The OK School Choice Summit featured Sen. Mark Loveless who, in part, promotes charters and vouchers as a means of spreading chaos in public school systems. His donor, Betsy DeVos’ the American Federation for Children, was also well represented. DeVos sees school choice as a path to “greater Kingdom gain.”

School choice: Sen. Loveless advances ‘factually incorrect’ ideology

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-education-trump-religion-232150

There had been about 20 anti-corporate reform protesters at the summit, so even though I had registered for the event, I was apparently supposed to be denied entry. By the time I arrived, the police outnumbered the protesters. As some protesters chatted amiably with the summit volunteers, I schmoozed with some pro-reform political leaders who let me walk in with them.

School Choice Summit features firebrand speaker, draws protests

At the time, I didn’t realize that we who opposed the expansion of charters and vouchers could not be tolerated because we had supposedly swallowed the “blue pill,” and that made us irredeemable.

Ordinarily I get along with conservative Christians by not questioning the religious beliefs of people who support people like DeVos, who see charters and vouchers as a means to “advance God’s Kingdom.” That is one reason why I was completely unprepared for what I’d see when Dr. Steve Perry gave the summit’s keynote address.

Okay, I know I’ve failed to fully grapple with the hate that drives many corporate reform supporters, as well as Trumpism as a whole. I assumed that the summit organizers probably knew how Perry became famous by condemning unions as “cockroaches.” But, surely the audience wasn’t conversant with the research of former Connecticut Deputy House Majority Leader, Jonathan Pelto, and they didn’t know that Perry’s charter school would sentence “even the youngest students in the building, to sit at the cafeteria’s ‘Table of Shame.’”

I’ve long known a lot of the charter supporters in the audience, and I didn’t think they would approve of his desire to:

Drag sorry principals and teachers out into the street. Kick open the doors in our communities and collar lazy parents. Line ‘em all up on Main Street, snatch their pants down and show the entire world the ass that they have given our kids to kiss.

Neither would the audience know that by 2014 that Perry had called Diane Ravitch a racist in at least 49 tweets.

http://jonathanpelto.com/2014/03/11/crazy-sht-capital-prep-steve-perry-said/

I sat down next to an old friend who supports charters and vouchers, and we shook hands. Perry immediately started yelling into the microphone, telling the audience that they should have no contact with people (like me) who oppose charter and voucher expansion. Perry said that opponents of Oklahoma City’s KIPP expansion are racists. He said that people (like me) who have Obama bumper stickers but oppose charter and voucher expansion are as bad as the worst racists in American history. Perry said that that public school supporters “designed” schools to fail, and to maintain Jim Crow and drive the school to prison pipeline.

Perry said virtually nothing about actual schools. At first, I assumed that Perry avoided real education issues because his fictional narrative about founding Capital Preparatory Magnet School had been debunked so thoroughly. After all, Perry’s charter has “fewer students who qualify for Free Lunch, fewer kids with disabilities, and fewer kids who are ELL than neighboring high schools in Hartford.” The charter has high attrition rates and teacher turnover. The reliable Rutgers University scholar, Mark Weber, shows how Perry’s charter had “lower increases in student performance in comparison to comparable schools.”

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/05/dr-steve-perry-final-debunk.html

But Perry explained that we are in The Matrix. Choice supporters had supposedly taken the “red pill.” Only they live in the “real world;” presumably that justifies any tactic necessary to defeat those of us who are deluded because we took the “blue pill.”

To say the least, the event was frightening. The largely white crowd loudly cheered Perry’s union-bashing and they clearly enjoyed being characterized as civil rights crusaders attacking Obama-lovers whose real goal is defending an education system which was designed to perpetuate Jim Crow.

Afterwards, I implored pro-charter friends in the crowd, asking them to renounce Perry’s hate speech. He had repeatedly said that people like me are as bad as the worst racists in American history. Do you approve of that?

One true believer in charters replied that Perry charged him up in order to better battle for choice. Another acknowledged the hateful side of the diatribe but said that I wasn’t hearing Perry’s thoughtful words. One kept replying that Perry was saying that poor children of color were being damaged by choice opponents, but he wasn’t saying we did that intentionally. He finally acknowledged that Perry was saying that the damage that people like me did to kids is by design, and he was wrong to attack us in this manner. None agreed to publicly distance themselves from Perry.

But that is not what scared me so much. Of course I’ve seen videos of demagogues firing up audiences. As a kid too young to understand, I’d witnessed John Birch Society and George Wallace rallies. But, as an adult, I’d never seen anything as frightening as the way Perry worked the crowd.