Two years ago, when Jennifer Berkshire interviewed a senior staff member at the Walton Family Foundation, the staffer explained that vouchers were not right for Arkansas because a) there were not enough private schools in the state, but more importantly, b) school choice was so closely associated with segregation academies that it was a toxic topic in a state like Arkansas.
But now, with DeVos running the U.S. Department of Education, segregation academies are just swell!
The Walton family is pushing two voucher programs in the Legislature.
Fast forward two years and the Waltons are backing a controversial bill that combines two new school choice faves—1) *tax credit scholarships* that would let well-heeled Arkansans and corporations claim hefty state and federal tax deductions for donating to a nonprofit, which then disperses funds to choice-seeking parents in the form of 2) an education savings account, which lets parents pay for private school tuition using a *backpack full of cash.* So what’s changed? Not the number of private schools. Arkansas has just 230 of them, and that’s before you cross off the schools that charge well in excess of the $6K voucher amount. And not the legacy of racism that gave rise to many of these schools in the 1960’s and 70’s
Marvell Academy, the segregation academy in the Delta which opened in 1966, still has an entirely white student body in a town where the local high school is more than 90% Black. Nor is Marvell the only *white academy* that’s still going strong. There’s the Desoto School in nearby Helena, which prides itself on schooling students in *an understanding of our cultural heritage* and whose current enrollment stands at 257 white students and 1 Hispanic kid. The site of the largest number of segregation academies wasn’t the Delta but Pulaski County, home to LIttle Rock, where resistance to what white parents called *forced busing* led to a surge in the creation of new private school *options.* Like Central Arkansas Christian, formed in 1970 by *a core group of dedicated families and church leaders from all corners of Little Rock.* Today, just over 17% of the students who attend the Little Rock Public Schools are white. At Central Arkansas Christian High, that figure is close to 90%. Miss Selma’s, founded in 1965, continues to offer dynamic, quality education to parents who would prefer not to experience the fact that 40% of Little Rock’s residents are Black. Pulaski Academy, meanwhile, has made great strides towards integration since it opened as a private school for white students in 1971. Of its 1,078 students, 54 are Black.
The worst of the South is rising again. Segregation will soon become possible with the blessing of the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Justice Department (remember the Attorney General is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama), and the U.S. Congress.
How fast can we reel backwards into the past, before the Brown decision? Watch the Arkansas legislature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was intrigued and googled information about Marvel. They only have 174 students with 9% non specified or hispanic attending. What’s the criteria to getting in? Is there a test? What’s the tuition? Just asking.
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If you’re wondering why the US Department of Education either ignores public schools or actively lobbies against them, look to staffing:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2017/03/jeb_bush_foundation_staffers_trump_education_department.html
From the Bush Foundation. Governor Bush regularly refers to the schools 90% of kids attend as “government schools run by unions” – complete and utter contempt.
NOT fans of public schools, the public employees at the US Department of Education.
If there were a huge group of government employees who lobbied against charter schools would charter schools be expected to welcome them and follow their advice?
Of course not. Yet this is what public schools are supposed to do. Why? Why am I expected to take direction from a group of people who work as hard as they can every day to lobby against my son’s school?
Would they ask charter parents to do this? No. They would not. Yet public schools are supposed to just happily take the hit from these ideologues and “cooperate” with them.
Not just no, but hell no. I don’t plan in participating in some DC political war against my son’s school.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Charter schools are the profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Everyone should know that the call for vouchers was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents a “choice.”
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
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After the Brown decision, many Christian schools sprang up as a alternative for white students, but parents had to pay the tuition. Many of these schools are in operation today. These parents would be happy to get a voucher to offset the cost of tuition. as would the parents of many other private schools.
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What is the most updated source summarizing the efficacy of choice /voucher programs, the States that have embraced these schools, and those who are withdrawing.
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The latest studies of vouchers show that kids lose ground in them.
The charter studies are all over the map, but most concur that they don’t get higher performance than public schools unless they cherry pick students.
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