by libertarian economist Milton Friedman—is the latest foray in the long effort to resegregate public schools.
Segregationists began to talk in terms of “school choice,” rather than saying they wanted to keep black children out of their white schools.
Overturning Brown begins with the origin of school vouchers in the Southern states, where they emerged as an attempt to keep schools segregated after the CONTINUE READING: School Choice and Segregation: New Name, Same Game – Seattle Education
