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Our limits on school choice are better than your limits on school choice

Michael J. Petrilli
12.22.2011

In the brouhaha over last week’s UCLA Civil Rights Project report on charter school “segregation,” one talking point seems unimpeachable: that it’s paternalistic or worse for Gary Orfield and his team at UCLA to want to keep minority parents from choosing their preferred schools because they serve “too many” black or brown children…That makes sense on the surface, but there’s a problem: we in the charter school movement aren’t so different. After all, we can’t “tolerate” it when parents choose schools that are extremely low-performing, even if they find them “better and safer” than their other alternatives....Read it here.

Tags: Gary Orfield University of California, Los Angeles

President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, executive editor of Education Next, editor in chief of the Education Gadfly Weekly, host of the…

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