Stephen Suitts is an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. He is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Earlier in his career, Suitts served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, and executive producer and writer of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the civil rights movement in five Deep South cities.
In this illuminating and important article, he examines the roots of the “school choice” movement, which began as an integral part of the segregationist opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision. Contrary to the rhetoric of Betsy DeVos, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and even some Democrats, school choice is NOT the “civil rights issue of our time.” School choice was born as a way to maintain segregation of the races. Read this article in full. It is a brilliant and necessary history of the fight to block desegregation of the schools in the South (and other regions), and it is a fight that is ongoing. Next time you hear Betsy DeVos lecture about “educational freedom,” bear in mind that she is echoing dozens of segregationist politicians, like George Wallace. You will meet many more if you this stunning history of school choice and its origins.
He writes:
The political movement for “school choice” is employing the icons and language of civil rights and social justice to advance private school vouchers that fifty years ago were primary tools for segregationists to preserve unequal education for African American and Hispanic children. President Trump’s call for a national program of “school choice” echoes the language of George Wallace and others who demanded the federal government and US courts permit Alabama and the South to administer “freedom of choice” for elementary and secondary schools.
These apparent contradictions emerge from the unexamined legacy of segregationists who designed and developed effective, lasting strategies that frustrated and blocked K–12 school desegregation. It is a legacy that turns the icons and language of civil rights inside-out while thwarting the national goal of an effective, equitable system of education for all children.
So now we see the Heritage Foundation, Betsy DeVos, evangelicals, President Trump, and others who paint themselves as the newly minted defenders of the rights of poor black and brown children. They do so by perverting the language of the civil rights movement to support their goal of transferring public funds to private schools.
Suitts described the broad coalition of white supremacists who used every tool they could fashion to fight desegregation and racial justice. School choice was one of those tools.
Political leaders such as Georgia’s Ernest Vandiver won office by campaigning on a slogan of “No, not one” African American child would ever be allowed in a white school but discovered after entering the governor’s office that complete, absolute segregation was impossible to achieve—and counter-productive to preserving as many virtually segregated schools as possible. There were segregationists such as Alabama state senator Albert Boutwell—who later as a “moderate” mayoral candidate defeated “Bull” Connor—and Birmingham corporate attorney Forney Johnston. While Wallace began as a white liberal before shifting his politics to become governor, Boutwell and Johnston were the first segregationist leaders to develop a variety of strategies, tactics, and rationales for school choice that often delayed and defeated the promise of Brown.
Resistance to school desegregation differed across the states of the former Confederacy according to class, geography, religion, and political ambition.18 Only by recovering and understanding the work of a wider cast of white actors who crafted enduring tools and strategies protecting segregation can the reactionary heritage of today’s school choice become clear. As Justin Driver has found, the efforts of these segregationist leaders “to maintain white supremacy were often considerably more sophisticated, self-aware, and nuanced than the cartoonish depiction of southern stupidity and hostility would admit.”19 These forgotten and ignored strategies help explain how today’s proponents of public financing of private schools can employ the language of civil rights without widespread discredit. They also reveal how the origins and historical development of “freedom of choice” have shaped and continue to define the impact and role of “school choice” and vouchers in public education across the nation.20….
From 1954 to 1965, southern legislatures enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions attempting to discredit, block, postpone, limit, or evade school desegregation. A large number of these acts allowed the re-direction of public resources, including school resources, to benefit private schools.25 In 1956, the Georgia legislature permitted the leasing of public property to segregated private schools. Five years later, the state enacted a law to provide vouchers for students to attend any non-sectarian private school, boldly declaring the act was to advance “the constitutional rights of school children to attend private schools of their choice in lieu of public schools.”26
The North Carolina legislature enacted eight bills, the first of which was a constitutional amendment to authorize vouchers for private education and to allow whites to close public schools through a local referendum. In Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, legislatures passed laws to publicly fund vouchers for private schools and to transfer public school property to private educational organizations. Citizens’ Councils were active in setting up private schools, especially in Mississippi. The Virginia legislature declared its support for this “freedom of choice” movement by enacting a system of vouchers for private organizations and citizens.27
In addition to direct transfers of public funds and assets, some states employed tax schemes, including tax credits, to build and finance private school systems. In the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, after President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to call out federal troops to protect a handful of black children attempting to attend Central High School, Governor Orval Faubus funneled public monies through contracts and tax credits to the Little Rock Private School Corporation until the federal courts stopped the subterfuge (along with further attempts by Arkansas to enact vouchers). In 1959, Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver led the legislature in passing the six segregation bills, including one that supported “the establishment of bona fide private schools by allowing taxpayers credits upon their State income tax returns for contributions to such institutions…”
By 1965, seven states had enacted some type of voucher that enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history. Yet, vouchers as a preferred and essential method of resistance to Brown did not stand alone but worked most effectively through larger plans that emerged from the different states. These plans were not uniform, but most incorporated strategies and language that have evolved and endured as the ways and means by which vouchers, school choice, and private schooling have escaped the stigma of their segregationist origins without losing much of the same purpose or effect.
Alabama’s Citizens Council proposed legislation to close all public schools and use vouchers for white parents to enroll in private schools in order to “keep every brick in our segregation wall intact.”
The die-hard segregationists came up with a three-way solution. Every student and family would have “educational freedom.” They could choose to go to an all-white school, an all-black school, and an integrated school.
All of the Southern states endorsed vouchers.
In Mississippi, white voters approved state constitutional changes recommended by Governor Hugh White’s advisory group that authorized state funding for children to attend their parents’ choice of a private school and for transferring public school properties to private schools. Afterwards, the strategy committee did little more since Mississippi’s white leaders employed other groups and strategies as their first line of defense. The legislature approved small funding increases for black public schools in an attempt to convince black citizens that the state would move closer to “separate but equal” facilities…
Lindsay Almond became Virginia’s new governor in 1957 after a campaign in which he supported the hardline approach. “I’d rather lose my right arm,” he proclaimed, “than to see one nigra child enter the white schools of Virginia.” He dropped his hardline stance and adopted “freedom of choice” as his policy. Some counties, however, went further.
Prince Edward County in Virginia maintained absolute segregation by closing the county’s public schools and providing county tax credit scholarships to supplement state vouchers for white children to attend private schools. In 1964, however, Justice Hugo Black issued the Supreme Court opinion outlawing the die-hard segregationists’ schemes. The Court ordered the public schools reopened on a desegregated basis and held that both tax credit and direct vouchers were unconstitutional.
Suitts traces the resistance to desegregation and the growth of private “white flight academies” in the South.
By 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, this history of die-hard resistance to desegregation and white-supremacist ideology had begun to fade from memory.
President Reagan transformed a “love of white skin” into a color-blind doctrinal belief that individual freedom of choice in schooling created diversity and opportunity for all in an era without segregation. Reagan became the nation’s primary voice for why and how government should support private schools, and, as a former actor and California governor, his own past and national leadership obscured the original role and rationales of southern white supremacists from public memory.
In 1984, in re-nominating Reagan, the Republican Party’s education platformincluded support for the right to pray in public schools, opposition to busing for desegregation, passage of tuition tax credits for private schools, and redirecting billions of federal funds dedicated to assist low-income students in public schools into vouchers for private schools. It was the first time a national political party endorsed school vouchers. In his State of the Union address fourteen months later, President Reagan declared: “We must continue the advance by supporting discipline in our schools, vouchers that give parents freedom of choice; and we must give back to our children their lost right to acknowledge God in their classrooms.”120 It was the first time a US president expressly advocated for school vouchers before a joint session of Congress. Without attribution, the views and tools of southern segregationists had become the official position of the national Republican Party and the Reagan presidency…
With the increased number of conservative justices appointed to the Supreme Court and federal District Courts and Appeals Courts, the judiciary abandoned its activist role in protecting the rights of black students.
The US Supreme Court began to bless these developments. As early as 1973, Justice William Rehnquist became the first member of the Court to issue a dissent from a school desegregation case relying on the precedent of Brown. In a case concerning school segregation in Denver, he condemned the Court’s opinion for requiring a school district to advance desegregation—employing the old scare word, “racial mixing”—where there were “neutrally drawn boundary lines” that sustained segregation.129 Barely a year after the Bob Jones decision held that religious private schools could not hold a tax exemption and discriminate on the basis of race, the Supreme Court slammed shut the courthouse door on those seeking to challenge the IRS’s weak enforcement. Parents of twenty-five black public school children sued the IRS, charging that its standards and procedures were inadequate to fulfill its obligation to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. In 1984, the US Supreme Court held that the parents had no standing to bring such a suit.130
With the appointment of other justices across more than three decades, the Court increasingly refused to require school districts to use any method of desegregation that proved effective in dismantling the dynamics of separation. By 2007, the Court had turned Brown on its head as a precedent for backing public school districts’ voluntary efforts to desegregate. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Brown commanded school districts to avoid using race as a consideration, even for the purpose of recognizing and diminishing public school segregation. “When it comes to using race to assign children to schools,” Roberts wrote without doubt or irony, “history will be heard…”
During the heyday of the first era of school vouchers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried that “token integration is little more than token democracy, which ends up with many new evasive schemes and it ends up with new discrimination, covered up with such niceties of complexity.”149 King’s words have proven prophetic, although he could not have foreseen how dramatically the icons and language of the movement he led would be used, even by his own lineage, to develop and advance the tools and strategies that segregationists of his day thought could defeat the promise of Brown…
Even if most Americans find repugnant the absolute separation of the races that George Wallace defiantly championed as destiny in 1963, his words have transformed into a prophesy about schools across the nation that rings true by the most accurate, historical definition of the term: “segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”
It’s also blatantly dishonest for the US Department of Education and Betsy DeVos to portray the vouchers they’re working 24/7 to promote as “offering the same choice that wealthy people have”
It’s nonsense. They know darn well that making comparisons between the low value vouchers they’re all enthusiastically selling and tuition at elite private schools is not true. That a federal agency is spreading this ridiculous comparison is embarrassing.
If I’m a student or a parent why should I trust the US Department of Education to give me ANY accurate information given that they’re running this political campaign?
Are they reliable on students loans? Colleges? Should an 18 year old considering taking on tens of thousands in debt rely on these adults for accurate information, given the malarkey on vouchers? No, that 18 year old should not. They should find an adult who is trustworthy.
The voucher is worth what it’s worth. It’s a proxy for money. If it’s worth 7k then it isn’t redeemable for 11k or 20k or 40k in tuition. That’s a lie. No one will be using a low value ed reform voucher for “Sidwell Friends” school or the other elite schools they use as comparisons, because 7k isn’t enough to pay for those schools and private schools have NO duty to let anyone in. That’s the truth. And they know it.
Thanks so much, Drs. Ravitch and Suitts.
For more on the Supreme Court case which addressed Freedom-of-choice plans, please read Green v. New Kent County. It’s the case which established the 6 Green Factors, the kind of litmus test for desegregation. (My dissertation focuses on this case). Interestingly, the case never mentioned teacher quality variables as a necessary standard—which is why I bristle every time I hear TFA as the solution to educational inequities.
oyez green v new kent county
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1967/695
Sounds like the typical big public education monopoly talking points. I guess the author is willing to discriminate against those children who do not flourish in the union staffed, big public school factories. Choice reduces cost and improves outcomes. Children are more important than union jobs.
Good gawd, talk about talking points. “union staffed, big public school factories”. You left out “gubmint monopoly”.
BTW: “Choice reduces cost and improves outcomes” – citation needed. Thanks.
I thought it was “gummint” 🙂
Choice does not reduce costs, and all the legitimate research has shown that it also does not improve academic outcomes. I taught in public schools over three decades and never felt I was in a factory. All I saw were hard working teachers bending over backwards to meet student needs. I saw lots of teachers going way beyond the norm to help poor students, and using their own money to do it.
Well, the charter “choice” schools certainly “reduce costs” on anything that would benefit students–lunches, school supplies, gymnasiums, theatres, media labs, libraries, and so on. They do this so that the per-pupil funding they get from the states can go to the fat salaries that the charter school execs pay to themselves, to lease payments made by the schools to companies that they privately own, to jobs for the ne’er-do-well relatives and golfing buddies and mistresses of the charter owners, and so on.
The “status quo” is now all of these fly-by-night charters and voucher schools and endless testing. If the schools are “factory models,” it’s the reformers status-quo that it’s using. In fact, schools are much MORE likely to be “factories” now than they were 20 years ago. Sticking kids in front of computers constantly, with enormous class sizes, with teachers that aren’t certified, is the factory model. And that idea originated in charter schools.
Turning rich and varied curricula into a test prep “factory” is one of the big problems too. Standardization is the enemy of creative expression, and “reform” is the enemy of public education.
Exactly, Retired Teacher!
Exactly, Threatened! Talk about factory models!!!
Comments such as yours will not be viewed favorably here. As Deep Throat said “Follow the Money”.
Charles, what “money” should he follow?
There is no money behind this blog other than my time. There is no advertising and no one pays me for my views.
Please explain your insinuation.
Yup. Follow the money. Consider for example, this listing of the vast staff that Diane Ravitch has:
Staffing of the Diane Ravitch Blog: Diane Ravitch
And the breathtaking compensation that those staffers receive:
Executive Compensation, Diane Ravitch Blog: $0.00
Remember that you read this muckraking expose here, first, in my post! Diane, really, how long did you think you could get away with this!
Thanks, Bob.
We are so accustomed to people chasing money that it’s hard to imagine someone who doesn’t, like teachers. Like volunteers. Like activists for causeS they believe in.
Chuck,
It’s completely comical you’d make that comment here of all places. You might want to (but won’t) check the 990 for edupost just as a starter. It’s a multi-million dollar (annually) privatization propaganda shop. The big money in education lobbying and nearly all of the money on the consulting side is in privatization.
Try the 990 for The 74: billionaires Walton, Broad, Etc.
Follow this money:
LILY ESKELSEN GARCIA, VICE PRESIDENT
SALARY BREAKDOWN (2013)
TOTAL COMPENSATION
$347,751.00
Gross Salary: $265,310.00
Allowances: $57,278.00
Official Business: $23,321.00
Other Compensation: $1,842.00
RHONDA WEINGARTEN, PRESIDENT
SALARY BREAKDOWN (2015)
TOTAL COMPENSATION
$497,118.00
Gross Salary: $382,677.00
Allowances: $49,616.00
Official Business: $64,825.00
source: https://www.unionfacts.com/employee/American_Federation_of_Teachers/RHONDA/WEINGARTEN
Source: LM forms filed with the Office of Labor-Management Standards. This information is a public record, which can also be found on the Department of Labor’s website: http://www.UnionReports.gov.
Q American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten recently pilloried President Trump’s health plan in the Huffington Post: “GOP Rewards The Rich, Rips Off The Rest Of Us,” she declared. Is Weingarten among “the rest of us?” The union leader hauled in $472,197 last year.
Weingarten is hardly the only fat-cat teachers’ union leader. According to the Department of Labor, National Education Association executive director John Stocks bagged $355,721 last year, while NEA president Lily Eskelsen García scraped by on $317,826. At the 2017 California Democratic Party Convention, California Teachers Association president Eric Heins ranted about billionaires without acknowledging his own $317,000 total compensation package. CTA executive director Joe Nunez’s compensation is $460,000; associate ED Emma Leheny makes $480,000, and deputy ED Karen Kyhn gets by on $427,000 yearly. New York City’s United Federation of Teachers boss Michael Mulgrew is practically working class by comparison, making $288,000.
END Q
source: https://www.city-journal.org/html/hypocrisy-inc-15728.html
Question:
How much money does the United States spend on public elementary and secondary schools?
Response:
Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States in 2014–15 amounted to $668 billion, or $13,119 per public school student enrolled in the fall (in constant 2016–17 dollars).1 Total expenditures included $11,734 per student in current expenditures, which includes salaries, employee benefits, purchased services, tuition, and supplies. Total expenditures also included $1,029 per student in capital outlay (expenditures for property and for buildings and alterations completed by school district staff or contractors) and $356 for interest on school debt.
Current expenditures per student enrolled in the fall in public elementary and secondary schools were 15 percent higher in 2014–15 than in 2000–01 ($11,734 vs. $10,228, both in constant 2016–17 dollars). Current expenditures per student increased between 2000–01 and 2008–09, peaking at $11,914 in 2008–09, and fluctuated between 2008–09 and 2014–15, reaching $11,734 in 2014–15.
Interest payments on school debt per student were 19 percent higher in 2014–15 than in 2000–01. Interest payments per student increased from $298 in 2000–01 to $398 in 2010–11, before declining to $356 in 2014–15 (all amounts in constant 2016–17 dollars). Capital outlay expenditures per student in 2014–15 ($1,029) were 24 percent lower than in 2000–01 ($1,353). Capital outlay expenditures per student were 17 percent lower in 2010–11 ($1,129) than in 2000–01 and a further 9 percent lower in 2014–15 than in 2010–11.
source: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
The forces fighting against school choice, are the recipients of all of this money. The public school teachers, the administrators, and especially the big union bosses wanted to keep the money gusher flowing in their direction.
As long as parents are forced to participate in the public school monopoly, the alliance of teachers, administrators, and union bosses will have a stranglehold on education spending.
School choice/vouchers will end this. The labor unions will be broken, and the half-million dollar a year salaries the labor bosses get will end.
As I said: Follow the money.
(P.S. I never meant to assert that this blog generated revenue. )
Charles,
I am among the forces fighting to preserve and protect public education from profiteers, grifters, entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, and billionaires.
No one pays me anything to do this.
I am not on a union payroll.
You are a sick puppy.
Charles, the Eskelson-Garcia [NEA, 3million members] and Weingarten [AFT, 1.6million members] salaries, as heads of the nations main two teachers’ unions, are about the same as the supts of NYC [Carranza -1.1million students] and] and LAUSD [Beutner – 735k students] public school systems. That seems appropriate (altho maybe Eskelsen-Garcia should get more). And it’s not like their salaries are paid out of school taxes. Contrast a couple of CEO’s of US charter chains supported in large part by school taxes: Eva Moskowitz – Success Academy $782k [17k students], Richard Barth – KIPP $425k [96k students].
Husband and wife team Barth (KIPP) and Kopp (TFA) ha e a household income in excess of one million.
Not everyone who opposes school choice, has an economic interest in keeping a government/public school monopoly. Agreed.
BUT- There is SO much money involved in public schools, that many (not all) people who are interested in the status quo, are acting in their own economic self-interest. In rural Kentucky counties, the public school system, is often the largest employer in the county. (My grandmother was a public school teacher in Grant County, KY).
The forces behind the fight against school choice, and parental control, have many “fellow travelers”.
Charles,
There is so much money funding the fight for school choice, so many billionaires…as Nick Hanauer wrote, 40 of the 50 richest family foundations are backing the forces of privatization. For what? To divert public money to entrepreneurs and grifters and evangelicals who run “schools” with uncertified teachers and no standards. Oops, there is one standard in those evangelical schools: keep out the gays.
That’s your side. Stop prattling about how much you love public schools while you defend every effort to defund them.
The US Department of Education is saying, over and over, that their voucher plans offers “the same choice wealthy parents have always had”
No part of that statement is true. Yet they have spent a year promoting it relying on the credibility of the federal government so people will believe it.
They should retract. It’s incorrect. What else do they say that isn’t true?
I think poor parents should try to get their kids into Andover or Lakeside, then, when they fail, sue the Department of Education for false advertising.
That is a great idea. The US Department of Education should sue elite private schools to compel them to accept vouchers worth $5,000. The cheerleaders for vouchers would scream “foul,” they don’t want “those kids.”
I have a friend who teaches in a private school. He confided in me that he never had a class load of more than 65 in the forty years of his tenure there. This breaks down to classes of 10-15. Add to that that these are children selected for a program that admits to being only for those who are capable of a lot of work and intricate thinking. Other students need not apply and are routinely told not to return. The price tag for all of this is breathtaking.
Leaving out, deliberately OMITTING, that private schools make choices too and may make choices and may exclude any student for reasons other than race is dishonest.
Do they think people won’t figure this out? That if they get their wish and we eradicate public schools and people apply to attend private schools they can’t afford or test into or stay in when the private school rejects them people won’t notice this? That it was not, in fact, their “choice” not to be able to attend “the same schools” wealthy people attend?
The religious school here regularly sends the students they don’t want right back to public schools. They’re allowed to do that, as long as it isn’t because the rejection is based on one of the few legally protected categories. Ed reformers know this. They know private schools don’t have the same duty public schools do. Why omit that? That’s an important piece of information. People need that to evaluate whether they want to pay for this or not.
Thanks for this excellent history on the sordid relationship between school choice and segregation. We should send copies of this to Obama and Cory Booker. Both of them are intelligent and should know better. What would make them believe this latest reincarnation of so-called choice would yield any different results? It hasn’t!
I think this is the best single overview of the racist origins of school choice that I have read.
I wish every reader of this blog would read it. And put it on FB and tweet it.
It is an amazing article, especially if you take time to look at the illustrations and video recordings.
I looked at some of the credits on the photographs and the videoclips. Note that our federal tax dollars helped to pay for many of these records, in particular the Institute of Museum and Library Services….one of the favorites for budget cuts from Republicans, along with the National Endowment in the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for digital conversion and description of the WSB Newsfilm collection.”
Agreed. This essay is astonishingly good. Sharing on FB and on my blog.
School choice fraud was always based on the most flawed studies in which “outcomes” at schools that essentially chose which students they were willing to teach were compared to schools that had to take all the students who the privately managed schools refused to teach.
I always felt that the people promoting school “choice” and “vouchers” are the same ones that want to allow private insurance companies the same rights they had in the past to dump patients — especially children — if they get any illnesses that can’t be cured with a quick dose of medicine. They really seem to believe that profit is more important than a child’s well-being. It’s not “first, do no harm”, it’s “first, do everything you can to psychologically harm the students you don’t want to teach to get them to leave.”
School choice was always about the schools having the ultimate choice, not the parents. That is why segregationists loved it. They knew that they could establish schools free to treat the students they didn’t want in the schools (i.e. non-white non-Christians) in whatever manner necessary to force them out. And then lie about it by insisting that the only reason the 5 year old who was constantly harangued and humiliated and punished in front of his peers didn’t thrive was his terrible nature.
You see the racism today in the white board members of charter schools where African-American 5 year olds are suspended from their kindergarten classes in outrageously high numbers with the white board members nodding approvingly when they are told how violent those African-American kindergarten children really are and how they deserve the punishment they get.
“people promoting school “choice” and “vouchers” are the same ones that want to allow private insurance companies the same rights they had in the past to dump patients… if they get any illnesses that can’t be cured with a quick dose of medicine”
Yup.
Conservative politicians hide their down&dirty methods under the petticoats of corporate-friendly libertarians. The jargon: there are no public goods to be promoted/ supported by society (except national defense)—just consumer products that can be delivered most efficiently via the free market. It’s really just an “I got mine too bad for you” attitude shared by school-choicers & rabid anti-Obamacare types: good but cheap ed via excluding poor achievers/ disrupters, and good but cheap health insurance via excluding the expensive-to-treat.
“Walton Foundation Pours $164 mil. into 2013 ed. grants. Who won?” (Washington Post)
The 6 heirs to the Walton fortune who have wealth equivalent to 40% of Americans combined didn’t give to very many universities in their 2013 category, “Shape Public Policy”. But, the schools they chose are notable… of course, the financially needy harvard which can always be counted on to help the rich. Other schools included were the Jesuit , Georgetown and Marquette Universities and, the Catholic UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME.
Estimating -80-90+% of the $164 mil. went to the well-known privatizers, Pahara, Fordham, Heritage, Franklin Center, TFA, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Philanthropy Roundtable (Hess and a Gates Foundation manager co-wrote the article, “Don’t Surrender the Academy”, describing how wealthy reformers could use money to get what they wanted) and, the now defunct Black Alliance for Education. Walton grants to EWA and Brookings weren’t surprising.
NPR got $600,000.
Charters and Vouchers = Jim Crow
Thank you, Yvonne, for putting it so succinctly!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for this post! Dr. Suitts’s article is breathtaking. Wow.
“The nation’s lack of memory has done far more than encourage the acceptance as racially neutral the economic and social arguments of voucher advocates, who blithely use the language of civil rights to advance the tools of segregationists.”
I felt that all along! At one point my first year of teaching I had a student in an extremely poor neighborhood with an IQ of 140. The following year the city expanded their gifted programs. Not in my district but a neighboring one. I sent her to a school where I had grown up knowing the Principal. She was doing well until 16 years old. Her Mother left the U.S and left her with her Grandma. She quit HS to earn money to support them both. Eventually she worked many jobs and attended the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park. Her first real job was a chef with the Sheridan Hotel chain. She was the first African American chef. Then worked for Leonia Hempsley and that chain. She was her personnel chef and did the menus for the chain. She now free lances and is still a top chef.
I am having difficulty reconciling the condemnation of segregation in this post with the enthusiastic support of the segregated adjacent school districts of Benton Harbor and St Joseph (despite being 3.4 miles apart, Benton Harbor High is 98% minority and St. Joseph High is 81% white).
Do traditional public school simply get a pass?
While I agree that this is a good history of the school choice movement and its tie to segregation of the races, I wonder if a proper coda might be that we exist in a society today that has succeeded beyond its wildest expectations in segregation of the classes. Modern school choice is related to the idea of living away from people you do not trust.
When bussing came to the southern cities, wealthy people who could crossed the county lines, creating a new segregation based on the ability of successful people to live wherever they desired. They moved to semi-rural neighboring small town, drove to the big city, and shook their head when the nightly news reported yet another murder in the rough part of town. They were not racist. They were just finding the best deal for their children. Why some of their best friends were ( ).
It is no accident that this happened simultaneously with the retreat of the nation into political conservatism. The separation of the classes is now in its third generation since that time. Now the purveyors of a class society have hit on the perfect way to segregate the classes without regard to race. Create opportunity for one class but call it choice (as D77 put it above, this might works if they gave everybody enough voucher money for a top of the line private academy) . Trust markets more than you do people. Care more about the successful than the losers. If the winners produce the next generation of leaders, we can dominate the losers. If everybody is selfish enough, it will help everybody.
A superb analysis, Roy.
The correlation between the cities targeted by the privatizers and proportion of Black students is not a coincidence just as it is not a coincidence that Black organizations, journalists, professors, politicians, churches, media and institutes/centers that support school choice receive money from billionaires.
excellent point. Gates lays the groundwork by paying off organizations to support his agenda.
Matt Young’s comment (6/21 10:10am) got me thinking how those on the ultra-conservative and progressive ends of the political spectrum often wind up saying/ feeling very similar things, though couched in different lingo.
The segregationists in the article fought government interference (via SCOTUS) in their daily lifestyle [school]. With early ‘60’s SCOTUS decisions on prayer and bible study in pubschs, many religious groups joined in. In parallel, libertarians have long looked to minimize governmental involvement in public life in every way possible. Those groups all used/use terms like “public education monopoly” and “choice” in the sense that Matt does. The latter two groups use Matt’s “public school factories” term: it is inaccurate, but appeals to many who feel trampled by fed policy, like assembly-linemen by mgt.
Most here are progressive to some degree, and are frustrated and flummoxed by 20 yrs of top-down micromanaging fed policies which undermine the financial viability of pubschs and harm the quality of ed w/stifling standardization. This includes PreK-12, union and non-union, public and private teachers: all our schools are affected. For a clue as to how rich-poor-gap-promoting [which folds in racially-segregating] these policies are: wealthier private schools spurn tax support, knowing this crap will soon get tied in. We use very different language due to historical political context, but “govt monopoly,” “pubsch factories” and a desire for “independent choice” aren’t far off the mark.
I think the main things separating right and left on these & other public-goods issues is that progressives seek govtl change. And they see their loss of voter influence as a direct result of trickle-up deregulation creating asset-heavy 1% dictating policy. Whereas ultra-conservatives have always felt govt stifles individual expression and community mores, so they seek to limit it wholesale; they see themselves as a victimized minority bossed about by liberal Democrats… But now that they’re Republicans, as soon as they get a super-majority, they use govt to impose their will top-down.
But I think we’re all unhappy for the same reason, & that’s the loss of voter voice.