Pete Tucker is a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C. He reports on corruption and ethics, a full-time job in the nation’s capital.
By the way, some Koch-funded libertarians got very angry to hear me link school choice and segregation. They harassed me on Twitter. They prefer to trace the roots of school choice to John Stuart Mill. That sounds better than George Wallace, for sure. However, they can’t seem to find a thread that shows publicly-funded school choice in these United States from colonial times to 1955.
I recommended they read Mercedes Schneider’s excellent history called School Choice, published by Teachers College Press. The introduction was written by Karen Lewis, then president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Being that they are libertarian ideologues, I don’t expect them to take my suggestion and open their minds.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I recommend Jim Grimsley’s HOW I SHED MY SKIN. It’s a very candid and insightful account of Grimsley’s growing up poor, gay and hemophiliac in the segregated South. even with all his disadvantages putting him at the bottom of the pecking order, he admits that being white put him ahead.
He was in sixth grade when integration started to come to his area. At first there was “Freedom of Choice” in which both the black and the white schools were kept open, but any kid could choose to go to either school. Of course no white kids went to the black schools and only a few black families were brave enough to send their kids to the white schools, so the courts decided that wasn’t an adequate solution – the schools had to fully integrate.
Immediately private schools opened all over the area for whites only and the public schools became almost defacto black schools (with a minority of white kids like him who were too poor to go to private schools). Grimsley does a very thorough job of deconstructing all the claims that people weren’t racist and that segregation wasn’t racist, etc. Very readable book from an insider’s perspective (granted, he was an outsider in other ways, which gave him a dual perspective). He walks us through how he began to realize the things he’d been taught about blacks without ever being directly told.
(Incidentally, his fictional (largely autobiographical) works are also amazing, especially WINTER BIRDS and COMFORT AND JOY. Highly recommend adding those to your reading list too although they’re out of print and difficult to get a hold of.)
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some Koch-funded libertarians got very angry to hear me link school choice and segregation.
You know you are succeeding because you are getting under their skin.
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I agree.
I also wonder how they expressed this anger. Were these Trump-style tweet storms?
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On the news there was a recent story about how the Paradise Charter School was helping students cope with the recent fire and devastation. The piece showed a teacher consoling students, and the environment seemed like a small, supportive environment. Every single student in the school was white. I looked up the demographics of the area. The town before the fire was about 92% white, 6% Latino and less than one per cent black. It had about 13.7% of residents that were considered poor. The test scores of the school were slightly lower than the average for the state. Out in the middle of a vast forest, what is the big demand for a charter school? What big civil rights issue can be claimed to be addressed in this school that couldn’t be handled with more efficiency and economy than in the public schools? The students seemed happy in this school, but I still wonder if this is the best use of public dollars?https://www.greatschools.org/california/modesto/16984-Paradise-Charter-School/
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Charter schools are the lucrative profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings has been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda: The deceptive call for vouchers and “choice” 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.”
The segregationists’ 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that, because of school attendance boundaries and racially segregated neighborhoods, no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1971 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end this ongoing de facto segregation, the segregationist “reform” movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since been trying new tactics to restore racial segregation. That’s why the ACLU has called for a total moratorium on charter schools.
In 1959, just before the Court’s deadline for racial integration of public schools, a prominent newspaper in Prince Edward County, Virginia, published the outline for the charter school scheme to resegregate education: “We are working [on] a scheme [with members of Congress] in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to corporations, reopen them as privately operated schools with tuition grants [vouchers] from [the State of Virginia] and from Prince Edward County. Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with [the Supreme Court and non-whites].”
At the same time, a prominent Virginia attorney who was an advisor to Virginia politicians announced a corollary scheme for resegregating public schools by means of standardized testing: “Negroes can be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they can’t maintain. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches [from white parents].” That was the conceptual beginning and foundation of all the standardized testing we see today, many of which tests are are designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure. The test results were and still are used to “prove” that traditional public schools are “failing” — a claim abetted by drastic underfunding of public schools so that they lacked the resources to teach effectively. The “failing” test scores were and are also used to “prove” that unionized public school teachers are “ineffective”.
That’s the beginning of charter schools, vouchers, and testing.
To date, the most successful resegregation scheme is charter schools because charter schools are profit centers 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” (Read this book: “The Manufactured Crisis”). 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.
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Scisne:
Thanks for shedding additional light on the topics highlighted by this posting.
😎
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Scisne and other readers,
Please sign a letter written by George Mason University students and faculty in advance of Wednesday’s meeting of the George Mason University Board, when they will discuss strings-attached donor contributions to the school.
UnKochMyCampus.org researched and reported, “Federalist Society Takeover of George Mason Public University Law School”.
A Koch-funded institute “partnered” with George Mason University posted a photo array of its employees-pictures appear to include 80+ employees and only one of them, Black.
UnKochMyCampus.org also authored, “Advancing White Supremacy Through Academic Strategy”.
The letter is at actionnetwork.org/letters/tis-the-season-for-transparency.
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Hard to unKoch George Mason. The Koch’s Own it.
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Gov. Ralph Northam and Sen. Tim Kaine ought to be able to change that ownership? If not, Virginia proves it is a colony of the Kansan, Charles Koch.
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The Governor and Senator don’t control private universities.
Read Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains”
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Northam appointed 4 of the 16 members of GMU’s governing “board of visitors”, in July. One of them is a graduate of GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
MacLean notes that only 4% of the population are libertarians so, obviously the Koch’s are getting some help for their agenda.
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Overall good thoughts, Scisne.
However I must challenge this statement “That was the conceptual beginning and foundation of all the standardized testing we see today, many of which tests are are designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure.”
No, standardized testing was not “designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure”. Those biases and resulting “failures” were an unintended consequence of the test making process. The original intent of those who championed standardized testing was to be able to sort out the “best” (according to the test results) students for placement in higher education institutions. Did those tests have racial and cultural biases? No doubt. But that is not the same as saying the designers intentionally wanted that result.
We must be careful in supposing intent where there is no record to back up that intent itself.
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WELL said.
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Well, seeing as Libertarians have a literal slavery problem in their ideology with “voluntary slavery,” their positions are already questionable. Take the fact that many in the alt right, particularly the unite the right bozos, have said that they were formally libertarians, it’s becoming more and more clear that libertarianism is a stepping stone into the worst aspects of our beliefs throughout history – property over people, feudalism, segregation, forced servitude in the guise of “voluntary association,” etc.
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That sounds better than George Wallace, for sure.
Oh. My. Lord. I can’t stop laughing.
Well said!
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Having grown up in Kansas in the 1950’s, I agree that a number of southern states provided tax funds for academies that were “white only.”
However, a number of towns in Vermont and Maine offered school choice beginning in the 1860’s. These towns decided not to have their own “public” schools. Instead, they allowed residents to attend public or private non-sectarian schools in other towns. This Vermont Public Radio 2017 series describe how this has worked.
http://digital.vpr.net/term/vermonts-choice#stream/0
However, a number of towns in Vermont and Maine offered school choice beginning in the 1860’s. These towns decided not to have their own “public” schools. Instead, they allowed residents to attend public or private non-sectarian schools in other towns. Local funds follow students in these town, paying the costs for students to attend these district or private non-sectarian schools. This Vermont Public Radio 2017 series describe how this has worked.
I visited Vermont in the 1980’s, driving around to various towns and interviewing district, private non-sectarian, and state department of education officials. It was a fascinating visit, learning more about how this operated. Again, it was not in all communities. VPR estimates that it operated in 2017 in about 1/3 of the towns. That’s the figure I heard from Vermont Dept of Ed officials.
I visited Vermont in the 1980’s, driving around to various towns and interviewing district, private non-sectarian, and state department of education officials. It was a fascinating visit, learning more about how this operated. Again, it was not in all communities. VPR estimates that it operated in 2017 in about 1/3 of the towns. That’s the figure I heard from Vermont Dept of Ed officials.
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The Vermont and Maine programs bear zero resemblance to charter schools today. They were created by states that had small towns without high schools as a way to allow their children to attend any high school with space. No one can honestly argue that these small-scale tuitioning programs in New England inspired Al Shanker, Ray Budde, the Walton Family Foundation, Jeb Bush, the Koch brothers, or the Dezvos Family. The true lineage of school choice as practiced today involves a replacement of public schools by private schools operated with public funds, at all Grade levels. Al Shanker saw that his idea of teacher-operated and union-approved schools-within-schools had been hijacked by union-busters and profiteers, and he denounced charter schools in 1993.
As Mercedes Schneider showed in her 2016 book “School Choice: The End of Public Schools?”, today’s choice movement began as a reaction by Southern Governors against the Brown Decision, amplified by the libertarian views of Milton Friedman, who opposed public education.
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Diane, you’ve asserted that there was no school choice program before the one in the south. As I pointed out, there were school choice program in Vermont and Maine that appeared decades before what happened in the south..
The roots of the charter movement come in part from efforts from many public school educators including this one created new district options in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. These new options appeared in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, San Francisco and other cities.
Some urban charters have been started by veterans of the alternative school movement. We recognized that there was no single best school for all students. We also recognized that one way to increase the professionalism of public school educators was to give educators a chance to create new, distinctive options.
Unquestionably some charters have been created by people eager to make money. Some have been greedy, some incompetent, some both.
But the nation’s first charter law, here in Minnesota, was written in part by innovative district educators frustrated by district bureaucracy. And a number of charters around the country have been started by veterans of the alternative school movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Some of them have joined together in a new organization whose statements already has been published in the New York Times, New York Daily News, Education Week and others: https://www.indiecharters.org/
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Have you read Mercedes Schneider’s history of school choice?
Do you care that the anti-union rightwing Walton Family Foundation boasts of funding one of every four charters in the nation?
Do you care that Gary Orfield declared charters a political success but a civil rights failure?
Do you care that the national NAACP called for a moratorium on new charters?
Do you care that voters in Massachusetts overwhelmingly rejected raising the cap on charters?
Does it bother you to march in lockstep with DeVos and the Koch brothers?
I assume you know that charters in New York depended on an alliance between Wall Street and the State Senate Republicans?
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Diane, you present no evidence to counter what I wrote. The facts are that part of the charter movement comes from progressive public school educators. And the first charter public school law was written by Minnesota Democrats. The second state charter public school law was written by a California Democrat.
Part of the charter movement’s growth has come from very conservative forces with which I strongly disagree.
I have a 60+ year record of involvement in progressive causes, including participating in civil rights marches as a teenager. Our children attended urban public schools. As a teen, I learned from the late Saul Alinsky about putting together coalitions – like the liberal/conservative coalition that successfully challenged the NCAA which was trying to impose.
There are a number of other very progressive public school educators who believe in public school choice – district and charter. They/we strongly oppose vouchers. We’ve made that clear, as has the Democratic state legislator who was the chief author of the nation’s first charter law.
We also oppose and in many cases have spoken out about vigorous opposition to the current administration. That means we clearly are NOT “marching in lockstep with DeVos, the Koch brothers, Trump, et. al.
In fact, many of us are working hard on a variety of efforts to promote a variety of progressive causes.
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Joe,
Progressives were duped.
Al Shanker admitted that he was duped.
The choice movement belongs to the funders, not to you.
It is now wholly supported by rightwing forces.
Your decision to remain in alliance with the Waltons, DeVos Family, and Koch brothers is your decision, but it does not change the facts: Choice is a rightwing, libertarian scheme to destroy and privatize public education.
I was inside the rightwing Manhattan Institute when the decision was made to hoax liberals like you. It worked. The goal in 1998, when Republican Governor George Pataki rammed through charter legislation, was privatization.
The money for charters comes from Wall Street and billionaires.
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Furthermore, Joe, how do you explain that EVERY TIME a voucher program has come up before the general public for a referendum vote, in EVERY STATE where it has been tried, it has been voted down by the people, by large margins? The public doesn’t support vouchers, and more and more people are waking up to charters–that they are generally less rigorus academically, that they take money from public schools, that they segregate, that public money disappears into private hands, that public schools take the charter “rejects” with no additional funds, etc.
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TOW – As mentioned in a previous post, I oppose vouchers.
As for charters – many polls show the majority of people are in favor. The majority of charters are not profit. We agree that greater transparency is needed in many parts of public education – both district and charter sector.
Some charters take the kids other public schools don’t want. And no one is forced to attend a charter.
Many of the arguments frequently presented here are the same as those presented when some of us began creating district options….they take $ away from traditional schools, we should just fund traditional schools more, etc. etc.
In fact, lots of progressive educators are creating options within the district and charter sectors because they recognize that there is not single best kind of school for all kids.
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You have been hoaxed by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, and Betsy DeVos. The American people will catch on. Despite the propaganda, 85-90% choose public schools, not charters or vouchers.
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This is actually one of those cases where the motivations of different supporters can be quite different but the ones setting and funding the policy lie about their own motivations to get those who may have quite legitimate motivations on board.
This is not at all unusual.
It happened in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, when, by the admission of the Neocon architect of that invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, the Neo-conartists put forward the WMD rationale because, in the words of Wolfowitz, it was something that everyone could agree on.
Of course, we all know that rationale was simply a lie meant to dupe the American public into going along with the invasion. It was a completely cynical effort to bamboozle millions of Americans and it worked brilliantly.
The charter issue is actually similar in this regard. The people behind the policy are motivated by quite different things than well meaning people like Shanker and Joseph Nathan.
Betsy DeVos , the Waltons, Eli Broad et Al are out to break the unions and make profits and if charterization has the added effect of further segregation, well, that’s just a bonus.
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Joe sees what he wants to see, a characteristic of the self-serving.
In one comment to a prior Ravitch post he praised a guy as a progressive. That guy’s argument in the same comment thread, promoted the Koch economic view which can be charitably described, as social Darwinism.
A top-ranking Gates’ employee publicly stated the goal of charters “…brands on a large scale”, in an interview about her role in founding the Gates-financed New Schools Venture Fund.
Whether the intent of charter schools is segregation or profiteering, there ‘s no reason to discard an overwhelmingly successful school framework because of propaganda about faux altruism. The idea that people claiming their “goodness” singularly has magic to make vulnerable students achieve extraordinarily (while big bucks are diverted from students to the managers pronouncing their own goodness) belongs on the pile with false Z-berg statements/ promises. Not coincidentally, Z-berg and Gates are investors in the largest for-profit schools-in-a-box business.
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I see the vast range of people working to improve schools. I see – hear – educators in districts and charter who work with persistence, courage and skill to make a difference. I see them shrug their shoulders about the mis-representation of their efforts by various people – including some who post here.
I also see/hear from youngsters and families throughout the country who deeply appreciate the work that many educators do, despite huge obstacles and vast disrespect. Every week I’m in schools, district and charter, and listen to young people who share ways that educators have helped then accomplish far more than they once thought possible.
I also see the corruption and greed that is far too often in public education – district or charter.
Lots of work to do. Grateful for those willing to work together.
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Joe,
Do you approve of the buying of local school board elections by out of state billionaires who want more charters?
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Joe’s polls- funded by billionaires? Have deceptive wording?
80% of Michigan’s charters are for-profits. According to a Michigan state legislator, the charter churn (failures due to lack of enrollment)
have been “brutal on Black families”.
Is Joe selling the proposition that Ohioans (7th largest state) wanted to be bilked out of $1 bil. by charter operators?
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Joe, consider that legislation, regulation and policy have changed considerably during the decades-long evolution of the charter movement. At one time charters were envisioned as innovative experimentation w/n & connected to the public system, contributing to the public good. Today public goods in general get short shrift. School choice is talked up at the same time funding is cut. The low priority & zero-sum approach re: public goods infects the entire enterprise, so that benefits accruing to some are taken taken from others regardless of intentions/ efforts.
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Joe,
If there is one thing that I’ve determined over the years is that almost everyone, on whatever side of the political and/or religious divide, has good intentions. To question those intentions is a fool’s errand. Even the worse tyrants in the world believed they were doing good.
So, where does that leave us in these debates. Well, from my perspective it leaves us with “What are the consequences of the actions of a person, political party, country, etc. . . ?”
For me, the negative results of tax payer funded charter school performance overall, the negative results of vouchers (including the questionable constitutionality of those), the negative and abusive to the students results of the standards and testing malpractices, all serve to point me to rejecting those things-to fight against them.
Throw in the disseminating and prevaricating edudeformer rhetoric that make exhorbitant false claims appear as “truth”, well. . . . It all serves to make me, again, reject all the edudeformer policy proposals outright.
If someone wants to open up a private charter school fine with me. Just don’t expect any of our scarce public school funds to finance your venture. Warning facetious font ahead: Let that vaunted free market of private schooling determine who wins and loses, eh!
Good intentions mean nothing!
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Duane,
Your 5th paragraph effectively shuts down any argument that Joe’s ilk can make.
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I have read On Liberty several times. Mill makes no arguments I can find for or against public education. He does make good arguments for governmental regulation of businesses. He based these arguments on the idea that government exists to protect one person of abusing his freedom at the expense of another. Hence the title associated with Mill and his predecessor m Jeremy Bentham: utilitarianism.
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