This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 6th, 2019. I'm Kila Brown.

The criticism that has been revived against advocates of school choice is that choice advocates are at best

indifferent to segregation.

Cato's Neil McCluskey argues that criticism needs to contend with some facts about school

choice advocacy today.

Well, school choice has become more and more common as it's really become an

accepted thing and I'm not just talking about charter schools or inter-district or inter-district choice, but private school choice has become widespread with 26 states or so with either voucher programs or scholarship tax credit programs or

education savings accounts and then on top of that charters and other choice

it's not private choice but some cases sort of like private choice. We've seen a very concerted backlash now

against that kind of choice. And one of the most prominent arguments that school choice opponents, especially private school

choice opponents have been using, is that private school choice, they say, originated in segregation academies, which were schools

set up in the South after Brown v Board of Education that were private schools to which public funding was attached to the school

or to the students so that white students could leave public schools that were slated to be integrated.

And so there we've seen this argument many times, and then in particular a recent article by Steve Suits of Emory University saying

that school choice is grounded in racism and people who support school choice are at best indifferent to racial

segregation in the schools. There have been real concerned efforts to

connect modern day school choice efforts to those terrible segregationists in the South, in the 50s and

1960s who wanted to use school choice certainly to avoid integration of schools.

What was in particular about this recent Suits article was being very explicit in making connections saying in fact supporters of

segregation academies often used the exact same kind of language

that school choice supporters use now.

So they talked about freedom of association.

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