Abstract
The authors argue that conventional mandatory and voluntary school desegregation techniques have failed to provide minority students with maximum feasible relief from invidious discrimination because they do not redress the root causes of segregation. They demonstrate that residential-based student assignment plans as well as plans that give students limited access to a few educationally enriched magnet schools are not asymmetrical remedies to wrongful segregation and thus work to perpetuate the racial and social inequities that they purport to correct. The authors offer an alternative approach to school desegregation—controlled choice—that operates independently from residential housing patterns and which explicitly seeks to maximize personal choice within a racially unitary, equitable, and educationally enhanced system of public schooling. Controlled choice was originally pioneered in Cambridge, Mass. during the early 1980s and has recently been adopted in Little Rock, Ark., and Fall River, Mass. The policy is also being actively reviewed by several of the nation's largest school districts including Seattle, Memphis, and Boston.
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Alves, M.J., Willie, C.V. Controlled choice assignments: A new and more effective approach to school desegregation. Urban Rev 19, 67–88 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01121341
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01121341