The 2026 session of the Mississippi Legislature is still seven months away, but House Speaker Jason White has already selected the soundtrack for the session – School Choice. Same song, 71st verse.
White made that clear during his interview on Mississippi Public Radio Monday.
“We are going to form a committee we are calling the Select Committee on Education Freedom in Mississippi and, yes, that means looking hard and long at studying all aspects of school choice,” White said.
That was a novel idea – in 1954. That was the year the United States Supreme Court declared state-mandated segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. Mississippi’s power structure has been chafing at that decision for 71 years now.
In the wake of that decision, the Mississippi legislature considered shutting down its public school system rather than comply with integration. When the state finally submitted to federal law, private schools popped up all across the state. Most white families could not afford private school tuition.
Ever since, there has been an attempt to make it possible for middle-class and poor white families to attend those overwhelmingly white private schools. No white left behind, you know.
Bills meant to circumvent the state constitution’s prohibition of public funds being spent on private schools emerge in each session. Yet even in a decidedly conservative legislature those measures have failed. In probing for a new approach that has a chance to succeed, the school choice rhetoric has been amended to allow students to enroll in public schools outside the district where they reside. The idea is to establish that it is the parents’ decision on where the education dollars set aside for their child can be spent. Essentially, it’s open enrollment and you can rest assured that once it applies to public schools it won’t be long before tax money is used to pay private school tuition for even the wealthiest families but, for all practical purposes, not the poorest families.
And when you say “poor families” in Mississippi, you are speaking almost exclusively of minorities, mostly the Black community.
The poorest families aren’t nearly as likely to have the transportation private schools don’t provide. Public schools find it a challenge to provide transportation for children in their own district, let alone the school choice kids who may live 10, 20, 30 miles outside the district. In theory, this form of school choice is an equal opportunity equation. In reality, comparatively few Black children will be in position to enroll in school with better resources, funding and support.
In 2025, 58% of Mississippi’s public school students are minorities, according to publicschoolreview.com, which calculates a wide range of data from more than 100,000 U.S. schools. Of the state’s 882 schools, 70 have a 100% minority enrollment. Of the 568 Mississippi public schools that have a majority of minority students, 212 have a minority student body that is 97% or more minority.
The perception is that minority schools are failing schools, yet Olive Branch High, with a minority population of 65%, ranks among the state’s top 10 schools in math and reading. Gulfport (64% minority) is in the top 10, too. Tupelo (65% minority) ranks in the top 20.
Conversely, there are 314 Mississippi schools with a white majority. Only seven of those schools have a white student population of 97% or greater.
Given the benefit of the doubt, maybe the current school choice effort is not designed to fully segregate Mississippi’s public schools, but it will have that effect. Whatever else may be said of it, if successful it will achieve an outcome a racist would embrace.
I have a pretty good idea that White knows it, too.
“I understand we have a complicated history when it comes to public schools and integration and segregation,” White said during his interview.
Complicated? Seriously? Is there anything less complicated than Mississippi’s history in public education and race? It’s all there in Black and white.
White dismisses the racist history of education in Mississippi as a relic.
“That’s 50 years ago,” he said. “It’s time for us to have meaningful debate and thought and reason about what we want education to look like in 10 or 20 years.”
And that’s precisely what worries me.
A segregated society is an unhealthy society. Decades of Mississippi falling behind on almost every quality of life indicator is a testament to that truth.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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