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Quality, Race, and the Urban Education Marketplace Reconsidered

Hess and Leal suggest that public and private schools within cities form an “educational marketplace” in which families act as consumers who seek the best educational alternatives for their children. In such a marketplace, Hess and Leal assume that private schools offer better educational services than public schools. Based on this assumption, they hypothesize that as the quality of public schools within a school district diminishes, the percentage of students who attend private schools increases. To support this view empirically, the authors examine cross-sectional data describing 50 urban school districts and attempt to predict the percentage of students in each of these school districts who attend private schools. Included in their model is a variable for school quality—as measured by the percentage of students who do not graduate from high school. They argue that their results show that as public school quality decreases, children increasingly attend putatively better private schools. We disagree with this interpretation. In our view, a model that emphasizes people’s attempts to distance themselves from groups they consider socially different better explains the educational choices families make. In particular, we stress the tendency among advantaged groups (i.e., wealthier and white families) to seclude themselves from disadvantaged groups. In short, we do not believe, as do Hess and Leal, that school choices follow a strict economic model of human behavior in which families select the best schools from a range of educational choices. Rather, we suggest that families elect to send