The Choice We Face
How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America's Most Controversial Education Reform Movement
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A comprehensive history of school choice in the US, from its birth in the 1950s as the most effective weapon to oppose integration to its lasting impact in reshaping the public education system today.
Most Americans today see school choice as their inalienable right. In The Choice We Face, scholar Jon Hale reveals what most fail to see: school choice is grounded in a complex history of race, exclusion, and inequality. Through evaluating historic and contemporary education policies, Hale demonstrates how reframing the way we see school choice represents an opportunity to evolve from complicity to action.
The idea of school choice, which emerged in the 1950s during the civil rights movement, was disguised by American rhetoric as a symbol of freedom and individualism. Shaped by the ideas of conservative economist Milton Friedman, the school choice movement was a weapon used to oppose integration and maintain racist and classist inequalities. Still supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, this policy continues to shape American education in nuanced ways, Hale shows—from the expansion of for-profit charter schools and civil rights–based reform efforts to the appointment of Betsy DeVos.
Exposing the origins of a movement that continues to privilege middle- to upper-class whites while depleting the resources for students left behind, The Choice We Face is a bold, definitive new history that promises to challenge long-held assumptions on education and redefines our moment as an opportunity to save it—a choice we will not have for much longer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Illinois education professor Hale (The Freedom Schools) explores in this pointed study the racist roots of the school choice movement and its damaging impact on public education. He documents how Southern states sought to avoid court-ordered desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education by closing public schools and funding private tuition with vouchers. In Northern cities such as Boston and Chicago, Hale finds the "same mechanisms of racism" in discriminatory housing policies and violent opposition to school busing. Conservative economist Milton Friedman sparked the national school choice movement by linking it to his free-market economic theories, and increasing support from the federal government and wealthy philanthropists made choice one of today's few bipartisan areas of agreement. But despite some successes, including Harlem Children's Zone, Hale finds that charter schools as a whole don't outperform public schools, and that the diversion of state and federal dollars toward private interests has drained resources from public school systems and maintained "larger patterns of segregation. The solution, according to Hale, is for more parents to enroll their children in public schools, and for organizers to work within existing structures to make improvements. Supported with convincing research and illustrative detail, this impassioned history makes a strong case that quality of education—not variety of choice—should be the goal.
Customer Reviews
School Choice = Competition
This book made me realize that choice has little to do with “what’s best for kids.” It’s about free markets, competition and privatizing education.