The Choice We Face Ebook Jon Hale

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 79
Jon N. Hale
The Choice We Face: How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America’s
Most Controversial Educational Reform Movement
Boston: Beacon Press, 2021. 288 pp.
In the last decade or so, Jon Hale has established himself as a student, scholar, and
advocate of the rights and interests of African Americans to an equal education, es-
pecially but not only in the American South. With his latest book he extends his
interests beyond that arena, though he certainly does not abandon them.
In The Choice We Face, Hale takes on the advocates of school choice, showing how
their movement is, in reality, an attack on public education in the USA. American
public schools have been a long-time target of the political right, and Hale is astute
in showing the direct relationship between the right and its opposition to public
schools, beginning with a chapter on the right-wing economist from the University
of Chicago, Milton Friedman. Hale thus puts school choice firmly within a free mar-
ket, anti-government approach to American society. Hale also is quick to note that
school choice is “racism by another name” (62) in another early chapter. Thus, his
expansion into the arena of school choice is undertaken in great part to expose the
racism of many, if not most, of its advocates, linking this work directly to his earlier
studies.
One interesting aspect of this study is Hale’s choice of publisher. Beacon Press,
headquartered in Boston, is affiliated with the Unitarian/Universalist society and
proudly publishes work with an avowedly social reform orientation. While Hale
clearly and convincingly uses traditional scholarly sources and judicious arguments in
this work, he also goes beyond that emphasis to embrace a public policy priority for
public education and an avowed advocacy approach to that priority. In short, Hale
implacably opposes the school choice movement, exposing it for what he believes it
is, an undemocratic assault on American education, as represented through its public
schools.
Now Hale knows, as does any reputable historian of American education, that
the public school has not been an unequivocal success in achieving equity for all
students. In fact, there are substantial reasons to doubt the commitment of many in
public education to educational equity. But for Hale, and many other educational
historians and advocates of public education, including this reviewer, the failure of
public education to achieve educational equity both historically and in a contem-
porary context needs to be acknowledged. This acknowledgement should not lead,
however, to the abandonment of the enterprise. Rather public education needs to be
reformed in the interests of equity, a value that has long animated the enterprise at
the rhetorical level. Turning rhetorical advocacy into institutional accomplishment
is the desired outcome, not the demise of the American public school. This reviewer
acknowledges the difference in the Canadian and American context regarding the
existence of public schools. But I also know that in the USA, attempts to take money
from public schools to support charter schools, or school vouchers for public school
80 Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation
students to attend private schools, in no way will enhance the school equity objectives
that animate Hale and many other historians of education.
Two issues covered in depth by Hale are of special interest. The first is the ad-
vocacy of the federal government, in both Democratic and Republican administra-
tions, for charter schools, especially charter schools that exist within a public school
system. This advocacy is not surprising in a Republican administration, but it is, at
least to Hale and myself, when it comes from Democratic leadership. The Obama
administration and, particularly, its Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, advocated
public charter schools as a meaningful approach to achieve school equity. What that
advocacy has never explained, however, is how providing an institutional alternative
that some students might tap can be a force in obtaining the larger goal of equity for
all students.
A related issue, and one that is particularly important for Hale, is the advocacy
of school choice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Hale details the efforts to desegregate
schools in Milwaukee in ways which alienated significant portions of the Black com-
munity. The alienation resulted in an attempt by Black leaders to create a black school
district within the city schools, an attempt which garnered support from several black
politicians and opposition from traditional civil rights groups such as the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The failure of this effort led, in
turn, to significant Black political support for a voucher program in Milwaukee, one
which would pay for Black students to attend private schools in search of a better
education.
Hale is sensitive in his discussion of the various Black leaders involved in the
Milwaukee debates, though he doesn’t arrive at a definitive solution to the contro-
versy that serves the cause of educational equity. Of course, that is not a criticism,
rather a comment on the thorniness of the issues in Milwaukee, and many other
places in the USA. Hale stops short, however, of clear condemnation of the Black
activist embrace of vouchers in Milwaukee, a position that seems, at least to this
reviewer, to be in tension with, if not at odds with, the opposition to choice that
animates the rest of his volume.
This criticism should not take away from my larger agreement with Hale’s analysis
of school choice. That movement, like other right-wing movements such as the over-
turning of the federal right to an abortion solidified in the Roe v Wade case in the
early 1970s, is starkly ascendant in the political landscape of the contemporary USA.
Finding a way to defend the public schools is a necessary objective for those com-
mitted to the promise embedded in the ideal of the public school. Those interested
in that defense will find a shrewd analysis and a political commitment to the effort
in Jon Hale’s book.
Wayne J. Urban
The University of Alabama

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Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 79

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