How to tell if you're a racist

Maybe Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson have a metric for those who oppose vouchers for students of low income families;

—a voucher offer [for a NY elementary private school] is shown to have increased the [college] enrollment rate of African Americans by 7.1 percentage points, an increase of 20 percent ....

If the offered scholarship is actually used to attend private school, the impact on African American college enrollment is estimated to be 8.7 percentage points, a 24 percent increase (Table 4).  This corresponds to 2.8 percentage points for every year the voucher was used.

....Among African Americans, 26 percent of the control group [those not winning a voucher]  attended college full-time at some point within three years of expected high-school graduation.  The impact of an offer of a voucher was to increase this rate by 6.4 percentage points, a 25 percent increment in full-time college enrollment (Table 5).  If the scholarship was used to attend a private school, the impact was about 8 percentage points, an increment of about 31 percent ....

...In the absence of a voucher offer, the percentage of African American students who attended a selective four-year college was 3 percent.  That increased by 3.9 percentage points if the student received the offer of a voucher, a better than 100 percent increment in the percentage enrolled in a selective college—a very large increment from a very low baseline.

That's from their evaluation of;

...the privately funded New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program (SCSF), which in the spring of 1997 offered three-year scholarships worth up to a maximum of $1,400 annually to as many as 1,000 low-income families with children who were either entering first grade or were public school students about to enter grades two through five.   A recipient could attend any one of the hundreds of private schools, religious or secular, within the city of New York. 

According to the New York Catholic archdiocese, average tuition in the city’s Catholic schools, the city’s largest private provider, was estimated to be $1,728, which was 72 percent of the total per pupil cost of $2,400 at these schools (compared to total costs of more than $5,000 in the public schools). 

Which had to be 'privately funded' because when Mayor Rudy Giuliana tried to use taxpayer funds for the experiment, he ran into strong opposition from First Amendment absolutists concerned about separation of church and state.

Or so, they said.