Jackson Free Press

"Those are not the parents who have children in schools now. Those arguments are old arguments that hopefully would not apply today."

— Forest Thigpen, president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, on arguments that "school choice" is a rehashing of efforts from the past to keep schools segregated.

Why It Stinks: Thigpen is either so gung-ho about pushing the "school choice" agenda that he'd look past the residual racism still alive in the state, or he's just naive. Look at the Jackson metro: Jackson Public Schools are 97 percent black, while surrounding private schools are virtually all white. "Those parents who have children in schools now" are the same parents who move out of Jackson each year when their children reach middle-school age. Segregation isn't as far back in Mississippi's history as Thigpen would like to make it seem.