As a potential remedy for these current inequities, which, again, stem from a legacy of racial injustice, major political figures have suggested we look into providing reparation payments to the descendants of slaves. For many 2020 Democratic candidates, such as Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, and others, reparations would serve the twin purpose of amending for past injustices and recompensing for lost economic opportunities due to racial oppression.

Reparations, a proposal with a long history, was brought back into the mainstream thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ massively influential feature in The Atlantic a few years back. Coates pointed out how, blocked by a litany of historical injustices — slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, etc. — minority households were kept from accruing any sort of substantial wealth. Conversely, whites suffered no wealth-building impediments. Coates argued that America owes black people a financial payout to correct historical wrongs.

There are a few standard rebuttals to reparations, some focusing on the economics and others on the ethics. At National Review, Michael Tanner argues that they would be both a logistical nightmare and ruinous to our economy. Minorities wouldn’t actually be served by such a policy, since a depressed economy would mean little to no wage growth. On the moral status of reparations, Richard Epstein argues that the people who were wronged by these past historical injustices, and those who wrongly benefited from exploiting black people, are no longer around. The wealth that exists today isn’t a product of that unjust treatment, but was “created by the ingenuity of a dizzying array of inventors, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and countless others. No fund of wealth survives the demise of slavery and Jim Crow.”

If reparations aren’t the answer, what would a truly racially just and economically sound initiative to repair the damage wrought by slavery look like? In his recent testimony before Congress, Quillette columnist Coleman Hughes offered a suggestion:

Black people…need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

The fights over health care and criminal justice reform are important in their own right, but I want to focus on education. Here, there is great opportunity to mitigate historical wrongs, helping black Americans more than whites, while not concurrently creating new injustices in the present. Really effective education reform can be achieved through smart policy changes that are both politically plausible and evidence-based.

A Feasible Solution

How to break the stranglehold? Inject greater freedom into the educational landscape.

School choice allows families to choose the school their child will attend, with the chosen school receiving the funds allocated for that student. By decoupling a child’s school placement from his or her area of residence, families are able to place their children in educational settings far likelier to help them succeed.

A related initiative, charter schools, also have the potential to greatly serve the black community—so long as they are used the right way. Sanders’ education plan would take away the ability for charter schools to play this role. Charter schools receive public funds for their operation but function free of many mandates and regulations.

When jointly implemented, school choice promises to work by creating an artificially competitive market and charters by freeing schools to innovate. If one school begins losing students to another, the school that is falling behind is naturally incentivized to respond to local demands without the need for a top-down mandate. Charter systems can function like laboratories for learning, providing specific communities, as well as the country as a whole, with an effective model to follow.

At the very worst, studies have found that school choice has a negligible impact on student learning. Even assuming a neutral impact on test scores, school choice consistently produces these results at a fraction of the cost. Yet study after study has found that school choice raises test scores, improves mental health, reduces crime, and saves money.

The Supreme Court case that effectively legalized school choice, Zelma v Simmons-Harris (2002), is too recent to admit of decisive conclusions. While the long-term impact on academic growth remains an open question, two studies out of the University of Arkansas found that, where implemented, school choice programs both reduced crime and increased later-in-life volunteerism. Another from the Urban Institute carried out in Florida linked higher rates of college attendance with school choice programs.

Similarly, a comprehensive review from Stanford University found that charter schools initially lagged behind traditional public schools but by 2013 they fostered the equivalent of eight extra days of learning per year. Notably, in the discussion of racially just policies, the researchers found that charters had little to no impact in already-affluent schools but, when enrolled in charters, minority and special education students performed markedly better than their public school counterparts. This is precisely what we’re wanting from policies designed to address matters of distributive justice: lift up the disadvantaged demographic without punishing any of the others.

An example of what a system like this could breed is Uncommon Schools. Known for their regimented teaching techniques, they have a 99 percent college acceptance rate despite 82 percent of their student population coming from poverty. Their style may not easily adapt to a rural small town setting but, being a charter system, Uncommon Schools have been able to craft a pedagogy and daily structures that best fit their specific student population. As school choice expanded, the system grew to include 54 schools with 20,000 students. This is the promise of charter schools in action: they synthesized their techniques into a book, Teach like a Champion, which other schools can adopt or draw inspiration from as they set out to find their own approach. My own school has a shelf of them.

With the freedom to innovate that charters provide and the competitive funding of school choice, education reform can make a meaningful difference in African-American communities.

It’s Possible

Whereas reparations have the support of just 26 percent of the population, school choice is backed by 54 percent — including 56 percent of African-Americans and 62 percent of Hispanics. This gives school choice another advantage over reparations as a way to address racial inequality: it’s not just a better fix, it’s also politically feasible as a nationwide policy.

In the early years of the school choice battle, the attorney fighting to defend the initiative, Clint Bolick, writes in his book Voucher Wars about the rows and rows of African-American parents attending the court meetings. Since then, a new wave of education reformers and racial justice advocates have come to defend the right for minority parents to choose the school their child will attend. Scholars at Harvard, Columbia, and other institutions have identified various pedagogies and teaching techniques that bring the academic success of minority students in-line with their white peers. To deny them these opportunities would be to do these communities a new harm, one to add to the long list of historical wrongs they have already endured.

Daniel Buck is a public school teacher in Wisconsin and a contributor to the Foundation for Economic Education, Quillette, and other places. Follow him on Twitter @Dantitheses396.