|« Back to Article|
Holder's argument to keep poor students in failing schools
By Rich Lowry : September 5, 2013
The segregationist Louisiana pol William M. Rainach would be mystified, but impressed.
Back in his day in the 1950s, locking black kids into inferior schools was a simple matter of racial prejudice. He'd surely marvel that six decades later, the nation's first African-American attorney general had found a way to do it in the name of desegregation.
Eric Holder's Justice Department is asking a federal court to block a portion of a Louisiana voucher program that gives poor children a way out of failing public schools. Ninety percent of the kids who use this educational lifeline are black. But Justice acts as if vouchers are tantamount to Rainach reaching from the grave.
Its petition harkens back to a 40-year-old desegregation case involving state-aided white flight to private schools. That case led to a court order forbidding Louisiana from providing assistance to private schools, meant to frustrate desegregation. The document's description of the noxiousness of past practices is compelling, but for the fact that it is no longer 1975.
The voucher program is available to kids from families below 250 percent of the poverty line and enrolled in schools receiving a C, D or F grade from the state. The program is popular, with about 8,000 students participating, and has shown improved test scores.
None of that is relevant to Justice, which seeks to block the vouchers unless they are subject to pre-approval in districts under the old court order. It claims that affected schools “achieved or were close to achieving the desired degree of student racial diversity, and the loss of students through the voucher program reversed much of the progress made toward desegregation.” It alleges “irreparable injury.” “Much” of the progress? “Irreparable” harm?
The petition describes how five white students left Independence Elementary School in Tangipahoa Parish. Education expert Jay Greene crunched the numbers and figured that the loss of these students would shift the school from 29.6 percent white to 28.9 percent white, for a total of 0.7 percent less whiteness.
On the other hand, Cecilia Primary School lost six black students, thus “reinforcing the school's racial identity as a white school in a predominantly black school district.” According to Greene, that would change the racial composition of the school from 30.1 percent black to 29.2 percent black, a stunning 0.9 percent drop.
A few questions suggest themselves: Who thinks this way, about schools, about anything? And: Does Holder have nothing better to do?
Even on his own bean-counting terms, Holder is wrong. A review of research literature by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice notes that almost every empirical study finds “school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools.”
The federal enmity to school choice is driven less by racial justice than by teachers unions, whose answer to poor kids stuck in rotten public schools is always simple: “Stay.”