FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Contact Barbara Faggins, 215-204-7476
[email protected]
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS SAY SCHOOL VOUCHER PROGRAM MAY FOSTER RACIAL SEPARATION
In recent debates, proponents of school choice have maintained that parents would make choices based on school quality and school preferences, not on racial bias.
A new study by two Temple University researchers challenges that position. The authors found that racial factors, independent of measures of school quality, appear to have a powerful and independent effect on high school selection.
According to Temple sociology professor Annette Lareau, "White parents avoid black schools even when the SAT scores are higher. Since urban districts all over the country tend to have many all-black schools, the pool of schools white parents would seriously consider is vastly smaller than choice proponents suggest."
Lareau and Temple co-author Salvatore Saporito, assistant director of Temple's Social Science Data Library, based their findings on research involving a voluntary school voucher transfer program in a northeastern school district in the United States.
The researchers examined the applications of more than 2,000 eighth graders-- 1,794 African Americans and 294 whites-- who participated in the voluntary transfer program. Asian and Latino applicants were not computed because there were few transfer requests.
Lareau and Saporito calculated the percentage of black and white applicants separately to determine how the applicants differed in their choice of schools.
"We wanted to know if white students avoided schools with high portions of African Americans, or if they preferred schools with measures of academic quality. We wanted to know the same for African-American students," says Saporito.
"The view that racial bias is unimportant in school choice is not supported
by our data," says Saporito, noting that the study reveals emerging behavioral patterns among white families in terms of school choice.
"We are finding that white families are more likely to leave a school or avoid a school that has many African Americans," Saporito points out.
Not only are white students leaving the schools with a high number of Latinos, Asians and blacks, but they are also selecting schools based on their racial composition, says Saporito, who also teaches statistics at Temple.
Black parents and students, the researchers found, were not as sensitive to the racial composition of the student body as they were to the number of enrolled students from disadvantaged families.
"Our interpretation is that poverty is the only factor which varied with school selection among African Americans," explains Saporito. "Race appeared to be a less powerful factor for African-American families than white families; however, some parents stated that they sought racially diverse settings.
"We are questioning this notion that you'll integrate schools through school choice. We found very strong evidence to the contrary that belies the assumptions made by choice proponents about integration," says Saporito, adding that the study indicates white parents are more likely to choose schools with other white students even if the schools have low SAT scores.
"The assumption has always been that school choice will allow the poor or [ethnic) student to leave the worst schools. We found that the white and wealthier parents were leaving black or poor schools," says Saporito. "Our findings suggest the need for conceptual changes in the field."
The school selection process is flawed, Saporito says, because choice advocates are presuming that a standard procedure can be used for families of different racial and class backgrounds.
"We found marked differences in the selection process for African-American and white families," says Saporito, explaining that whites eliminated schools based on a single criterion and used other criteria to select from the remaining schools.
Blacks did not eliminate from consideration a particular school on the basis of its racial composition, says Saporito: "In other words, different racial groups appear to make decisions in different ways."
The study recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
For more information about the study, or to interview the researchers, call Temple's News Bureau, 215-204-7476.
RSS