Peter Greene read Steve Suitts’ book about the origins of the modern school choice movement—Overturning Brown— and highly recommends it.
Suitts demonstrates beyond doubt that the school choice movement was launched by southern segregationists to fight the Brown decision.
Standards were also used to sort students by race.
Greene writes:
These segregationists developed strategies and language that are strikingly familiar. Seven Southern states developed voucher programs, aimed mostly at creating three parallel systems of white, black and segregated schools. Various school choice programs were promoted without ever discussing segregation or even race, but by focusing on “freedom” and the necessity for parents to choose their own child’s educational setting. South Carolina’s governor argued that competition would help schools improve. Georgia enacted tuition tax credits, an early version of Betsy DeVos’s Education Freedom vouchers, in 1958. In 1964, a Mississippi defender of segregation stopped talking about “states’ rights” to segregate and started speaking out against the “monopoly” of “government schools.”
An early version of the standards movement, allowing states to sort students by supposed academic, behavior and cultural criteria, became a mechanism for maintaining segregation without actually talking about race, substituting rhetoric about “quality education.” An Alabama school leader explained, “Our primary interest is educating people basically of like learning capacities. We adopt a school system to meet their needs.” In other words, we’re not segregating the races; we’re just helping students find a school that best meets their needs. That was in 1972.
To find the roots of our current policies and the rebirth of segregation, read Undermining Brown.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“A string of legal defeats like this might give a department head pause. Instead, it’s been full speed ahead for DeVos.
She rewrote the Borrower Defense regulations so dramatically that almost no borrower will ever qualify for debt cancellation again; the department itself estimated that only about 3 cents of every dollar borrowed will be forgiven under the DeVos rule. Her rewrite was so drastic that 10 Republican senators joined the Democrats to vote to overturn her rewrite this March and Trump’s veto kept DeVos’ rewrite in place.
And now, the department is trying a particularly cruel and Orwellian sleight of hand — denying debt cancellations without admitting they are doing so. They are writing to tens of thousands of defrauded borrowers that their claims have been approved, but because there’s no evidence they were harmed, the amount of debt relief is zero dollars.
But perhaps that’s to be expected: DeVos, of course, had stacked her department with former executives of for-profit colleges, like Robert Eitel and Diane Auer Jones, both formerly of the for-profit college chain Career Education Corp.”
Betsy DeVos, leader of the ed reform “movement” for 30 years.
They must be very proud.
Do people at the US Department of Education worry that this incredibly shabby treatment of the public will destroy their reputation with the public?
They now work in active opposition to low income college students? The people who pay their salaries?
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/betsy-devos-refusal-honor-student-loan-forgiveness-shows-her-disrespect-ncna1234074
Important. As you know I have never fallen for charter schools and voucherism. I am very aware of the history of “southern academies.” will share this post. Very important.
DeVos now quotes the work of the ed reform lobby to attack public schools. She relies on the same echo chamber to attack public schools, because she’s played a central role in the national ed reform “movement” for 30 years.
Such a shame for public school students, who aren’t being served by these public employees at all.
If you’re wondering why the ed reformers in DC haven’t gotten around to doing anything for the 90% of kids who attend public schools, here’s the answer:
KellyannePolls
on WH plan for school funding in next covid relief bill:
“We’re looking at 10 percent of the money, pretty much, going to non-public schools, Education Freedom Scholarships” – says parents of private school students need help.
They’re too busy lobbying for vouchers. Once again public school students and families are the dead-last priority, and ed reformers are holding funding for public schools hostage until they get funding for the private schools they support.
National private school vouchers! So much for that “principle”, huh?
Public school students will get attention only after the preferred private school students are taken care of- this is the ed reform lobby at work.
We bailed out some of the wealthiest and most exclusive private schools in the country before anyone lifted a finger on behalf of public schools.
Absolutely outrageous neglect. But that’s what you get when you hire exclusively inside the ed reform echo chamber. A really distorted view of policy, where 90% of students and families are neglected and ignored because public schools are ideologically incorrect among ed reformers.
Middle of July. Nothing accomplished.
Bellwether (Gates funding, founded by the same person who is responsible for New Schools Venture Fund, TFA and Pahara) wrote last year that “reformers” should reach out to churches to achieve their goals.
just needs the word “certain” in front of churches
Yes- the ones that got millions from the PPP which was intended for businesses that pay taxes.
The systemic segregationists must be delighted that laws have been twisted around so that “school choice” is the main focus in D.C. The federal government has wasted over a billion on schools that never opened or closed shortly after opening. How sad it is that the federal government is helping to segregate schools.
I can understand the right wing Southerner’s support for “choice” that results in increased segregation. I cannot understand Obama’s support. He was not a libertarian. How could he be so naive as to believe that “choice” is a positive for most minority students? Even if he believes in Friedman’s magical market, it creates winners and losers. Most of the losers are the poor minority students. Obama must have noticed that most of choice is about transferring public money into private pockets while creating separate and unequal schools for mostly minority students.
Trade-offs to get elected? Tech tyrants and Wall Streeters had chips that Obama and John Podesto wanted. Why does CAP continue to promote privatization? Its Board Chair has a lobby shop, Bipartisan Policy Center, which hosts education sessions paid for by Gates and John Arnold.
Of course it was, as was the anti abortion movement of the same period of time. In response to Carter holding back funding of segregationist Christian Academies. They could not attack him outright for anti segregation policy. So they attacked him on abortion and choice.
That was a powerful Forbes article by Greene, a forceful article. I must read the book. “The segregationists developed strategies and language that are strikingly familiar.” Clearly.
Agreed, southern segregationists promoted one form of school choice.
However, there’s a lot more to this issue, including people like Nate Blackman (creator of the Metro School in Chicago, Frances Lucerna, creator of El Puente Academy for Peace & Justice, Deborah Meier, creator of Central Park East in NYC, Wayne Jennings, creator with a multi-racial group of mothers of ST. Paul Open School, Herb Kohl, creator of “Other Ways” In Berkeley, and many other progressive educators in communities all over the US. They started doing this in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Even before that, in the early 1960’s, the Urban League was creating Street Academies as options for African American students with whom urban districts were not succeeding.
Click to access ED059323.pdf
IN 1968, civil rights hero Kenneth Clark urged creation of new public schools OUTSIDE the control of local districts.
https://hepgjournals.org/doi/abs/10.17763/haer.38.1.vj454v36776725q7
All of the above are easily to verify facts. These were a few of many progressive efforts to empower low income families who can not afford affluent exclusive suburbs, who can not afford expensive, exclusive private schools, who could not get their children into Boston Latin, or Bronx Science, or the many other “district” schools that used standardized tests to screen out youngsters.
To ignore these progressive efforts reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ““I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Joe,
For many years the term “school choice” was thoroughly stigmatized because of its complete and total identification with Southern segregationists. They coined the term and they owned it. I lived through that ea did you? Every Southern state endorsed school choice as their answer to subverting the Brown decision. Your efforts to find an alternative narrative do not change the sordid history of school choice. If charter schools were the salvation of black and brown children in America, why is there so much segregation and inequality in America today? And why so much racism in liberal Minneapolis, where charters are prolific?