Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West blast the charter school advocates who dishonestly attacked Bernie Sanders’ plan for charter accountability as racist.
This is an amazing article. Please read it in full. I am not supposed to quote more than 300 words without violating copyright law. I would love to post it all, but I can’t. You have got to open it and read it.
Reed and West write:
During the Reagan era, ultraconservative columnist James Kilpatrick, a notorious segregationist since the southern Massive Resistance campaign against the 1954 Brown decision, took up the right-wing attack on Social Security from a novel angle. He opposed the program as discriminatory against African Americans because black men were statistically less likely than whites to live long enough to receive the old-age benefits. That was likely the only time in his public life Kilpatrick expressed anything that might seem like sympathy for black Americans.
A decade or so later, many advocates of the welfare “reform” that ended the federal government’s 60-year commitment to provide income support for the indigent similarly couched their efforts in feigned concern to help poor black people break a supposedly distinctive “cycle of poverty.” Similar disingenuous tears have accompanied the federal government’s retreat since the 1990s from direct provision of affordable housing for the poor. Thus, a racist premise that there’s a special sort of black poverty became a way to spin cutting public benefits for poor people as a supposedly anti-racist, anti-poverty strategy.
Now, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the charter-school industry and its advocates also make such claims, asserting that charters offer unique opportunities for poor African-American children. On those grounds, for example, The Washington Post recently attacked the Bernie Sanders campaign’s Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, which, among other features, supports the NAACP’s call for a “moratorium on public funds for charter school expansion until a national audit has been conducted to determine the impact of charter growth in each state.” In a May 27 masthead editorial, the Post described charterization as a civil-rights issue, claiming that charter schools can remedy the “most enduring—and unforgivable—civil rights offense in our country today [which] is the consigning of so many poor, often minority children to failing schools.” To justify that claim, the editorial cites research indicating that black students in charter schools “gained an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days in reading per year compared with traditional school counterparts.”
Reed and West demonstrate that multiple studies show that charter schools do not outperform public schools, and they are more segregated than public schools.
They write:
As is a common occurrence in the privatization of public functions, lack of effective public oversight has provided the charter-school industry great opportunities for fraud and corruption. A 2019 national study by the Network for Public Education concluded among its findings that “Hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been awarded to charter schools that never opened or opened and then shut down. Only a few months before the Washington Post editorial attacking Senator Sanders’s support for the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charters, the newspaper published an investigative article exploring the nightmarish uncertainty that sudden closure of fly-by-night charter schools can inflict upon students and their parents…
The charter industry is about profiting off education. In addition to the officially for-profit companies involved, even many charter nonprofits are structured in ways that enable people and businesses to make money off them. Charter operators and affiliated entities have used public funds to obtain and privately own valuable urban real estate.
Moreover, administrative overhead for charter schools is often more than twice that of district schools, and charter executive salaries far exceed those of district administrators. A 2017 report found that in post-Katrina New Orleans, long touted as the Shangri-la of charterization, administrative spending per pupil had increased by 66 percent, while instructional spending had declined by 10 percent.
Bad as the out-and-out fraudsters and get-rich-quick schemers are, the most dangerous and destructive elements in the charter-school industry are the billionaire “philanthropists” like Bill Gates, Walmart’s Walton family, and Eli Broad, the hedge-fund operators, corporate chains, and their minions in think tanks and on op-ed pages, who, out of ideological and commercial motives, have for some time been plotting the privatization of public schools and the destruction of public education as anything more than an underfunded holding pen for the least profitable students….
Of course, teachers’ unions are the charter industry’s bête noire for a more old-school reason as well: There is no place for them in the business model. Charter-school teachers are paid less than teachers at traditional public schools, are less experienced, less likely to be certified, less satisfied with their jobs, have higher rates of turnover, and most important, are much more likely to be at-will employees who can be dismissed without cause. The charter-school industry has been able to impose these clearly less-desirable working conditions on teachers partly through taking advantage of young, idealistic people funneled from outfits like Teach For America. And the long campaign stigmatizing public-school teachers, as well as other public workers, and their unions as the equivalent of lazy welfare queens has enabled propagation of a narrative projecting the image of fresh-faced, energetic young elite-college graduates as more effective and desirable than experienced teachers…
Simply put, charter advocates’ sanctimonious bluster about charterization as a civil-rights issue is deeply disingenuous, and the attacks on Bernie Sanders as racist for joining the NAACP in opposing it are repugnant.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charter schools exposed for what they are-the plan of racist Georgia Gov. Talmadge, provides clarity for Americans
It will also provide clarity when the wealthy’s plot, which uses a twisted interpretation of religious freedom as coercion for vouchers and charters, is exposed. The scheme is backed by some Catholic and evangelical churches and their universities. In The Hill today, “SCOTUS Has a Chance to Uphold School Choice and Religious Liberty”. The article’s authors are from the Pioneer Institute (Boston- the new hub for social engineering) and, the Mackinac Center (the DeVos’ colony of Michigan).
A commenter to the article described her daughter’s experience, “In the Catholic schools I was told what I could not do or be. In the public school I was told what I can do and be”.
Catholic and evangelical schools are the perfect feeding ground for authoritarianism and colonialism.
These guys are two of the very best. Read anything they write. Their arguments also help to distinguish between Bernie and Liz. Liz still hasn’t come clean on privatization of public education or on whether charters/vouchers etc are ok. FDR’s economic rights–the ideas at the base of the Sanders campaign–are basic human rights. Has Liz come out in full-throated support of them?
From FDR’s state of the Union Address, 1944:
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
Why isn’t this list the Platform of the Democratic Party? These are the principles the Greatest Generation fought the Nazis for. Will Liz sign on to it? Or, do modern Democrats call FDR a communist? (Biden certainly would.)
Thank you, Steve, for this reminder.
I had contact with a close ally of the Warren camp. I keep asking why she won’t make a clear-cut statement about K-12: testing, privatization, charters, collective bargaining, TFA, the billionaire money flowing into privatization. The response: she is on a roll, too busy.
may she find that being too busy to deal with this issue will cause a ruckus for her as it ends up squarely on the debate stages
This is a huge opportunity for Bill de Blasio. If you know anyone who knows him, I hope you reach out to him.
The first debate won’t have Bernie but will have a slew of DFER pro-charter Democrats and Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio.
Bill de Blasio has the chance to distinguish himself by asking Warren directly about her support for non-profit charter school chains which have huge suspension rates for African-American kindergarten students and why she would not support the moratorium that the NAACP wants.
No one else in that debate is likely to do so, but de Blasio could.
de Blasio could explain how the “good” charters that some right wing democrats love in NYC are famous for suspending large numbers of African-American 5 year olds and ask Sen. Warren if she believes those CEOs when they claim that such a huge number of African-American kindergarten children are as violent as the charter CEOs say that they are?
de Blasio could explain how charters take the least expensive to teach children and throw the most expensive to teach children back to public schools and then lobby to keep the funding for those public schools low by claiming that their results prove that those public schools don’t need money.
de Blasio could ask Warren why with all her knowledge of economics she supports a two tier system which privatizes the profits (so that even non-profit charter CEOs get outrageous salaries) and socializes the costs of public education.
de Blasio could ask Warren why, if she supports having a public school being allowed to pick and choose their students, why she would privatize the profits of teaching the least expensive students and socialize the costs of all the students those charters dump back into the public system.
de Blasio could ask Warren why she is ignoring all the testimony from former charter parents that the NAACP documented about how their children were pushed out of charters who only wanted the easiest and cheapest to teach students.
Put Warren on the spot. Ask her if she has even read the NAACP report and whether Warren believes that the parents who testified about the way their own children were treated by charters who wanted their children to leave are liars.
The MSM continues to cheer Elizabeth Warren’s rise in the polls, at the expense of Bernie Sanders. They gush over her most-oft quoted statement, “I have a plan for that,” claiming it demonstrates that Warren has better-developed policies while Sanders continues to only offer blanket statements.
Sad and telling that Warren, who has taught in the classroom, does not state, “I have a plan for that” when it comes to K-12 education, the cornerstone of freedom and democracy.
Waiting to see what Randi and Lily do. Do they actually endorse a candidate (Sanders) who stands up for public education? Or do they do the bidding of the DNC/DCCC and their deep-pocketed donors?
Eleanor,
Is your comment intended to suggest that those who “do the bidding of the DNC/DCCC and their deep-pocketed donors” would support Elizabeth Warren?
Just wondering if you are now suggesting that every person who supports Elizabeth Warren is doing so because they are doing the bidding of deep pocketed donors?
On K-12 education, Bernie is far, far better than Warren. On other issues I like Warren better. That is how politics works. I don’t like some of Bernie’s proto-racist statements, but that doesn’t mean if I decide to vote for him I’m doing the bidding of the Ku Klux Klan.
There are MANY good candidates running for President in the Democratic primary. None of them are perfect on all issues. It doesn’t mean that they all won’t be far better Presidents and make this country far more progressive than what happened in the last few years under Trump.
Bernie would have made a fine President in 2016 despite him still having the DFER pro-charter view of public education at that time and in the years following when he campaigned for DFER candidates. Just like HRC would have made a fine President. Just like every single one of the Democrats running will be the beginning of a road to a progressive future from this far right government we have.
an essential question, and always so telling as big money Democrats pretend otherwise: Why isn’t this list the Platform of The Democratic Party?
Particularly galling because pre-school and college, each, are on the Dem’s lists. A weak statement about public schools sometimes appears.
Good point!
Reed and West do an excellent job dismantling the idea that charter schools are “islands of opportunity” for minority students. They build their case by citing many example of how the charter industry has failed to deliver, and they discuss many of the nefarious goals of those corporations and billionaires that promote privatization.
“Charter advocates’ sanctimonious bluster about charterization as a civil-rights issue is deeply disingenuous, and the attacks on Bernie Sanders as racist for joining the NAACP in opposing it are repugnant.” Bernie has always been on the right side of social justice issues, and this issue is no different. He now understands that the goal is mass privatization and monetization of a common good and a cornerstone of democracy.
Perhaps ten years ago there was more support for charters among minority parents because they believed the sale pitch of the privatizers. Today they have witnessed the devastating impact of privatization in the past ten years. More than half of black parents surveyed in California today no longer support charter expansion. They understand the colonialist agenda of many charter schools and have witnessed the establishment of separate and unequal schools for mostly minority students. The tide of public opinion is turning against privatization.
In today’s racially polarized world, only African Americans could make the arguments that Reed=West make. It was especially important that they called out Amy Wilkins, niece of the wonderful civil rights leader Roy Wilkins, for defending charter schools and school choice, and pointed out that she is paid to defend charter schools.
It is up:
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-Charter-School-Industr-in-General_News-Bernie-Sanders_Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Dishonesty-190620-539.html#comment736851
I also put up 3 comments quoting the salient points you point out here.
Thank you!
I will share the Reed/Cornell piece as widely as I can. It says clearly what I have been groping to express for quite some time.
The Reed/West article is brilliant. They put it all together.
I should have written “West” not “Cornell.” But it it brilliant, as you say. Let’s hope it has an impact.
It’s astonishing that even back then (in the 1960s and 70s), people were using a) the “freedom of choice” argument and b) standardized testing to skirt the law and implement de facto segregation. Thank you, Diane, for reminding us of this history!!!
When I was a small boy, I sometimes spent time on my grandfather’s tobacco and cotton farm in Southern Kentucky. And when I did, on Sundays, after church, we would take a stroll down Main Street. And if an elderly black man passed us on the street, he would tip his hat to me, EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST A CHILD, and say, “Afternoon, Suh,” without a hint of irony or humor. That’s how entrenched the racism was, that a black ELDER was expected to show such deference to a white child.
I remember my aunt explaining to me that if blacks and whites were made by Washington to go to school together, they would end up marrying and having children whose skin was splotchy all over, like Holstein-Friesian cattle. Moronic.
My grandfather’s best friend was a black man named Ezra. They went fishing together once or twice every week. Ezra would come to the house, stand in the front yard, and yell out my grandfather’s name. They were friends for sixty years, but Ezra was never in my grandfather’s house because in those days in that place, black men didn’t come into white people’s houses, ever. When my grandfather died, he was laid out in the front room for the wake. Ezra came to pay his respects. My mother MADE Ezra come inside to do this, though Ezra was clearly (for good reason) very uncomfortable doing that. I will never forget her words: “Ezra, that man in there probably loved you more than anybody else on Earth. So you get yourself inside and say goodbye to Daddy.”
Just think of all that was lost there over all those years!!!
It sickens me to remember this stuff. It wasn’t long ago. Not long ago at all.
And now, sixty years later, we have a freaking racist in the White House–a hero to skinhead neo-Nazis.
Bob, I bet Ezra had to enter the house through the back door.
Nope, through the front. But what a horror that they were friends for all those years and never sat down to dinner together.
Living in segregated Houston, the custom was that black people always knocked at the back door, never the front.
This was typical, as well, in Southern Kentucky, at the time, when domestics came to clean, iron, care for children, etc. But those were always women. Racism and sexism served up daily from the parlor to the pulpit.
Great story, Bob. Reminds me of a number of man to man relationships that developed despite the restrictions of society. When ole Dan Gordon died at the age of 95, it robbed my uncle of countless afternoon conversations over a tall boy. “I lost the best friend I ever had,” he confided in me after Dan died. My father had a similar relationship with Mr Gene Brady. They built a barn together without electric saws or electric drills while I watched, tiny and fascinated. Mr Gene would spend long hours lecturing me about the difference between the workin man and the lazy man even as he turned the drill bit silently through the hard oak lumber by hand. Trust me, Duckworth, your ideas are not new. Mr Gene gave me the same thing for free.
What a magnificent article by Professors Reed and West!!! I second Diane’s request: Please, please read it. It covers a lot of important ground succinctly.
I’ve shared this link on my social media. Please do as well.
Thank you, Bob, for the moving story of Ezra and your Grandpa. Very touching and telling how close to us this is.
Agree.
When you scratch the surface of the “southern gentleman,” we sometimes find racism. Sadly, we still find it all over, not just in the South.
When I moved to New England, where I spent much of my publishing career, I was shocked to find that the racism there was even more virulent than in the rural South, even among the educated, professional, very well-to-do folks I came to know as I moved up the socioeconomic ladder. In general, with some exceptions, where I grew up, though the racism was ubiquitous and structural, it took the really violent, nasty forms only among a) poor, extremely uneducated whites and b) the politicians pandering to those folks. There was more of a live and let live attitude, probably because people actually interacted with and knew one another, whereas in the Northeast, there was extreme segregation in which wealthy whites had very, very few interactions, ever, with people of color. The worst forms of racism are dependent upon a) ignorance and b) fear of that which is unknown and assumed to be very unlike you. The first time I heard what New England bankers and CEOs and politicians said to one another in the country club changing rooms or standing around the golf tee when they thought only their kind were listening, I was completely shocked. Their racism had a nastiness and violent intent about it that I had rarely heard before. Pure naivete on my part.
Those politicians pandering to racists are very much still with us: Trump, Miller. It’s horrifying that we have made so little progress, that we should have such people in power in the 21st century. Troglodytes.
Bob: EXACTLY,
“the destruction of public education as anything more than an underfunded holding pen for the least profitable students.”
That is the bottom line from the supposedly “non-profit” charter CEOs who are paid handsomely out of the blood profits of harming the children they feel are unworthy.
The truth is that almost the entire non-profit charter movement is predicated in first their undermining every effort to help the communities’ public schools and then dumping the children they don’t find profitable to teach into them.
There are no good charters anymore because even if their CEOs don’t use the most reprehensible practices themselves, they know their existence is predicted on remaining silent and giving their tacit approval to the most reprehensible practices of the most successful practices.
This entire movement is predicated in having white education reporters and white board members who believe the lie when a charter CEO tells them that lots of African-American kindergarten children act out violently in their charters and it is all the fault of their own violent natures.
Those white education reporters would never believe it if the principal of the nearly all white elementary school in Scarsdale or Westport or Great Neck told them that the white affluent kindergarten children acted out so violently that they needed to be suspended and it is only because of their own violent natures.
Those white reporters would go digging instead of believing something so unlikely. But since charters with high suspension rates are suspending African-American five and six year olds, those white reporters’ own inherent racism makes them believe it must be true, since a white CEO told them it was true.
I wish those reporters would check their own inherent racism because when the real story of what is going on is finally known – because of articles like this one in The Nation — their own racist reporting will be an embarrassment and cause for shame. Every story they wrote in which the reporter insists there are “two sides” to the issue of whether lots of African-American kindergarten children act out violently in charters will be cause for shame.
Great heaps of praise for Dr Reed for his work with Bernie 2020. Bernie beats Trump! This sharp article by Reed and West should be an op-ed. In. The. Washington. Post. Really, the Post should feature the article and apologize for calling the NAACP’s position racist. That was surreal. It was like calling Dr. Martin Luther King racist for working to deny poor people the ability to “choose” to ride the bus during the boycott, the ability to “choose” to help themselves at the expense of their neighbors, the only difference being that riding the bus is usually better than walking, whereas attending a charter is usually not better than attending a public school with properly certified, experienced teachers and some stability. The Post editorial board has a lot of explaining to do.
Bernie is the only candidate who has a long, established record for speaking truth to power.
The CEO of the Gates Foundation is the lead independent director for the Facebook board. She’s responsible for the policies and practices of the Zuck/Sandberg-managed company.
In addition to all of the other egregious wrongs committed by Facebook, earlier this year media reported, “Facebook content moderation is an ugly business”. Facebook contracts out the moderator function which provides cover. The employees of Facebook’s contractor are poorly paid, allegedly forced to work in a dirty, unhealthy environment and forced into vigilance with 95-98% accuracy under threat of loss of their jobs. The employees suffer from the inevitable stress of daily, prolonged exposure to violence, hatred and sordid and criminal acts.
In a just world, the Gates Foundation CEO, Bill and Melinda and Mark and Priscilla would be forced to become content moderators.
The Gates Foundation CEO provides major Facebook oversight which should make people ask, are the Gates Foundation leaders, policies and practices, as much a disgrace as Facebook’s. The answer is, the Foundation is worse because it’s operated to undermine democracy for longer and hasn’t been as scrutinized
I read a Guardian article yesterday about how the Democratic Party and mainstream media are all ganging up to prevent Bernie from winning. It’s “anyone but Bernie” again. It’s like the Yankees and Red Sox going easy on each other to keep the Houston Astros out of the World Series. Not exactly meritocratic. Hardly democratic. Definitely disingenuous. I am also very concerned about Elizabeth Warren being supported my the media as part of this anti-Bernie cohort. I feel the Bern, and I also feel for the Bern because as a public school teacher I know what it’s like to have nearly all the billionaires in the world trying to make me fail. Go Bernie. Never compromise.
The Repubs want Biden. My opinion-they know the 2020 race isn’t going to be close but, by claiming it is, Dems can be led out of fear to vote for Biden in the primaries. George Will made the case today. He said, Americans want a leader to restore not transform
Me and mine feel the Bern.
Thank you. Democracy in the Democratic Party is broken when we vote for primary candidates because we think they make good candidates instead of voting for candidates because we think they will make good leaders.