School Choice is Desegregation

My high school was ranked 32nd in the entire country during my attendance. Of course, those numbers are based on test scores and matriculation rates. When you walked the halls of Fort Myers Senior High School, you could feel the racial tensions and the weight of history pressing down. In fact, if you just walked the halls, you could see it on display.

When we first moved to Florida, how they ran the school district we had moved into seemed cool. We had to visit the school department building and fill out some forms, and we received a large packet of information; we then got to choose which school we wanted to attend. My family was big on academics, so this seemed ideal; we could attend schools with the best programs to suit my brother and me.

That was eighth grade for me, and when high school arrived, I wanted to attend the performing arts school. Still, somehow, even though I didn’t apply to the International Baccalaureate program, it accepted me. I was going to Fort Myers Senior High School across the River for this advanced academics program. Yeah, somehow, I realize now, looking back, my mother applied for me.

I was exhausted and reluctant, but it seemed incredible; they had a rigorous and beneficial program that would earn me a significant amount of college credit by the time I graduated. At that time, only the second two years were the actual IB program. Still, they had created a Pre-IB program to prepare their students because they were just not up to snuff for the internationally standardized program. There had been too many program failures and dropouts before they implemented it to keep running the program for much longer. The Pre-IB program was designed to be adopted by many IB schools nationwide because American students often needed a boost compared to their European counterparts, especially in adjusting to the out-of-control workload.

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What sort of visible issues might I be suggesting? The school was seemingly self-segregated until I went to classes and realized an unreasonable proportion of the IB program was white, and the rest of the school was filled with black and LatinX students; this was why the halls were a river of separated colors. The lunch room was blocks of color; the quad was blocks of color. It was frightening, as someone who sees patterns everywhere, to see the segregation visibly happening on such a small scale, even though it theoretically wasn’t being imposed on us.

During my first year, the (white male) principal came through with the school officers and gave an “object lesson” in racism. He used male vs female instead of race. He recruited some drama students before the event and had them participate; they demonstrated scenes of students clashing like they did when the school was initially desegregated, like when he and many of our other teachers experienced as students there in the 1960s, and some as teachers only a few years prior for the most recent round at creating a unitary school district.

I had a full-on meltdown, crying and shaking. It didn't help that one of my best friends was the male student helping with the demonstration. I yelled at the principal, insisting that they couldn’t do this! But they could do it, because everyone just looked at me like I was crazy; most girls thought it was fun to treat the boys poorly for once. One of the police officers took me to the nurse, which everyone agreed with, so I missed the end of that lesson.

I am crying and shaking now, remembering it. It was a very intense experience, but the principal also discussed how the parents freaked out and protested even in 1998 when school choice was implemented because they knew then it was about desegregation, and did not want it. Lee County, Florida, resisted desegregation outright and openly with every fiber of its being.

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When I was living in Florida in the early 2000s, a committee reevaluated land usage and who would be assigned to which schools if they reinstated neighborhood schools, which is the norm in many places. A judge ruled it would place Lee County right back into a segregation situation. There was no way to maintain a unitary school district without continuing school choice because Lee County was still, in effect, segregated.

A few years back, when I saw the governor of Florida trying to make school choice the norm all over the state, I was shaken. You can’t desegregate something that isn’t segregated. When researching further, I found that counties and states across the U.S. are considering, attempting to implement, or have already implemented school choice. Gentrification is segregating our population without the need for laws to do it for us.

Am I saying this is a bad idea and that school choice will do more harm than good? Yes, I am saying that. Something founded on racist principles and using tactics taken right out of the Jim Crowe playbook is a bad thing that can only continue to dismantle the shreds of actual publicly available education we have here in America.

This implies to me that these school districts were all so segregated that they chose to preemptively put this measure in place to fix the problem before the federal government forced them, Little Rock 9 style, to Desegregate. A school district, after all, has no control over who has been moving where, wink wink.

They control what funds they allocate, where, and who gets those precious vouchers. I have already started seeing reports that the private school vouchers, which were a central component of the Florida plan and many others, are only going to upper-class and or white families. Go figure because anyone with half a brain couldn’t see that would happen. I know from personal experience that school choice can be expensive in many ways. Just in transportation costs alone, the program could destroy and cannibalize itself.

I can also tell you with 100% certainty that the vast majority of the students of color who went to Fort Myers Senior High School when I did were still getting an inferior education. It was legal, and I have no idea how you would prevent it since the program that my grades allowed me to join is the excuse for the disparity. Not only that, but I would have a tough time convincing many people there was anything wrong with it, even though there obviously is.

K.B. Silver

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Article originally published in Bouncin' and Behavin' Blogs on Medium FEB 9 2024

“Separate and Unequal in Fort Myers | Middle District of Florida | United States District Court.” Www.flmd.uscourts.gov, www.flmd.uscourts.gov/separate-and-unequal-fort-myers. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.

International Baccalaureate. “International Education.” International Baccalaureate®, 11 Oct. 2019, www.ibo.org/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.

Smith, Ashley A. “Lee Lagged on Integration.” The News-Press, 17 May 2014, www.news-press.com/story/news/education/2014/05/16/lee-lagged-integration/9197985/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.

Ford, Chris, et al. “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers.” CAP 20, Center for American Progress, 12 July 2017, www.americanprogress.org/article/racist-origins-private-school-vouchers/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.