fact, a massive part of advertising is to inform people about their opportunities and to draw them across those borders. In all but a handful of choice plans, however, school district lines become absolute walls, which separate the students most in need of strong schools from the vast majority of schools with the most resources, the best teachers, and the strongest curricula and paths to success in college.
Districts with significantly stronger schools often don’t provide free transportation, which limits choice on the basis of income and wealth, reinforcing inequalities. In these areas, families without the resources to provide their own transportation can only watch as better-off children enjoy them. The school choice theories and policies that have been dominant since 1980 almost totally ignore these very real market barriers. A choice system that cuts off the vast majority of the strongest schools from the children who need them most and instead preserves them for students with many types of home advantages is not a market system in any meaningful sense. Many critics who agree with Milton Friedman’s complaint that poor students do not have the same chance as affluent students to access better schools strongly oppose policies that would enable many of these students to enroll in the schools in the critics’ own suburban districts. It is a curious fact that market models are rarely applied to the mainstream schools in the predominantly middle-class suburban communities where many of their advocates live. If markets create such gains, why do affluent areas not also seek to use them? Why do suburban communities wall off their schools and prosecute parents from other jurisdictions who try to access them? In fact, most such communities not only provide no choice in schools but also do everything possible to limit their housing market in ways that exclude families who are not affluent but might wish to send their children to these neighborhoods’ schools.38 Suburban districts simply assign children to the nearest school, and their schools, of course, report high achievement, graduation, and college-going statistics. Suburban housing and land-use policies, which exclude affordable and subsidized housing while taking no significant action against housing discrimination, produce dramatic contradictions with market theories. Though school opportunity is tied to housing, there is no metropolitan housing development market, and local land-use and zoning regulations forbid builders from producing affordable rental housing for families in most areas with excellent schools—facts that are also almost completely ignored in choice discussions.39 Yet it is clear that subsidized housing, for example, has long been and continues to be developed in ways that exacerbate school segregation and unequal educational opportunity.40
The fact that individual municipalities have the right to exclude students from other school districts is the basic but overlooked cause of school inequality. Suburbs with strong schools often use their housing and building-code policies to exclude all but the upper-income fraction of families. Few of these communities have serious policies to deal with the continuing housing discrimination, documented in housing market audits, against nonwhite families who have enough income to live there. These policies give affluent suburban communities the advantages of access to the economy of the metro region while shifting many of the costs back to the cities and denying city students access to their schools. When Milton Friedman, Abigail Thernstrom, and many others argue that choice should provide poor children with the same opportunities their own children receive, they don’t really mean the same middle- and upper-class suburban schools connected to good colleges; they mean the choice of a charter or a voucher school that serves other poor minority children. They certainly don’t discuss the extreme control of the housing market, which prevents any of the children they express sympathy for from living in suburban communities where good public schools already exist. They use the market metaphor selectively. Claiming that unequal schools reflect individual choice and not systemic problems can shift the blame from a general system of racial and class segregation to the “antimarket” teachers’ organizations and school districts that resist charter schools.
It could be argued that suburban residents don’t need schools of choice because they can choose their schools through the housing market. There is, of course, some truth to this. White and Asian families with substantial incomes can, of course, exercise broad choice in where they live and what school district they have access to. Being able to choose housing, to get favorable loans, and to live in a costly community is linked to improved schooling opportunity. The frequent use of school test scores in marketing housing is a reflection of widespread concern for at least one aspect of school quality in housing searches.41 (Interestingly enough, there is also evidence that whites are moving to whiter areas, regardless of school quality.)42 Given the other forces that affect housing searches even for the middle class, however—such as amount of equity, previous location, job and institutional commitments, transit and freeway locations, location of relatives, and ability to obtain mortgages—even families with the ability to choose often confront limitations accessing strong schools. And from 2007 to 2012, a severe housing market crisis locked millions of families in place regardless of their desires, stuck in underwater mortgages on residences they cannot afford to sell. But in spite of these limits on choosing schools through housing decisions, there is a striking disinterest in and even hostility toward the expansion of charter schools in many suburban communities. The reality is that these communities tend to be satisfied with their schools and often see charters as threatening the financial base of a healthy and desirable system. Federal policy squarely focuses intense external pressure to expand charters on places with low-scoring schools, which include most segregated low-income schools. There is very little external pressure on affluent suburban communities to create them. We force poor communities to implement forms of choice their school officials do not want because of the belief of others that it will be good for them since choice is inherently superior. In the communities where business leaders, policy makers, and other advocates often live, however, there is little choice.
The truncated school choices for city residents are very different from what an actual market would offer. Often, in paying more attention to the theory than to the situation on the ground, advocates treat the choice that is available (such as a neighborhood charter school not significantly different from the local public school) as a major solution. To call this a market and to suggest that these choices are somehow similar or equal to what affluent families get through their choice of communities is to stretch the market metaphor to the breaking point. What is valuable about a market is real choices, among all available goods, at prices that are lowered by widespread competition. What we have in school choice programs today is limited choice, little information for parents, and an unsupported theory that any nonpublic school will produce educational gains simply because it is nonpublic. The fact that parents seek this limited choice is taken as evidence that choice is better, and data to the contrary is ignored.
Market theory assumes that people know what they are buying and make decisions based on comparisons of offerings from many providers. If people do not know what they are buying or have false information, markets are inefficient. Theorists of school choice often simply assume that parents have good knowledge and that their decisions show that the chosen schools are better. The actual state of parental knowledge and how it relates to school quality are, of course, researchable questions. What we know is troubling. Empirical studies show that rates of both knowledge about and the use of choice programs strongly skew toward the more educated, the more affluent, and the better-connected families.43 This pattern is stark and clear. If unequal knowledge reflects family inequalities, choice can become a mechanism to reinforce rather than overcome stratification.
The school choice market theory assumes that educational quality will be the basis of choice. But if the chooser has little valid information, this cannot be true. Additionally, it is clear that white families often make choices not on educational information but on issues such as race, a major nonmarket factor that, if not dealt with, will increase the already severe racial separation in unequal schools and undermine the stability of integrated schools and neighborhoods.44 The fact that unrestricted choice led to white families leaving integrated areas half a century ago was a major reason why civil rights policies restricted choices that increased segregation. When whites leave or stop moving into a neighborhood, resegregation is often rapid and usually triggers a similar change in school population, producing
