Mercedes Schneider writes here about a peculiar development that is percolating among “reformer” groups: Bring back racial segregation!
While civil rights groups are concerned about the alarming increase in racial segregation in recent years, about the retreat of federal courts from enforcing desegregation decrees, and about the role of “school choice” in promoting segregation, a few leading figures in the “Reform” movement have decided to embrace segregation.
At a recent convening of Global Silicon Valley (GSV) at Arizona State University (ASU), “Reformers” offered a panel discussion titled: “No Struggle, No Progress: An Argument for a Return to Black Schools.”
The panel was moderated by school choice advocate Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform; its leadoff speaker was Howard Fuller, who has received millions of dollars from rightwing foundations to promote school choice among African Americans.
Schneider writes: The panel description reads like, “Since racial separation and hate crimes abound, let’s just go with it.”
School choice has predictably led to every kind of segregation–by race, religion, ethnicity, and social class, not only in the U.S., but in other nations that have adopted school choice.
Fuller’s organization, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, was the recipient of grants from the pro-voucher, rightwing Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation. BAEO was a good gig while it lasted–its revenues ranged from $2 million to $8.5 million a year. Fuller and BAEO carried the gospel of school choice to black communities, especially in the South. BAEO closed its doors at the end of 2017; the rich white philanthropists must have decided to shift their resources elsewhere.
In 2011, Schneider points out, Fuller won an award established in John Walton’s name to honor “champions of school choice,” presented at the national convention of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.
Rucker Johnson of Berkeley has written about the substantial and lasting advantages conferred by attending integrated schools. His latest book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, co-authored by journalist Alexander Nazaryan, explains why school integration was a great success, and why we must not abandon it.
I would pay to watch a debate between Howard Fuller, the well-funded advocate of a return to segregation, and Rucker Johnson, whose research demonstrates the value of school integration.
Fuller has become the black voice of separatism and segregation, a line that seems to resonate with wealthy white conservatives and philanthropists like Betsy DeVos, the Bradley Foundation, and the Waltons.
Powerful rightwing foundations like Bradley and Walton generously funded Fuller’s advocacy.
Did he use them or did they use him?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This was Peter Cunningham’s argument, too. “Integration has been hard, so let’s just not even try.”
Civil Whites Reforms
No Struggle, No Progress
Return to Black Schools
No laws passed by Congress
No “integrate” rules
Return to the old ways
Of Separate but Equal
Return to the old days
A civil rights sequel
Been saying SCHOOL CHOICE (CHARTERS & VOUCHERS) are about JIM Crow.
Best place to learn about our society and about one another is in our PUBLIC SCHOOLS … this is democracy, NOT Charters and Vouchers. But then the oligarchs don’t really want democracy so they sneakily have “marketed” LIES and FRAUDULENT practices.
One of the best schools I ever attended was WT Moore Elementary school in Tallahassee Fla, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.
It was and still is a truly remarkable school.
WT Moore
The school is truly fine —
To that I will attest —
It places human kind
Above a silly test
I am pretty sure there are probably many many WT Moores all over the country.
“so they sneakily have “marketed” LIES and FRAUDULENT practices.”
And the GAGA Good German adminimals and teachers have implemented those malpractices.
I revisited this statement which you have so often reminded us of, and which I have so often agreed with, while I was digging in a pile of metal screws looking for the right one (a futile task it was too). I was thinking not of the teachers but of your metaphor/analogy using the group whose passive cooperation enabled fascism. It was passive cooperation that led Gorbachev to believe that communism could not survive without glasnost and perestroika. It was passive sabatoge by slaves in the old south, breaking tools, being content to use them dull and Poorly maintained, that doomed southern planters to failure despite their military dominance over slaves.
This made me wonder if the same behavior could be documented in teachers during the period of reform we are living through. Did those who felt themselves trapped in the system behave as willing sabatours of the efforts of the administrative attempts at good scores?
That would be an interesting study. How to go about it I don’t have a clue.
But my take is that such sabotaging was more likely than not very limited. It’d be great to hear that teachers, indeed, were doing so but somehow I don’t think it happens all that much.
For me it comes down to what is known to be the thoroughly discredited management style of top-down management that public education adminimals so fell in love with starting in the late 90s and accelerating into the new century-hell it makes them the ultimate supposed knowledge keepers. A number of commentators here have pointed to Deming’s and other’s work in breaking apart that top down management. One would think that the adminimals would realize the inherent inefficiencies involved with it, but again, then to do so would begin to take their little fiefdoms away (at least their little fiefdoms of their own mind).
keep in mind that across the nation MANY teachers who could not stomach the invasions/test score infatuation did stand up and did very vocally speak out — and were thus the first to be directly targeted and strategically moved out of the game
Quite true Ciedie, as you and I both know from personal experience. But if that is what it takes to at least attempt to prevent educational malpractices that harm so many, well, that is what it takes. And if everyone who knows (which is 95% of educators) were to do what it takes the malpractices would be gone in a flash.
Who failed to see it coming?
The education centers in university ed departments, which are funded by the richest 0.1%, are White monoliths. The self-appointed reformers, in the wealthy’s think tanks, may include one token Black person.
Silicon Valley is notorious for exclusion of everyone who is not White and male.
The Black leaders who have fronted for the richest 0.1% are rewarded handsomely as Dr. Keith Benson described in the Ravitch post, 2-16-2019, “To the Black Education Reform Establishment: Be Real with Who You Are and Who’s Interest You Serve”.
Thanks to Mercedes. She always speaks the truth and provides evidence to support.
Absitively, positlutely.
The Catholic Universities that support the deformers should hang their heads in shame.
The Catholic Church NEVER hangs its head in shame.
This post highlights the racist and colonialist undercurrent in privatization. I wish we had never opened up public money to private groups. It was much better when we had clear lines of public and private, and public schools received investment. Instead, we have wealthy separatists like the Waltons using public money for segregation projects which are inherently unhealthy for a diverse nation. This is shameful in post MLK America.
I taught black and brown ELLs in an integrated public school for many years. My students benefited tremendously from attending a well resourced school that provided outreach services to poor families. The results were transformative for my poor ELLs, many of whom finished college and joined the middle class. America needs to learn how to accept different types of people. It is far better and healthier for all of us. We should embrace opportunity for all by investing in public education, which is the best hope of a better future for most students of all colors. MLK knew this because “separate is never equal.”
It’s ridiculous and impractical to believe we can return to segregation. My own family has children of mixed races within in the family unit. Does anyone truly believe parents are going to go along with any suggestion to separate families and attend different schools based on skin color?
I also have a mixed race family. Race is an artificial construct created by man.
It is the solemn duty of Diane’s army to stop the assault on the vulnerable.
21.2% of all Black women vs. 17.5% of White women and, 15.4% of all Black men vs.11.8% of White men work in the public sector.
The same rich people who chose to attack public pensions, plotted through privatization, targeting minorities first, to deny local control of schools. The same rich people who politicized pensions and schools are funding community surveillance programs (Baltimore among the first).
Did the ruling class seek and find innovative ways to punish beyond the harsher sentences handed down to Black people for the same crimes as Whites?
Without knowing motivation, we are limited to speculation based on correlations and, the appearance of gatherings with dubious topics.
Not surprising that Facebook’s lead independent board member said in 2018 that Z-berg was the right man to rebuild trust in Facebook. The board member, Susan Desmond Hellman is the CEO of the Gates Foundation.
John Arnold’s Foundation and Bill Gates’ Foundation operate in unison on certain projects.
Gates Foundation often collaborates with the anti-union Walton Foundation on funding.
The axis of evil- Walton-Gates-Arnold and their enablers.
Bernie exposed CAP as the right wing mouthpiece that masquerades as liberal.
With vindication, ed deform’s core of greed and injustice will be laid bare.
Am I missing something here? How is the situation created by white flight any different? When white families in search of “good schools” leave more racially (and often, more economically) diverse districts, they create the same problem. Integration has always been something FORCED upon most white people…
False equivalencies- the stock and trade of bigots from the ruling class and their hangers on.
The Buffett’s (Warren’s son, Howard, highlighted) are the subject of an expose, Jan. 10, 2019, New Phoenix Times, by Beau Hodai. The reporter should get a Pulitzer for cataloguing the cruelty that the rich fund. One of the least offensive things found in the reporter’s internet search is a photo of Howard standing in a boat with the caption, “great white man arrives”.
To remind readers, Warren gave $60,000,000 to his kids’ foundations and he funds Gates’
villainthropy.