The Choice We Face Read online

  Virtual schooling is lucrative for investors, however. Federal support for school choice and the demands to improve education opened the floodgates. With exceedingly high student-teacher ratios, support for quality teaching could be undercut. Technology is poised to replace teaching altogether. K12 Inc., a publicly traded, for-profit company, has emerged as the leader of the virtual education market. Enrolling nearly one hundred thousand students across twenty-nine states, it demonstrated to investors the potential value of online schools. In 2018, the company reported over $238 million in revenue.74 Much of this was funded by public tax dollars at local, state, and federal levels. As professor of African American studies and education Noliwe Rooks revealed in Cutting School, five Pennsylvania cyber charters received $200 million in tax money in 2010–11, and Agora Cyber Charter, which is run by K12, took in $31.6 million in 2013 alone from taxpayers in Philadelphia.75 Online learning is good for big business.

  The technology used in virtual education has proved indispensable during the pandemic. Schools committed to a fully online format remain resilient in spite of the mixed results and several investigations into fraud and corruption. Having received a boost during the pandemic, virtual schools remain popular and enjoy legal, financial, and political support at the federal level. Betsy DeVos was a financial backer of K12, Inc. Two organizations she founded prior to her appointment as secretary of education—the American Federation for Children and the Great Lakes Education Project—are highly supportive of online learning and virtual schools. As DeVos wrote to Senator Patty Murray of Washington: “High quality virtual charter schools provide valuable options to families.”76

  There is faith in the ideal that all options should remain on the table, with a full school choice menu available for all. The school choice menu is ever growing, both in popularity and criticism. The existence of so many options presents a vastly different picture than that of the schools the boomer generation attended. School choice today represents a new ideology that addresses the very nature of public education and has perhaps already eclipsed it. Consumers continue to demand more choice and, though some may argue it democratized public education, the reviews are mixed at best.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Race and a Civil Rights Claim to School Choice

  HOWARD FULLER was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on January 14, 1941. He grew up in the all-Black part of town, a space policed and terrorized through the mechanisms of White supremacy much like the rest of the Jim Crow South. He moved with his mother and stepfather to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the age of five. Attending both private Catholic and segregated all-Black public schools, Fuller experienced what was then the full spectrum of education in the United States. He also served in the civil rights movement and participated in the more revolutionary aspects of it in the South. Fuller first became involved in the struggle when he joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1964 as a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. CORE gained notoriety for its integral role in organizing the Freedom Rides to desegregate bus terminals across the South in 1961. Fuller’s work in Cleveland changed the course of his life. In protests surrounding the local demand to desegregate, Fuller witnessed firsthand the Reverend Bruce Klunder, a twenty-seven-year-old White Presbyterian minister, crushed to death by a bulldozer.1

  After leaving Ohio, Fuller worked with Operation Breakthrough, a North Carolina–based antipoverty program that focused on empowering local Black communities. Conservatives branded Fuller and his comrades “outside agitators” and “dangerous extremists.”2 Fuller also worked with Black students at Duke University who took over the campus administrative building in 1969. Eventually, Fuller led Black students, community supporters, and movement leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellers in the establishment of Malcolm X Liberation University—a Black institution of higher education in North Carolina committed to the principles of Black Power.3 He traveled with anticolonial freedom fighters in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. He adopted the name Owusu Sadaukai, a name bestowed by his students in North Carolina and reflecting the militant, pan-African ideology that he gained during the Black liberation movement.4

  We can see the work of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in Fuller’s struggle. He has actively resisted racism and poverty, and his commitment cannot be questioned. But many have raised eyebrows at the path he has taken in recent years. Fuller is on the front lines of the school choice movement, though obviously for very different reasons than southern Whites. For Fuller, choice was and remains revolutionary. Choice is empowering. It is an opportunity for poor families to escape, if not control and repair, a broken system. As he notes in his autobiography, published in 2014, “Giving low-income and working-class parents the power (and the money) to make choices about the schools their children attend will not only revolutionize education but provide the compass to a better life.”5

  Having earned a PhD in the sociology of education from Marquette University in 1986, Fuller is one of several civil rights activists turned education reformers who embraced school choice in the 1990s. He is also one who reached across the aisle in ways that seemingly belied his revolutionary work of the 1960s and 1970s. Fuller sat at the table with some of the most conservative education reformers, and forged alliances with school choice advocates. He counseled the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson, as the state adopted a private school voucher plan. “Howard Fuller and myself are friends,” Thompson stated, adding a comment that can be read as a racial microaggression: “He is a very astute and articulate individual.”6 Fuller advocated the idea of choice to George W. Bush when Bush was governor of Texas, a year before he became president of the United States. In his words, “A surprising thing happened: I connected with the dude.”7 The organization he founded in 2000, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), received significant funding from conservative philanthropists and think tanks including the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Bradley Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.8 Fuller continued down this path, working with Betsy DeVos years before her appointment to the Department of Education.

  It was easy to wonder how Fuller—a radical Black activist—ended up in the company of conservative Whites. It was even easier to criticize him for it. Yet Fuller’s trajectory illustrates an ironic development in the growth of school choice—it is fully embraced by some as a genuine civil right.

  Dr. Fuller has much support. Americans have been hungry for education reform, and school choice is an appetizing option on the menu. A study released by the right-wing American Federation for Children found that 67 percent of Americans support school choice while only 27 percent oppose it. Of those who positively view choice, over 40 percent strongly support it. Moreover, 80 percent of Republicans support it, as do 56 percent of Democrats. A strong majority—71 percent—placed a high priority on families having “access to a variety of public school options no matter where they live or how much money they have.”9 Even if biased, the level of support of choice cannot be dismissed. This is tantamount to establishing it as a fundamental right to choose.

  But support for choice has been racialized, and race shapes the nuances of school choice and the advocacy for it. The numbers behind school choice support reveal a racial divide—one that Fuller’s story illustrates today. One poll estimated that 73 percent of Latinx families and 67 percent of African Americans support school choice. Another showed that over two-thirds of African Americans support private school vouchers.10 A poll conducted by the Democrats for Education Reform showed that 58 percent of Black Democratic voters and 52 percent of Latinx Democratic voters supported charter schools. This number is all the more significant when looking at the fact that only 26 percent of Democratic voters overall supported the schools.11 Organizations like the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (HCREO) and Howard Fuller’s BAEO push for school choice legislation and organize support for it.12

  Though school choice ori
ginated with racist resistance to desegregation, it understandably appeals to parents who feel trapped in a failing system. People of color who support choice also position it as part of the continuing trajectory of the civil rights movement. Choice has grown increasingly complicated and nuanced a half-century after its inception, and the movement behind it must be viewed as fluid and at times paradoxical.

  Like Geoffrey Canada and Fuller, a member of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle who embraced the principles of school choice later in life represents the politics of choice in Black communities and communities of color across the nation. Wyatt Tee Walker was chief of staff for Dr. King and a key organizer in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With King, Walker shaped some integral civil rights campaigns of the movement, including the Children’s Crusade and the movement in Birmingham in 1963, which demanded and eventually achieved desegregation of public spaces, including schools, in the cradle of the Confederacy. The Birmingham movement has grown in our collective memory into a tale of nearly insurmountable odds, of youth and nonviolent activists who nevertheless slayed the behemoth of segregation in the epic proportions of David and Goliath.

  Like Fuller, Walker eventually took up the cause for school choice. From New York in 2014, Walker wrote that his efforts in organizing a charter school in 1999 were part of “another nonviolent revolution and march for justice.” He asserted, “The effort to create great new charter schools now is another such story, requiring community leaders and educators to overcome many obstacles and much entrenched opposition.” Walker looked on the struggle to create charter schools as tantamount to overcoming segregation in the United States. Quality of education and the desegregation of schools were consistent priorities of the movement in the 1960s, and they still were for Walker as a minister in Harlem a half-century later. “The movement for justice,” Walker wrote, “taught me the importance of education. . . . In the charter school movement, I am continuing the work of Dr. King.”13

  By most accounts from those who lived through it, and from reports in the press, public schools were failing their students by the 1980s. The promises of the Brown decision remained unfulfilled. Critical race theorist and legal scholar Derrick Bell commented on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown that the edict had “gained in reputation as a measure of what law and society might be” but that massive resistance and weak enforcement had “transformed Brown into a magnificent mirage, the legal equivalent of that city on a hill to which all aspire without any serious thought that it will ever be attained.”14

  After the fallout of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, criticism of public education grew nationwide. Conservative academic and political advisor Chester Finn branded education reform efforts during the 1980s as meager at best. He described policy grounded in shallow thinking and research as an “epidemic of ‘dumbth,’“ labeling the system of education as “a very sick patient.”15 Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age and a leader in the “free school” movement of the 1970s, continued his narrative of failing public education with his 1991 best-seller, Savage Inequalities. Using graphic imagery, he exposed the shocking conditions of public education in urban “death zones” across the United States. Children still suffered “death at an early age.” In Savage Inequalities he wrote, “Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were worse than anything I’d seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working.”16

  In more ways than one, families of color felt the brunt of a failing public school system. By the 1990s, they had few places to turn for quality education. Communities of color were ready for alternatives.

  Like many segregated neighborhoods across the country, the Harlem community served by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker lived the awful realities of public school failure. In Savage Inequalities, describing abhorrent conditions in public schools, Kozol revealed that New York City schools received half of what the surrounding suburbs spent per pupil. The wealthiest districts in the state spent nearly three times more than schools in the city. Much like students in other cities Kozol investigated—East St. Louis, Chicago, Camden, and Washington, DC—students in New York suffered infested and dilapidated buildings, worn-out classrooms, unmanageable class sizes, and old textbooks, for starters, all comprising a defeated, morose atmosphere that deadened any real prospects of learning.17

  P.S. 144 in Harlem was one of the poorest-rated schools in the city, with just 21.7 percent of students reading at or above grade level. Only 12.5 percent tested at grade level in math the year the school opened in 1999.18 Valerie Banks sent her son to the school, noting, “When you’re a poor person, public school is usually your only option.”19 And, as Wyatt Walker stated, “the public schools were not doing their jobs.”20 With the support of advocates like Walker who had strong links to a larger movement, parents like Banks demanded options. A flourishing school choice movement provided them.

  Walker was not alone in connecting school choice to civil rights. White conservatives were part of a growing chorus of pro-choice advocates who took up the banner of civil rights across the nation in advance of Donald Trump, who called school choice the civil rights issue of today. Conservative groups including the Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank, and the Landmark Legal Foundation, a legal advocacy organization, adopted a civil rights platform in 1989. In it they articulated an agenda ostensibly promoting “‘individual dignity and empowerment’ for minorities, with an emphasis on lifting regulatory barriers that conservatives say prevent minorities from pursuing economic advancement.”21 A choice advocacy group, D.C. Parents for School Choice, which received funding from the Walton Family Foundation, assailed Senator Ted Kennedy for his opposition to vouchers. They compared him to arch-segregationist Bull Connor, who had unleashed police dogs on children marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Wyatt Tee Walker in 1963.22

  Other school choice advocacy groups interested in education reform sought to address the “achievement gap”—itself a construct based on racist discourse around intelligence and standardized tests—and other racial disparities in education as part of their overarching argument.23 Clint Bolick gained prominence in Republican circles in the early 1990s as a cofounder of the Institute for Justice, the “nation’s only libertarian public interest law firm,” and quickly rose through the ranks as an ardent advocate of school choice. He then served as president of the Alliance for School Choice, symbolically founded on the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 2004, to emphasize the lingering “gaps” in education. As a lead litigator and defender of the voucher programs in Cleveland, Bolick successfully argued the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) case, in which the Supreme Court upheld the use of publicly funded vouchers for private and religious schools. “We’ve tried everything,” he stated on the anniversary of Brown, “except transferring power over basic educational decisions from bureaucrats to parents.” In his words, choice offered “an educational life preserver to children who desperately need it.” Bolick now serves in his highest position yet, sitting as an “activist” judge of the Arizona Supreme Court.24

  School choice advocacy group American Alliance for Better Schools wanted to “promote equity by giving middle- and low-income families some choices of all schools—public, private, and religious—that wealthy families already enjoy.”25 The libertarian-influenced Citizens for Educational Freedom published a pamphlet in the early 1990s, Tuition Tax Credits for Low-Income Families, promoting its members’ interest in providing more options to underserved communities.26 School choice was indeed the new civil rights issue leading into the turn of the twenty-first century—and conservative Whites were some of its most ardent advocates.

  Regardless of ideology, the deplorable conditions of public education disproportionately affected poor families and students of color. The reality of shamefu
l conditions was difficult, if not unethical, to ignore. The promises made by choice advocates included a quality of education that had yet to be realized since the failed promises of the Brown decision and the civil rights movement. Not only that, some school choice advocates, like Wyatt Tee Walker and Howard Fuller, who were seasoned civil rights activists, successfully established deep rapport and trust with the communities they served. They inspired a large following that grew to include Black leaders such as TV talk show host Steve Perry, political commentator Roland Martin, Senator Cory Booker, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries. Support for charters even extended into the Black Lives Matter movement.27 Such Black leaders legitimated school choice in ways that White corporate interests could not.

  Thirty years after the Brown decision, the insidious history and politics of school choice made little difference to many who sought a better education for their children. Wisconsin state representative Polly Williams, a Black Democrat, worked with Howard Fuller in proposing school choice legislation to improve failing schools in Milwaukee through a controversial voucher program that built on the network of private and Catholic schools in the city. “If you’re drowning and a hand is extended to you,” she noted, “you don’t ask if the hand is attached to a Democrat or a Republican. From the African American position—at the bottom, looking up—there’s not much difference.”28 Howard Fuller noted, “I’m neither Democrat nor a Republican, and I don’t believe in any of them. . . . I’m just out here and surviving and trying to help a community move forward.”29