How School Choice Left Black Children With Scraps for Their Education

To understand why Black children only get the scraps of school choice, we need to interrogate what the phrase “school choice”has meant in the years between the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and today. Initially, before Brown, Black families sought more choice in their children’s education. More precisely, they wanted access to schools that were better resourced than those established for Black children.

School choice promised to allow parents, irrespective of race, to choose outside of their zoned public school in the interest of their children’s education, while in reality, that choice was fraught at best and damaging at worst. The hope education fostered in the hearts of generations of Black parents was paid for by having to make the impossible chose between their children having to endure violence, racial isolation, and psychological trauma in predominantly white schools or under-resourced, understaffed, less credentialed, and policed predominantly Black public schools.

The sacrifice of leaving local public schools was made most evident in the lives of civil rights activists Ruby Bridges and Linda Brown. Bridges was just six years old in 1960 when she walked to school in New Orleans escorted by four U.S. marshals. On her first day, Ruby was accosted by two white women, one who threatened to poison her, the other who held a display of a Black baby doll in a coffin. For her safety, Ruby was not permitted to eat food prepared at school. She spent the entire school year alone. No white parent would allow their child to be in the same classroom with her. Brown was thrust into the national spotlight by her family’s commitment to ending racial segregation in public schools. The Brown name entered the annals of history by chance. Thirteen families were involved in the civil rights lawsuit, but the Brown’s case was chosen because it was alphabetically first: Brown v. Board of Education. These two Black girls still embody both the hope and the terror that Black parents are faced with generation after generation as they choose an educational path for their children.

Read More: Linda Brown's Legacy and the Hidden Ripple Effect of Brown v. Board of Education

Thirty years later, access to white schools continued to offer Black children nothing more than a mixed bag: A chance at more advanced academics but at a negative and often damaging social cost. Aja (her name has been changed to protect her privacy), who is 40 and Black, grew up in my hometown of Rochester, New York. She works for a local nonprofit in the city. Educators raised her—her grandmother and mother are teachers—and she loved to read as a child. She remembers being a first grader who often finished schoolwork before her classmates. When she did, she would put her pencil down, hand the work to her teacher, then walk over to the reading nook to quietly lose herself in a book, careful not to disrupt her classmates. Rather than give Aja more challenging work or encourage her independent reading time, her white teacher labeled Aja’s trips to the reading nook disruptive and called Aja’s mother to complain.

“I was a precocious little kid,” Aja told me. “My thirst for knowledge was a problem for this teacher.”

Aja’s mother searched for a better school for her daughter, one that would nurture her love of learning. Private school was too expensive, so Aja’s mother filled out an application for her nine-year-old daughter to attend Urban-Suburban, the “first and oldest voluntary desegregation program in the United States.” Established in 1965 through an agreement between the Rochester City School District and a neighboring school district, the program transfers inner-city students to suburban schools and vice versa. Urban-Suburban’s goal is “to decrease racial isolation, deconcentrate poverty and enhance opportunities for students.”

The ruse of school choice left Aja’s mother with few options for her daughter. White people who had fled to the segregated suburbs left underfunded urban public schools in their wake, and programs like Urban-Suburban were designed to fill the gap. However, to seize the opportunity offered by Urban-Suburban, Aja would have to leave her city behind. “It was overwhelming. It was terrifying. It was traumatizing,” Aja said about attending a nearly all-white school. The suburb her school was in was 87% white. “It was also the realization that, damn, we’re poor,” Aja continued.

Listening to Aja describe her experience hit me hard. I had applied to that same program for high school, but I had been rejected. I thought Aja was lucky—until I spoke to her. When Aja and I met as teenagers, we instantly became best friends. We both noticed right away that I needed Aja’s help. We were in the same grade and the same age, but I was years behind her educationally. She was well read, and I had never finished a book. She began to tutor me. I needed her guidance in every subject. We joked and laughed about how far behind I was, but Aja would reassure me that she had my back. And I, in turn, gave Aja the Black female friendship and camaraderie that she had missed out on attending a white school.

But Aja’s access to rigorous academics came at a price. She recalls sitting in classrooms in those moments before or after the bell rang, the moments when students had time to mill about and talk. That’s when she’d find herself surrounded by white peers who shot rapid-fire questions at her “tommy-gun-style,” she told me. They wanted to know what it was like to live in Rochester, but first they had to make their assumptions known.

“Are you in a gang? Do you have a gun?” Others asked about her hair and talked about Black people in only stereotypical ways. Aja said she felt like “an exhibit in a zoo.” All she could do was look at them incredulously, hopeful that the look on her face showed her disgust at their ignorance. “I knew I was dealing with white people’s perceptions,” she told me. “But I didn’t have the framework to understand what was happening.” Aja made do, building community with other Black students who, like her, were bused in from the city. She got used to white classmates trying to correct her English and stopped expecting anyone in leadership at the school to bridge the gap between the culture she came from and the one she’d been “imported” into. In this way, Black children are often exposed to soul-crushing social challenges and psychic damage when they attend majority-white schools.

In reality, we have educational scraps. Black parents’ sacrifices are expected, and the awareness that many of us will do whatever it takes to help our children is systematically exploited. Our sacrifices are celebrated as America’s watershed moments for the appearance of civil rights, but once the cameras leave, we are met with resistance in the courts—and legislation often quietly unravels the gains of our sacrifices. We are expected to be America’s moral conscience—and we are unceremoniously punished for it.

From Punished For Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal by Bettina L. Love. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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