The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling supporting the use of public dollars for vouchers to private and parochial schools has been a cause for gloating by some conservatives. But their excitement cannot gloss over several important facts that show, when all is said and done, most Black students will be no better off by the ruling than they were before.

First, let’s deal with the money. The Cleveland vouchers at the center to the court’s ruling pay a maximum of $2,250 a year to fewer than 5,000 families. African-Americans should not be duped into thinking that in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Black students will suddenly be attending classes with wealthy White students and, according to their reasoning, receive a superior education.

That’s not going to happen.

Let’s look at George W. Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. It will charge boarding students $28,250 this year (It also says expect to spend another $2,200). So, if one of those Cleveland students wants to attend Phillips and can manage to transfer a voucher there, he or she will still need to come up with at least $26,000.

Second, when African-Americans leave the public school system for private schools, they enroll in schools that are more racially isolated than many of the public schools from which they have fled. A recent report issued by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University titled, “Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation” concluded, “Black-white segregation is greater among private schools than among public schools.”

The report, which is available on the project’s web site, notes that 78 percent of the private school students in the nation are White. But during the 1997-98 school year, the average Black private school student attended a school that was only 34 percent White.

By comparison, Whites make up 64 percent of public school students. Even with that lower percentage, the average African-American public school student attends a school with a White enrollment of 33 percent White.

Among private schools, Catholic institutions—where almost all of the Black students go—represent racial segregation at its worst. The Harvard study says, “Black Catholic school students attend schools that are, on average, 31 percent White; Black students in non-Catholic religious schools attend schools that average 35 percent White and Black students in secular private schools attend schools that average 41 percent White.”

The report does not suggest that the racial segregation among Catholic schools is by design. To the contrary, the authors point out that many of the Catholic schools are still located in central cities where housing discrimination is still a fact of life. Catholic schools enroll approximately half of all private schools students, followed by evangelical Christian schools with about a third of the pupils and the rest attending secular private schools.

Interestingly, most of the private school racial segregation in grades K through 12 does not occur in the South, where “White flight” was common during the early days of school desegregation in the 1960s. In fact, White private enrollment in private schools in the South is at 11 percent, which is 1 percent lower than the national average. This is at the same time that the South has the highest proportion of Black students in public schools with Whites.

That does not mean the end of White flight, especially in major cities. The report observes, “In school districts and metropolitan areas with higher shares of Black students in the population, a higher proportion of Whites attend private schools…. In all of our models, the strongest predictor of White private enrollment is the proportion of Black students in the area.”

What is often overlooked in the discussion about vouchers in Cleveland is that part of the plan calls for inner-city students enrolling in cooperative suburban school districts. However, no suburban district agreed to take any of the students.

As the debate rages over vouchers and private schools, the reality is that private and parochial schools enroll only 10 percent of all students. That means 90 percent of all students, whether they like it or not, will remain enrolled in public schools. The challenge is how to improve those schools, not find ways to rob public schools of their most motivated students and concerned parents.