School Choice? Some Kids Don’t Really Have One

School Choice? Some Kids Don’t Really Have Oneby Jamila Thomas | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile) | The OpEd Project
When it comes to school choice, I am not convinced all children have one. Parents living on the margins don’t have much of a choice, either. As I walk the halls of schools, and talk with teachers, students and parents, it becomes obvious for certain students, “choice” is a popular phrase signaling quality and high-impact results — but doesn’t at all mean what it says.
If anything, poor and racially marginalized black and brown students make a choice to come to school in the first place. Based on funding formulas and limited resources and services many students showing up bedecked in white shirts and khakis, expect to gain a fair and equitable education they won’t actually get. While “choice” is being pushed from the federal level down to the closest city block, what’s being offered is more of a stripped-down facsimile of public education that does not serve all students. And if the Trump administration budget is any indication, the expansion of so-called “choice” can’t help students because of more than $9 billion (13.5 percent) in Education Dept. cuts that accompany this move.
This is happening while investors leverage money-making opportunities to make “education” a product by siphoning public dollars into charters and vouchers that don’t deliver the results they promise. In fact, many of the children who are angry or ill prepared are the mercy of their parents’ plight or bad decisions. Their demeanor is not reflective of their desire to be a good student but of a more complex situation. Yet, for many this noble idea of choice seems like the answer. Meanwhile, most schools still aren’t prepared to cope with the totality of a child’s experience.
Budgets impact everything from school resources to hiring the best teachers. When children from racially and economically marginalized communities are siphoned from neighborhood schools into charter schools run on slim budgets, they are forced to battle for more than the right to learn. The real choice being made may well be safety, as parents from marginalized communities smartly prioritize sending children to safe environments but ones that don’t happen to deliver solid learning results. A recently released study of D.C.-based school charter school vouchers suggests as much, as the study shows school choice has actually worsened learning results rather than improved them.
It is compelling now to utter the words “educational equity” while not adequately addressing “teacher parity” or “equitable resource allocation” or “student/teacher behavioral management” or the impact of so-called school choice. Stating these systematic ideologies in the same sentence is equivalent to five freight trains traveling 100 miles per hour and stopping at the point of impact. Wait! Stop! There are so many questions that need to be answered.
At the core of a child’s growth and development, regardless of ethnic background, is an excitement about trying new things, seeing new things and learning creatively. There is a valid argument that students who fail are not failing because they are not capable but because they are disengaged. Why is this? Teachers need support to act boldly and creatively, teaching against “the test” in order to pass the test. 
In Texas, where the choice movement has taken off, African-American students are performing significantly behind their peers, according to Texas Academic Performance Report. Data shows glaring achievement gaps for third-graders, the age group serving as the barometer for ongoing academic growth and development. Students performing well by the third grade are more likely to have academic success. By fourth grade, students are no longer reading to learn but reading to excel because of the compounding effect of educational concepts. In the 2014-2015 school year, only 52 percent of Texas black students scored favorably on the reading portion of the state- sponsored standardized test compared with white children, 86 percent of whom scored significantly higher. Hispanic, Asian and Native American students also scored significantly higher at 65 percent, 74 percent and 77 percent respectively on the same reading assessment.
What we know for sure is teachers’ creativity is shackled to black-and-white testing preparatory sources, and a child’s natural ability to embrace new concepts is threatened and beaten down by a constant barrage of “That’s not on the test.” There is a direct correlation between absenteeism and academic performance. The more a child is engaged in school the more likely they are to come to school and participate in a more concerted way than a child who is withdrawn and disconnected from the academic process.
Exposure connects students to excitement about learning, and this is especially true for underserved pupils, many of them African American. For many black children, schools are not a choice but rather a sentence, time wasted gearing up for test that doesn’t even reflect their reality.
The idea around school choice is noble and necessary. Let’s just be clear when these schools are “chosen” and filled to capacity by students who have the support systems, we not forget there are students who never had a choice in the first place.
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Jamila Thomas, a Dallas Public Voices Fellow, is an African American Student Success Initiative coordinator in the Dallas Independent School District.