The world of education suffered two major set backs in 2007—the adoption of a radical private school vouchers program by the Utah state legislature, and a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down voluntary racial integration plans in Louisville and Seattle—but the good news is that both have been met with powerful responses. Voters in Utah subsequently repealed the legislature’s wrong-headed vouchers program, and a number of national leaders and local school districts are forging ahead to promote integration through alternative means, emphasizing class rather than race.

School Vouchers

The Worst

In February, Utah’s governor signed legislation authorizing an unprecedented use of taxpayer money for students to attend private schools throughout the state. Unlike voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. (which are bad enough), Utah’s program would have given some level of voucher funding to all students in the state, including the wealthiest. One state legislator noted, “This is not the camel’s nose in the tent; this is the whole camel in the tent.”

The Best

In Utah, defenders of public education petitioned to have the vouchers legislation go on the November ballot for an up or down vote, giving citizens an opportunity to veto the idea. Proponents of privatization were banking on the fact that Utah voters, who had given George W. Bush his largest margin nationally in 2004, would back the free market theory of education that underpins the vouchers notion. But on Election Day, 62 percent of Utah voters rejected vouchers; the idea lost in every single county in the state. The vote would have made sense to the late Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who noted that vouchers aren’t conservative; they’re radical. Shanker argued, “the public schools, more than any other institution in our society . . . have brought together different groups—groups which in other societies would always be at war with each other—and taught them to respect and work with each other.” He wrote: “It is no exaggeration to say that the public schools helped to bring about a political, social and cultural miracle.”

School Integration

The Worst

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial integration plans in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. Unlike affirmative action in higher education, where white students can argue that through hard work, they have earned a right to admission at a particular college, and should not have their race held against them, the case of nonselective public schools has no issue of merit or deservedness at stake, and so the Supreme Court decision that race could not be a factor even in assigning students is particularly troubling. In a nation where schools are already growing more segregated each year, the decision was a clear blow to the democratic promise of quality integrated schooling.

The Best

The good news is that, despite the Supreme Court’s ill-conceived decision on school integration, many communities are moving ahead with integration plans that will satisfy the Supreme Court’s opposition to employing race as a factor. As The Century Foundation’s report, “Rescuing Brown v. Board of Education” noted, some forty school districts nationally have turned to income as a basis for student assignment. Using factors such as eligibility for free and reduced price lunch, these districts have had considerable success in raising student achievement and indirectly promoting racial integration as well.

Presidential candidate John Edwards took note of this success when, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision, he proposed a plan in July to diversify schools by income. Edwards’s plan would provide a financial incentive to suburban schools to accept low-income students and beef up magnet school funding for city schools to attract wealthier suburban students. The Washington Post editorial page praised Edwards for offering a plan to “move the debate forward in a useful and stimulating way.” As my colleague Greg Anrig notes, a new report from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) makes clear that concentrations of poverty reduce academic achievement and underlines the importance of allowing kids from all backgrounds to attend good middle-class public schools.

At the higher education level, too, presidential candidate Barack Obama has spoken about the importance of integrating student bodies by class as well as race. Asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos whether Obama thinks his own daughters should receive a preference in college admissions, Obama responded: “I think my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.”

Recognition of the importance of class inequality by Edwards and Obama is important as a matter of substance: research finds that the main reason integration boosts achievement is not because black kids learn more sitting next to whites but because poor kids do better in a middle-class environment. For liberals, emphasizing class is also important politically, since policies which highlight race tend to encourage white working class “Reagan Democrats” to vote their race rather than their class. And emphasizing class is increasingly important as a legal matter: conservatives may not like socioeconomic school integration, but it’s legally bullet proof, and they can’t lay a glove on it. Moving into 2008 and beyond, policies that lead with class, and use race only when necessary, will increasingly provide the best way forward.