Overturning Brown
School choice, largely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The rhetoric of school choice, however, resembles that of segregationists following Brown v. Board, who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers.
In Overturning Brown, Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist policies and the modern school choice movement to expose the dangers lying behind the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparity has expanded exponentially in the years following Brown v. Board, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today.
It is only through recognizing the smoke and mirrors that Suitts deftly exposes in Overturning Brown that we understand the risk America’s underprivileged youth face with school voucher programs and as public funds are funneled into charter schools and predominately white and wealthy private schools.
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Published in 2020.
Author Q and A
1. What was the moment that made you realize, “I have to write this book”?
If there was one specific moment, it was probably when I read a few years ago that Martin Luther King III had led a march for “school choice” in Florida. It told me that even the son of America’s most prominent civil rights leader of the 20th century did not know the history of school choice in southern school desegregation nor understand what that history offers about understanding today the probable effects of public funding of private schooling.
2. Is Brown v. Board of Education really in danger of being overturned?
Yes. Private schools remain the most segregated schools in the United States and public funding of those schools, without mechanisms to assure that they become diverse and integrated, will not only keep most students attend private schools, according to their own race, but will sustain the underfunding of public schools, which most children of color and low-income students have and will continue to attend. In this historical context, as public funding of unregulated private schools is rapidly enlarging, the US Supreme Court already has riled that public schools can do very little on their own to advance school integration, while states are free to divert public funds away from public schools towards supporting the nation’s least diverse schools – private schools. In effect, these trends can truly mean the 1954 decision that ended state-sanctioned segregation by race will be overturned as a goal which the nation is moving toward.
3. What’s the most common misunderstanding people have about school choice?
Most people don’t realize that school choice means in most cases that private schools get to choose which students to enroll with public funds – and far less often that parents and students get to choose which private schools to attend. Despite receiving, public funding, most private schools are able to maintain their own admission policies and their own tuition costs – which usually means that students of color and low-income students of all races seldom are admitted to the highest performing private schools.
4. What’s a story, person, or episode in the book that best captures the stakes?
Actually, it’s a chart that is on page 82 of the book. It compares by state the percentage of children attending public schools and those attending private school schools with overwhelmingly white enrollment. In other words, in each state what percentage of students were in private schools where black, Hispanic, and Native American students were 10% or less of the school population as compared students in public schools in the category of schools.
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Here are two examples: in Delaware 72% of students in private schools were in schools overwhelmingly white. That is compared with 4% of students in the public schools. In Oklahoma 55% of the private school children attended such overwhelmingly white schools while only 4% of the children in public schools in Oklahoma were in such white schools.
5. What should parents, board members, and the community watch for when proponents of “school choice” show up at the state legislature?
They should be prepared to confront the proponents of school choice on their claims that public funding of a private schools will not injure the funding of local public schools. And they should be prepared to confront the proponents on their claims that public funding a private school primarily gives parents choices for their children’s education. The primary effect is that it gives private schools the public funds to enroll their own choice of students they wish to admit.
