Expanding access to private schools through vouchers or other forms of publicly sponsored school choice, critics argue, would only exacerbate the problem of segregation created by private schools. Yet the facts suggest that private schools are nothing like the places depicted by such critics. Far from being segregationist enclaves, private schools, on average, are better integrated by race than are public schools. Expanding access to private schools is likely to ameliorate segregation in U.S. education, not lead to race wars, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Public schools are hampered in their ability to reduce segregation by the fact that most of their students are assigned to schools based on where they live.
Public schools tend to reproduce and reinforce racial segregation in housing.
Private schools, on the other hand, can and typically do draw students from across political and neighborhood boundaries to gather a more racially mixed student body. While it is true that public school systems have a higher proportion of minority students than do private schools, the distribution of minorities within the public and private sectors clearly shows that, by detaching schooling from residences, individual private schools are more likely to be integrated schools. According to a national sample of public and private school 12th graders collected by the U.S. Department of Education, public school classrooms are more apt to be almost entirely white or almost entirely minority. In private schools, just 41 percent of students are in similarly segregated classrooms. And private school students are markedly more likely to be in classes that come close to resembling the nation's demographics.