New Study Completely Undermines DOJ’s Anti‐​School Choice Lawsuit

It’s long past time for the U.S. Department of Justice to drop its embarrassing lawsuit which would keep black kids in failing schools.


The DOJ sued Louisiana earlier this year, claiming that its school voucher program may be negatively impacting desegregation efforts. When it became apparent that the DOJ’s evidence amounted to the thinnest of gruel, everyone from Gov. Bobby Jindal and Rep. Eric Cantor to the Washington Post called on the Obama administration to drop its frivolous lawsuit. Even after two PhD students at the University of Arkansas released a study estimating that Louisiana’s school voucher program had a positive impact on racial integration, the DOJ refused to back down. I wrote then:

If the DOJ’s case was already like a house of cards resting atop a rickety stool, then the new University of Arkansas study kicked out the stool. The study, “The Louisiana Scholarship Program,” by Anna J. Egalite and Jonathan N. Mills, finds that the transfers resulting from the LSP vouchers statewide “overwhelmingly improve integration in the public schools students leave (the sending schools), bringing the racial composition of the schools closer to that of the broader communities in which they are located.” Moreover, in the districts that are the focus of the DOJ litigation, the “LSP transfers improve integration in both the sending schools and the private schools participating students attend (receiving schools).”

Now a study sponsored by the state of Louisiana finds that the voucher program improves racial integration in 16 of the 34 districts under federal desegregation orders while having little to no impact on the remainder. Whereas the University of Arkansas study produced estimates based on publicly available data, the Louisiana study reflects the actual effect of the program during the 2012 – 13 school year. Politicoreports:

Louisiana hired Boston University political science Professor Christine Rossell to analyze the effect of vouchers in 34 districts in the state under desegregation orders. Rossell found that in all but four of the districts – some of which are majority white, some majority black and some more evenly split – vouchers improved or had no effect on racial imbalance. And in the districts where racial imbalance worsened, the effects were “miniscule.”


Louisiana’s voucher program allows students to transfer out of failing public schools into private schools using public funds. The majority of the students participating in the 2012 – 13 school year — almost 76 percent — were non‐​white. A total of 551 students used the vouchers.

In the 2013 – 14 school year, more than 85 percent of the nearly 6,800 voucher students were black. So long as the DOJ refuses to drop its lawsuit — which would have opposite of its supposedly intended effect — the Obama administration’s message to these students is: “If you don’t like your school, you can’t leave your school.”