Shavar Jeffries, blogging over at the Black Professors blog, continues to write about school choice and its importance to the black community (and by assocation, the latino community as well).

This time however, the post is about School Choice and its connection to the Civil Rights Establishment. Professor Jeffries writes:

According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Black parents, especially Black parents of children in urban schools, strongly support school choice. This result should be unsurprising: The futures of their children are directly, if not irrevocably, compromised by the continuing failure of urban schools. At the same time, most longstanding civil-rights organizations — like the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) — strongly oppose school choice. The following assertions of LCCR, contained in its platform statement on educational matters, is typical:

After Brown, discrimination and resistance to integration was so extreme in places like Prince Edward County, Va., that they closed their public schools and used taxpayer money for vouchers to pay for private schools for white children. Vouchers are still a way to abandon public education, increase segregation, and leave millions of children behind; we can’t go back to this shameful tradition.

Established civil-rights organizations often repeat the mantra that contemporary school-choice policies are simply a reflection of discriminatory policies used decades ago to subvert Brown. But this claim is misplaced for several reasons, not least of which is the simple fact that most Black children are educated in overwhelmingly minority schools. This de facto public-school segregation is largely the consequence of residential segregation coupled with narrow judicial constructions of federal courts’ remedial authority under Brown II to compel integration — judicial power limited particularly by the Court’s effective prohibition on metropolitan remedies in Milliken v. Bradley and its decisions in the 1990s facilitating the termination of desegregation decrees.

In this context of broad de facto segregation, the notion that school choice would enhance segregation concerning the children purportedly left behind by vouchers seems incongruous: These children were left behind long ago by the mass exodus from these neighborhoods of Whites and the middle class. Indeed, vouchers not only fail meaningfully to enhance segregation, but perhaps offer the best opportunity to facilitate integration. In many respects, the only weapon left in the arsenal of the public-school integrationist is the magnet school, a school designed primarily to provide a kind of education likely to persuade racially and economically diverse groups of parents voluntarily to enroll their children.

In any event, not only does the continued preoccupation with integration seem untenable given current demographic and jurisprudential realities (leaving aside, for the moment, the educational value of compelled integration, an issue which I will discuss later), but also it fails to address specifically the substantive effectiveness of the education urban public schools provide to Black students. Black children need to learn, and need to do so immediately given the exigencies of the modern economy. Public schools, objectively, are not getting the job done and have not done so for decades. At the same time, Black, urban parents possess a limited, if extant at all, capacity to impact public-school politics in a way likely to affect sustainable systemic change.

I thus wonder what it is our established civil-rights leadership is thinking. While our leadership focuses quixotically on a remedy devoid of practical currency, we are in the midst of losing yet another generation of Black children to a government-run system that demonstrably is failing their needs.

The last sentence bears repeating, “While our leadership focuses quixotically on a remedy devoid of practical currency, we are in the midst of losing yet another generation of Black children to a government-run system that demonstrably is failing their needs”.