The article in question doesn’t seem like a very convincing counterargument, honestly. It’s not so much that people want to take their kids out of “ethnic” schools because they’re racist, it’s that people want their kids in good, safe schools, and those are heavily linked to class and economic factors, and those are heavily stratified by race due to legal and historical factors. But you’d see the same general pattern even in a society with no racism, it’d just be aligned on whatever axes of social inequality were most relevant in that society.
Personally, I have mixed feelings on the subject. The current system fucks up property values in ways that have negative side-effects, it’s still gameable, and it’s essentially crab-bucketing – the idea is to make it hard for even upper-class people to escape terrible hell schools, so that they’ll be motivated to make them less bad, but that doesn’t seem to have really manifested.
On the other hand, social stratification is certainly going to be worse under vouchers, and it will mark a movement to a more high-pressure cram-school type lifestyle for students. It will diminish the proportion of the population that’s trapped in the dead-end hell schools while still keeping it enormous, which increases the likelihood that they’re there for good. So it’s really a question of what percentile we want to optimize for here. Obviously, people mostly want to optimize for theirs, but it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a right answer.
