What Choice?

Unpacking How School Choice Leads to School Segregation.

A Toolkit for Activists, Educators, and Youth

For our culminating graduate work, we (Brianna Racoosin, erin reid & Bee Siaotong) focused our energies on how we could make a critical intervention into school segregation in New York City, one of the most racially segregated school systems in the United States. Through our research we became invested in exploding the myth that School Choice creates a fair and equitable high school education in New York City. Rather, we understand that the policy of School Choice exacerbates segregation and contributes to deep inequities across the many high schools in NYC. This seemingly colorblind policy is steeped in the values of neoliberal racial capitalism and does not adequately serve the students of NYC. We were guided in our research by the question “who has the power to choose in the most racially segregated school system in the US?”