The Choice We Face Read online

  To Claire, Edith, and Nina, with all my love,

  and for whom all choices are made.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Choice We Face

  CHAPTER ONE

  The “Divine Right” and Our Freedom of Choice in Education

  CHAPTER TWO

  Milton Friedman and the Problems with Choice in Chicago

  CHAPTER THREE

  Racism by Yet Another Name: Busing, White Resistance, and the Foundations for a National School Choice Model

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Federal Support of the School Choice Movement

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The School Choice Menu

  CHAPTER SIX

  Race and a Civil Rights Claim to School Choice

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Sinking Ship of Public Education and the Failure of Choice

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Resisting School Choice Through Counternarrative and Coalitions

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  The Choice We Face

  ONE DAY IN APRIL 2015, I attended a town hall about the future of Burke High School, a historically Black public high school in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time, I was a faculty member at the College of Charleston, teaching classes on the history of education and the civil rights movement. The meeting piqued my interest. It was organized by local White parents who demanded reform to improve Burke High. Though the school was modern and within walking distance for most students, most Whites refused to send their children to the school, citing subpar test scores, poor teaching, and a weak curriculum—perceptions that were not always supported by research. The nominal purpose of the meeting was to improve a Black high school. But what was really at stake—as what is at stake at most meetings of this kind that occur every week in communities across America—was the heart and soul of public education.

  The room was crowded by Charleston standards. Over two hundred people were in attendance. The fact that nearly half the crowd was Black made it one of the rare integrated meetings in the city. It was classically local and grassroots. Notice for it was publicized by word of mouth and through Facebook, the preferred social media of parents in Charleston, if they used any at all.

  Burke High School was founded as the Charleston Industrial Institute in 1894. It is the only high school that remains a traditional, noncharter public high school on the peninsula of Charleston. It is also 97 percent African American. Racially, the school stands in stark contrast to the popular historic homes that surround it, which are mostly occupied by Whites. The gentrified neighborhoods of Charleston are now over 70 percent White, a dramatic shift since the 1980s, when the city was two-thirds Black. The city, historically, was predominantly Black. Before the Civil War, the numbers of enslaved African Americans outnumbered Whites by at least two to one, at times five to one.1 Charleston is now the whitest it has ever been in history. Though Black parents and community members have long labored to improve Burke, the concerns of White parents who called the meeting seemed to garner more attention. These underlying truths and the dramatic gentrification of this historically Black city added to a palpable tension in the room.

  Moving in droves since the early 2000s to this newly “discovered” tourist destination, Whites wanted better options for their kids. Burke High School’s reputation, like that of many segregated Black schools, left much to be desired. The school was consistently tagged as “at risk” or “failing.” Unfounded rumors of violence and inept teaching circulated among White Charlestonians. Alternatives to Burke were appealing yet limited. The magnet schools serving middle and high school students in the area were great but were very difficult to get into. The local paper, the Post and Courier, likened entry into the premier Charleston schools to admission at Harvard. The private Porter-Gaud School is indicative. Porter-Gaud is routinely lauded as one of the best in the state and enjoys status as a nationally ranked private school. It is also one of the most expensive, with tuition for the lower school set at $22,000 per year.2

  Avoiding Burke and largely excluded from the alternatives, parents demanded more choice. Like other gentrified areas across the country, Charleston embraced charter schools as a way to provide more choice with wide support among both African Americans and Whites. In fact, a Black alumnus weeks before the meeting submitted a proposal to convert Burke into a charter school. The proposal, driven by a growing desire among Whites to use the public schools if they were “chartered,” was almost guaranteed success. The last public high school standing in Charleston was about to become a charter school, and the meeting set the stage for how the debate would unfold.

  Public education and the politics surrounding it were personal for me. My wife and I are White. We were then without children. But if and when we did have children, we had decided to commit to using the public schools in the area. We would have skin in the game, as problematically White as it was.

  I was also captivated intellectually, which only fueled my interest in the future of Burke High School. The school was for me steeped in symbolism and significance. With my students I studied the history of education in South Carolina and the struggle to achieve a quality education, one of the hallmark struggles of the Black freedom movement. In 1740, it became illegal to teach African Americans in South Carolina. After the Civil War, a paltry education was reluctantly offered, provided it was segregated. During the civil rights movement, Whites vehemently resisted integration, putting forth insidious mechanisms to preserve their privileges and investment in a segregated system, most notably through “freedom of choice” plans that eventually included charter schools.

  The deeper meaning of events was obvious to me. At the center of debate was school choice. As school choice advocates and some scholars have noted, “choice” or the principles behind it have existed since the earliest years of our republic. Philosopher John Stuart Mill warned of state intervention in education. Other theorists, including Thomas Paine or even Adam Smith, have backed the use of vouchers or public support for private education. It has been noted that states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine (which has covered some of the cost of private school tuitions since the 1870s) supported vouchers over 150 years before the Brown decision. And across the country parents practiced choice to some degree when they enrolled their children in a private school, which was often religious in nature, most notably Catholic. Choices driven by a “market” existed over a century before the founding of a common public school system in the United States.3

  But school choice as understood and practiced today is an education policy that took on new significance in the politics of massive resistance after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Calls for vouchers and minimalist state intervention prior to Brown occurred when schools were segregated by race in the United States or, before 1865, when formal education was denied to Black families. Race and racist policy after Brown have shaped the emergence of school choice and are inextricably linked to its contemporary manifestation. Segregationists used vouchers along with an ideology of choice that fundamentally shaped what we mean by “choice” today. Vouchers and calls for subsidized private education fell into the hands of influential segregationists after Brown. This is not to say that everyone who discussed vouchers in the 1950s was racist. However, to ignore the determining role of race and the politics of massive resistance or to claim that the origins of choice are not racist—as so many have done and continue to do—is to conceal problematic and paradoxical development of school choice over time. Such myopic definitions ignore the very premise of public education in the United States, which was indelibly shaped by racist policy.

  As practiced t
oday, school choice allows parents to select alternatives to their local public school to improve all schools through competition. Since the Brown decision, school choice includes a myriad of choices alternative to traditional public schools, including but not limited to charter schools, publicly funded but privately managed schools; magnet schools, public schools with specialized curricula to attract White students; school vouchers, publicly funded “coupons” used to cover the cost of private schools; private schools, education funded by private tuition that often provides religious instruction; and homeschooling, the education of children in their own homes.

  School choice often encompasses where we choose to live too, since this is often determined by a desire to enroll in the best possible schools. It is baked into White flight. The choice includes the decision to move to more desirable locations, many times suburbs but increasingly pockets of urban areas once deemed unsuitable by Whites after desegregation. Since school choice hinges on claiming the right to attend a school that you select, making a good choice involves decisions about purchasing homes in proximity to excellent schools.4 One’s choice and the history that shapes this choice are irrevocably linked. Yet an emphasis on the right to choose schools while citing test scores or real estate–based assessment of “great schools” essentially masks the racist origins of school choice since the 1950s while perpetuating the racism behind it.

  School choice is more than mere policy. It is more than vouchers and charter schools. School choice is an ideology and a way of thinking about public schools. It is an idea that fermented during desegregation in the 1950s and is grounded in the politics of massive resistance. School choice—in particular “freedom of choice” plans—gained popularity as a way to avoid racially desegregated schools. School choice provided new ways to talk about public education as the system was being desegregated. It put forth new ways of thinking about one’s “right” to an education. Its promoters rivaled civil rights advocates who claimed and demanded a right to a quality education unfettered by racial discrimination. Instead, after courts mandated that students attend desegregated schools, parents demanded their individual right to choose their children’s school. The way school choice emerged as a popular idea and policy in the aftermath of desegregation distinguishes it from any previous “choice” and demarcates the policy as one of the most controversial in the history of US education.

  Today, using choice does not make one racist. But it is grounded in a racist history and racist policy. The ideology of choice today includes a right to choose or a demand for that right. It is often used to escape failing “government schools”—a coded term with direct links to racist origins. But choice is also used in paradoxical ways that challenge its racist past. Some cities that have been roiled in desegregation struggles, such as Boston, employ “controlled choice”—a comprehensive approach to student assignment that intentionally promotes racial and economic integration through use of a rank-order system in which all families choose.5 Civil rights advocates as well as racist politicians and “school choice” advocates claim that school choice is, in fact, a civil right. It is, in short, complicated. What is meant by “choice” depends on one’s racial, social, and economic position in the United States, not to mention one’s connection to and awareness of this history.

  But race and racism are critical components in understanding the choices before us. The very school choice plans discussed at this meeting in Charleston were clearly and unequivocally linked to these historic attempts to preserve segregation. At first, I was lost as to how so many people supported school choice at the meeting that evening, not to mention the ferocity with which Whites cut down Burke High School. They cited a litany of reasons why they would not send their kids to the state-of-the-art school with modern facilities and amenities that defined quality public education. Burke in many ways stood as a monument that disproved the “if you build it, they will come” theory. The county invested in new buildings and a state-of-the-art auditorium to replace the older historic buildings. They installed the latest technology and upgraded the entire campus by 2005. The county invested heavily in Burke to attract Whites and spent much more per student at the school than they did on the largely White suburban schools. The county had built a shiny new school, but no Whites came.

  I was also lost—and would have been mildly entertained if it had not been so real—as a multitude of “progressive” Whites denied that race was a factor, dancing and tiptoeing around the reality that Burke was virtually an all-Black school. Test scores, teachers, courses, and discipline—though contested when one parsed the data—comprised the litany of reasons Whites refused to send their children to Burke. Race, racism, and racial microaggressions—illustrated by the White parent who convened the meeting and regularly shushed the audience when people started to speak out of turn—was the elephant in this crowded room.

  In the follow-up conversations on social media and board meetings at the district office, it seemed that the charter school proposal was likely to pass. Supporters cut across race and class lines and included many Black parents and alumni who believed that a charter could improve the school. Conversations about charters were also shaped by the general feeling that civility had to be honored. The people of Charleston who fervently debated the future of Burke beseeched us to keep “politics” out of the meeting that night and all other discussion about improving Burke. Any improvement was supposed to be solely for the children.

  At the moment it was also clear that if the charter proposal did not pass—and it ultimately did not pass, this time at least—Whites would only seriously consider going to Burke if it adopted some sort of charter, magnet, or private option they endorsed. Choice appeared to be one of the more viable ways to build consensus in this racially divided city.

  I was stunned. Whites’ disavowal of race and the way they skirted discussion of race was embarrassing. It crystallized how color-blind ideology operated in modern times, further perpetuating inequity. It demonstrated with poignant clarity that many White liberals either ignored race altogether or failed to comprehend its nuanced manifestations.

  I was also perplexed by the nearly universal desire that politics should be left out of the conversation. Education is inherently political. It deals with the provision of a public good that imparts the knowledge necessary to compete in the job market as skilled workers and to participate in our democracy as informed voters. The quality of public education correlates with the strength of our nation. To assert that education should remain above and beyond politics, as so many had argued in Charleston, was ignorant and ahistorical. American education has been politicized from the very beginning. Thomas Jefferson articulated this in the nation’s first call for public education in 1781, Frederick Douglass demonstrated this in his first autobiography in 1845, and the NAACP enshrined the political nature of education as they argued the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. Even the quintessential Dixiecrat of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, understood the political implications of education.

  The practically unquestioned acceptance of school choice was confounding, as were the choices it spawned, such as charter schools, magnet schools, and private schools. As a student of the civil rights movement, I saw choice as the worst possible solution to improving Burke. There was a painful history of school choice in South Carolina, but parents, advocates, and White homeowners in Charleston seemed to be wholly unaware of this.

  Debates that gripped Charleston in the ensuing months were unnerving, to say the least. The situation inevitably became what all could agree was indeed political. Scores of parents, teachers, scholars, organizers, and clergy entered the fray, each putting forth their opinions on the matter. Anger and distrust permeated school board meetings. Whites passionately policed Facebook pages devoted to the issue, attempting to enforce politeness. This was Charleston, after all, where civility and paternalism reign supreme.

  In the midst of this heated debate, a horrific event transpired. On the evening of Jun
e 17, 2015, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof—a high school dropout from outside Columbia, South Carolina—entered the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston. He opened fire on those gathered for Bible study, killing nine people. When his manifesto declaring White supremacy and a desire to start a race war was released, Charlestonians stood strong. Such racism did not and would not define their “holy city.” As the city and nation mourned—including President Barack Obama, who traveled to the city and sang “Amazing Grace”—the intense local fights over school choice subsided.

  Yet deep-seated racism and educational inequality were still everywhere, and it was everything. Dylann Roof symbolized racial ignorance and a failure of the state’s education system. Educators reeled over how anyone could enroll in a public education system and still spout racist ideology and history as Roof had done.

  The proximity of the education problem to the Charleston shooting is also telling. Buist Academy, a highly selective magnet school, stands directly across the street from the AME church. The school tells a different story of injustice than that which unfolded across the way. This school symbolizes a more insidious injustice that plagues the entire public school system. Buist is one of the best elementary and middle schools in the district. It offers Spanish and French beginning in kindergarten, its teachers practice a child-centered pedagogy with low student-teacher ratios, and the school prepares students for the college track at an early age. District officials established Buist to provide a better “choice” in public education, theoretically spurring innovation and better schools across the district.

  Yet Buist and the theory of choice that supports it has only perpetuated racial and class divisions. To ensure race-neutral admission policies in schools like Buist, local lawyers cited reverse discrimination and threatened to sue the district to great effect, ensuring that race would not be used in admission criteria. The vast majority of Black students who are not granted admission to exemplary choice schools are relegated to some of the least desirable schools in the district, like Burke and other predominantly Black schools. The system of racial segregation repeats itself. Once the news cameras left and the flowers left by mourners outside the AME church began to wilt, the fight over schools ensued once more.