The Southern Education Foundation has released a new report on private schools, race, and their rapid growth of vouchers in recent years.  The report demonstrates that new programs are concentrated in the South.  It also notes that there have been increased efforts at the federal level to use federal funds for vouchers.  Those efforts have only failed by narrow margins.  The point of the report is to signal the segregative threat that the expansion of these programs poses.

In 2012, for instance, African American students were 15.8% of the public school population, but only 9.2% of the private school population.  Conversely, whites were 51.7% of the public school population but 72.1% of the private school population.  One might simply write this off to socio-economic disparities, but the report emphasizes that private schools in the south have historically been a reaction to integration and that over the past fifty years, the South's share of the nation's private school population has risen from less than 15% to over 30%.  And when we look at the demographics of private schools in southern states, the disparities between public and private schools is even more shocking.

In Mississippi, whites were a slim majority in public schools in 1998, but were 90.8% of the private school population.  In South Carolina, whites were 58.7% of the public school population, but 90.1% of the private school population.  The most telling data point, however, was the variation among states.  While the gap between white enrollment in public and private schools was significant in all but one southern state, the gap itself seemed to be a reflection of the how large the white majority was in public schools.  The higher the percentage of whites in public schools, the lower their percentage in private schools.  In other words, where whites were a stronger majority in public schools, there seemed to be less incentive to enroll in private school.  Similar trends existed in 2012, although not as obvious. The report also includes similar data analysis for Hispanic and Asian students.

The report also focused on individual schools and what it calls virtual segregation:

The third measurement of this study examines more deeply patterns of over- and under-representation of students by race and ethnicity within each school in 2012 by identifying the private schools in the 50 states where white students comprise 90 to 100 percent of total enrollment. These rates and patterns are compared with the numbers for virtual segregated public schools in the states and regions.

In 2012, white students were far more likely to be educated in virtual segregation in private schools than in public schools. Forty-three percent of the nation’s private school students attended virtually all-white schools in contrast to 26.9 percent of public school students. Among the 50 states, South Carolina’s private schools had the largest disparity in segregated education between private and public schools: 63 percent of white students in private schools in South Carolina in 2012 were taught in segregated schools in comparison with only five percent of the state’s public school students. Mississippi had almost as large a gap – a difference of 56 percentage points. Seventy-one percent of white students in Mississippi private schools attended segregated schools, while 15 percent of the public schools’ white students were attending segregated schools.

It also identified virtual exclusion:

The final measurement quantifying and comparing racial and ethnic patterns in private schools identifies the numbers of white students attending schools with only 10 percent or less of under-represented students of color – African American, Hispanic, and Native American students combined. In one sense, virtual segregation can be understood as a measure of the extent white students are extremely “packed” into schools, and virtual exclusion as a measure of the extent under-represented students of color are extremely absent or excluded from school enrollment. The analysis also compares rates of virtual exclusion between private and public schools by state and region.

Nearly two-thirds of white students attending private schools across the 50 states were in schools that virtually excluded African American, Hispanic, and Native American students. The rate was 41 percent in public schools. Racial exclusion in South Carolina’s private schools exceeded the rate among its public schools by the largest margin among the 50 states. Eighty-four percent of the white students in South Carolina’s private schools were in racially exclusionary schools in 2012. This rate compared to 11 percent in the state’s public schools – creating a private school disparity of 73 percentage points. Private schools in Delaware had the nation’s second largest disparity in exclusionary schooling: 72 percent of all white students in Delaware’s private schools were in virtually exclusionary schoolhouses, but only four percent of the state’s public schools’ white students were in such schools.

Seven of the ten states with the largest measures of racial exclusion in private schools were in the South. Six of those seven states were the Deep South’s “freedom of choice” states. The percentage of white students in private schools in the 15-state South exceeded the percentage in the public schools by 37 percentage points – close to twice the disparity in racially exclusionary schools for white students elsewhere in the nation in 2012. 

Get the full report here.