justified the obvious conflicts between American belief in individualism, individual responsibility, and a real possibility of success, and the deep and persisting inequalities among groups.5 U.S. society is therefore seen as morally good, not because it produces equality but because it provides a fair pathway to possible success for everyone. Each person is responsible for his or her own response to opportunities and success or failure in the market. When the educational system is challenged by critics, one response tends to be proposals for an expansion of opportunity.
Though U.S. public schools were remarkable in bringing together European immigrants (and later their children) from nations that differed profoundly in many dimensions, their record with nonwhites has been a massive disappointment. Indians, African Americans, and people of Mexican origin in the United States received little education until well into the twentieth century.6 Rectifying this profound inequality has been a central issue in civil rights struggles.
For the two centuries after the first census in 1790, nonwhites constituted between 10 and 20 percent of the United States population, and the percentage of immigrants reached a historic low in the mid-twentieth century, before the 1965 immigration reform. Then the proportion of nonwhites exploded, particularly among the young, greatly raising the educational stakes.
The mid-1800s common school reforms that created public school systems were motivated by a belief that all students should be offered an adequate curriculum established by the state government. The idea of providing prescribed equal educational experiences was so strong that there was, in fact, a struggle in some parts of the country in the name of equal preparation to ban private religious education (the private sector of U.S. education has always been largely religious schools). In its classic 1925 decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court rejected an Oregon initiative that required all children to attend public schools, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to choose a private school. It held unanimously that “the fundamental liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”7
More than 80 percent of private school students attend religious schools, but private schools educate only a small minority of American students—now about a tenth, down from a sixth in the mid-twentieth century. Even after the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris breached the legal prohibition on public subsidizing of religious schools, there was little movement in the country to adopt school vouchers, and many states still forbid aid to religious schools.8 Public schools operating under state law and the policies of state governments and local districts are clearly the dominant force in American education. As a result, the most consequential choice debates concern public schools.
From the mid-1800s, when they became widely established in the United States, until the 1960s, there was little provision for choice in public schools. All children were required to go to school, which was assigned by where they lived (and sometimes on the basis of their race), and they either went there or paid for a private school, which was also required to offer the basic state curriculum. In theory everyone was exposed to the same kind of educational opportunity. The common school ideology emphasized uniformity and universalism, at least for whites. Everyone was going to be introduced to the same basic learning by qualified teachers. There were decades of struggle to build systems of public education with adequate standards of teacher training and curriculum and to eliminate politics and partisanship in school operations across the country. Schools were seen as essential for the development and progress of communities and were expected to infuse millions of immigrants from divergent backgrounds with a shared culture and civic understanding.9
Until the mid-twentieth century, the federal government had almost no role in education policy, so the focal point for the development of public schools was state governments. Their efforts were highly uneven.10 Additionally, in the mid-twentieth century seventeen states still had duplicate school systems serving the same areas, one for black and one for white students. Indian and Latino students also had separate schools or classrooms in some states. Linda Brown had to walk past a white school to a more distant black school, prompting her father to become the lead plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, which the Supreme Court decided by outlawing systems of schools intentionally segregated by race, generating decades of struggle.
Until the 1970s, most of the civil rights battle was about access to the same schools in the same neighborhoods. When it turned out that residential segregation in the increasingly urbanized South was producing segregated and unequal schools even without state segregation laws, the Supreme Court ordered mandatory desegregation across neighborhood boundaries in 1971.11 It extended desegregation to northern and western cities in its 1973 Keyes decision but drew a line between city and suburban schools the very next year in Milliken, making desegregation impossible in many places with city school systems with few remaining white students.12 Courts began dismantling desegregation orders seventeen years later, when the 1991 Oklahoma City v. Dowell decision allowed cities to have segregated neighborhood schools after a period of desegregation.13
Tasked with taking action against segregation, cities faced tension over the mandatory reassignment of students and teachers by courts, which led to a strong focus on new forms of race-conscious choice combining magnet programs with desegregation policies. Today, however, color-blind choice has become a central part of the discussion of educational reform, based on a theory that challenges the American tradition of public schools controlled by local elected boards and assumes that semiprivate schools are superior and unregulated individual choice will solve inequalities. As schools become ever more segregated by race and class and the links between segregation and inequality are more fully documented, the issue of segregation, of course, will not go away. The policy shift is often justified by claims that schools outside the public school bureaucracy will solve the problem because the need to compete makes them superior.
MARKET THEORY
The theory of school choice that has been most widely adopted in the past three decades in the United States, the market theory, argues that giving parents the right to chose schools for themselves and giving educators the opportunity to create or transform autonomous schools of choice will have a powerful educational impact.14 The goal of this theory is equal opportunity to make a choice, assuming that parents know what is best and will equally understand and take advantage of broader opportunities without assistance. Obviously this theory starts with the individual, sees regulation by public agencies and legislatures as barriers to opportunity rather than guarantees of equal treatment, and assumes that a broad scope of individual choice will produce greater equity and higher levels of achievement.
The complicated part of this theory is that although the claim that choice will improve opportunities seems to be a factual premise subject to empirical investigation, it is also a central value premise in the broader theory of market economics and the political philosophy of individualism. That market competition creates value is a central premise of both the discipline of economics and conservative ideology, which therefore see markets as good by definition. Classical economics postulates that if both buyers and sellers are free to compete, there will be the most efficient outcomes, providing good products at good prices and strong incentives for improving them. In education the dominant version of this theory argues that if parents can choose to move their children, families and educators can create new schools exempt from regulation, they will not be trapped in inferior settings, and students will have much better opportunities. Children will be able to move out of settings where education reform rarely succeeds. The theory also holds that if educators are no longer limited (or protected) by school bureaucracies and union contracts, which by their very nature limit market competition, they will create new and better schools offering much richer opportunities, and those that do this the best will be rewarded with growing enrollments and public funds. According to this theory, rigid bureaucracies and self-aggrandizing unions, which conspire to block educational innovation and
