Government officials using anti-discrimination law to perpetuate educational disadvantages
The Department of Justice is seeking a federal court order to halt Louisiana’s school voucher program. The order would apply to school districts still under federal desegregation supervision. Arguing that the implementation of the voucher system has caused “school wide racial demographics to stray further from district-wide percentages,” the DOJ seeks to put the program on hold...
The Department of Justice is seeking a federal court order to halt Louisiana’s school voucher program. The order would apply to school districts still under federal desegregation supervision. Arguing that the implementation of the voucher system has caused “school wide racial demographics to stray further from district-wide percentages,” the DOJ seeks to put the program on hold starting in the 2014-15 academic year.
But the Louisiana lawsuit is just the latest point in a strange and disturbing trend in Southern states. Anti-discrimination laws recently have been invoked against school choice programs, harming the same people the laws were meant to benefit.
In Alabama, two lawsuits have been filed against the state’s Accountability Act of 2013. The act gives tax credits to parents whose children would be assigned to failing schools, to offset the costs of sending their children to a nonfailing private school or a nonfailing public school. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the program, alleging that it discriminates against other students who can’t make it out of failing schools when alternatives are geographically out of reach. It’s an absurd argument. As the Cato Institute’s Jason Bedrick puts it, the SPLC says that if the program can’t rescue “every child from a failing school, then it shouldn’t be allowed to rescue any child” at all.
Not to be outdone, Alabama State Sen. Quinton Ross joined forces with teachers union President Anita Gibson to sue to stop the Alabama law by alleging that the way it was passed violated proper legislative procedure. They also claim that tax credits “redirect state revenues” to sectarian and denominational schools. Of course, the law does no such thing; it only allows parents to keep more of their own money to spend on the school of their choice.
What all of these cases share in common is that they argue on the basis of anti-discrimination and equal protection laws that school choice, whether implemented via voucher programs or tax credits, are unfair to the poor or minorities. But it’s difficult to take these arguments seriously when the main beneficiaries of such programs are themselves overwhelmingly low-income minorities. In Louisiana, the vast majority of students receiving scholarships, 91 percent, are African-American. And in Alabama, as in most other places, failing schools are disproportionately found in low-income regions with a high concentration of minority residents.
It’s disgraceful enough that generations have been deprived of a quality education. But to deny parents the freedom to place their children in better educational opportunities because of “discrimination” is itself deeply discriminatory. Federal and state officials need to stop using anti-discrimination law to perpetuate educational disadvantages.