SCHOOL VOUCHER PROGRAM May Foster Racial Separation.

• Position: Brief Article

Proponents of school choice maintain that parents would make choices based on school quality and school preferences, not on racial bias. A study by two Temple University, Philadelphia, Penna., researchers challenges that position. Professor of sociology Annette Lareau and Salvatore Saporito, assistant director of Temple's Social Science Data Library, found that racial factors, independent of measures of school quality, appear to have a powerful and independent effect on high school selection. They based their findings on research involving a voluntary school voucher transfer program in a school district in the Northeast.

According to 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."

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.) They 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 proportions of African-Americans, or if they preferred schools with measures of academic quality. We wanted to know the same for African-American students," Saporito explains.

"The view that racial bias is unimportant in school choice is not supported by our data," he argues...