Controls and Choices: The Educational Marketplace and the Failure of School Desegregation

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Many activists and writers have ascribed continuing racial segregation in American schools to a failure of will. In this view, forced transfers of students and other aggressive judicially mandated policies would lead to greater equality in education if only legislators and judges had the will to continue trying to make school districts conform to plans for redesigning schools and even American society. Controls and Choices: The Educational Marketplace and the Failure of School Desegregation provides a detailed examination of the nature of the educational marketplace, supported by historical evidence, to argue that school desegregation failed because it involved monopolistic efforts at redistributing opportunities. These efforts were fundamentally at odds with the self-interest of the families who had the greatest ability to make choices in the educational marketplace. The authors use the concept of the educational marketplace to explain how market-based attempts at school reform, notably vouchers and charter schools, have grown out of the failure of desegregation and remain hampered by lack of recognition of how the schools really function as markets. Some additional key features of this book include: Gives a clear understanding of how schools function as markets Illustrates the argument with histories of specific school districts Links the history of school desegregation to school vouchers and charter schools Includes easy to read and interpret graphs and figures Includes most up-to-date school population and census information

Reviews

Beginning with the premise that education is a business monopoly supplying clientele for the marketplace, equity in education falls short. Comparing the populations in low socioeconomic schools with those that are advantaged and mostly white clarifies that inequity exists. The former is of less value to consumers. Further, equity in education is not necessary to provide the skills required. It does not mirror marketplace reality. Though redistribution of diverse populations through desegregation was a noble civil rights goal, it sped up segregation. Mandated attempts achieved nothing more than an initial appearance of equity, and mandated redistribution encouraged the advantaged to relocate. Deciding where they could get the best education for their children, such as private, parochial, or magnet schools, middle- and upper-class families moved. This mobility, white flight, demographically reestablished the gap that desegregation was intended to address. One chapter provides several in-depth examples of desegregation failures. Another chapter outlines those claiming success, such as in-school desegregation; however, even those suffered from many of the same maladies. In short, after decades of desegregation in the US, desegregation has proved to be ineffective in providing educational equity. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; faculty. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Carl L. Bankston III is an American sociologist and author. He is best known for his work on immigration to the United States, particularly on the adaptation of Vietnamese-American immigrants, and for his work on ethnicity, social capital, sociology of religion, and the sociology of education. Stephen J. Caldas has published many articles and books on school desegregation. He also publishes in the area of bilingual education. He currently teaches quantitative research methodology and education policy at Manhattanville College in New York.