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  • Home
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    • Analysis
    • Commentary and Opinion
    • News
    • Spotlights
    • Voices for Education Choice
    • factcheckED
  • Topics
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    • Charter Schools
    • Customization
    • Education Equity
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    • Education Research
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    • Education Spending
    • Faith-based Education
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    • Microschools
    • Parent Empowerment
    • Private Schools
    • Special Education
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    • Virtual Education
    • Vouchers
  • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Guest Bloggers
    • Ashley Berner
    • Jonathan Butcher
    • Jack Coons
    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
    • Patrick J. Wolf
  • Education Facts
    • Research and Reports
    • Gardiner Scholarship Basic Program Facts
    • Hope Scholarship Program Facts
    • Reading Scholarship Program Facts
    • FES Basic Facts
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ArchivEDBipartisanshipEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsFeaturedPodcastSchool Choice

archivED: Meet Florida’s newest school choice Democrat

Ron Matus November 30, 2019
Ron Matus

On MLK Day, Rep. Bush attended a special event with Gov. Ron DeSantis at Piney Grove Boys Academy, an all-male, predominantly black private school in Lauderdale Lakes where all 85 students are recipients of state-supported educational choice scholarships. From left is Piney Grove Principal Alton Bolden, Rep. Bush, Frances Bolden, Bobby Bolden, and Tellis Bolden.

Editor’s note: redefinED wraps up its series of podcast flashbacks with one of the best from 2019: an interview with state Rep. James Bush III.

OPA-LOCKA, Fla. – If you want to know why Florida state Rep. James Bush III supports educational choice, take a ride with him.

Just a few blocks from his legislative office, District 109 – which Bush called “one of the largest and poorest and most violent and neglected districts in the state” – is more Mad Max than Miami, a hodge-podge of industrial zoning and bars-over-windows residential. On a recent Sunday, Bush bumped a rented Mustang down a moonscape of graded road, lined with teetering chain-link fence and littered with cast-offs: a flat-screen TV, a jet ski, a crushed camper top.

Around the corner, a line of salvage yards emerged like fortresses, stacks of crunched cars rising over walls topped with barbed wire.

Then, right next to them, a public housing complex …

Bush braked. The contrast panned into view. Satellite dishes poking out of lavender stucco … a woman pushing a stroller … kids riding bikes …

“Now what is right five steps from this (junk yard)?” Bush said. “Look at all this stuff the kids are breathing. I don’t want it to sound like I’m painting a real negative picture of our city but … this should be our focus.”

“Those are the kinds of concerns I have when it comes down to doing what I’m supposed to be doing as a rep in Tallahassee,” he said minutes later. “Not getting caught up in who can control who, and doing the most politically correct things, and not putting the children of this state first … ”

Say hi to Florida’s newest school choice Democrat.

Bush, 63, served four terms as state representative in the 1990s. He was elected for a term in 2008. He was elected again in August.

His Democratic roots run deep. Bush retired after 30 years as a public school teacher (and teachers union member). He served as acting president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He earned his bachelor’s from Bethune-Cookman, the private-school-turned-college founded by Mary McLeod Bethune. Bush doesn’t just know the history of black churches, education and liberation. He’s lived it.

His support for choice is, on the one hand, practical. His district includes thriving faith-based schools. His district has far more pressing needs than what schools parents choose. As a lawmaker, he said he’s going to fight for more funding for the Miami-Dade school district (and everything else his district desperately needs) at the same time he supports the options his constituents desperately want.

On the other hand, Bush’s support is grounded in a belief. When parents are empowered to determine the educational destinies of their children, he said, that confidence in the power to make change spills over into the rest of their lives.

“Because the parent now would say, ‘Well I feel now better because I got my child where I think it’s best for them,’ as opposed to going through just a normal traditional way of educating,” Bush said. “It gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership and a sense of having some input.”

“It propels them to another level of getting involved in other things that affect their child,” he continued. “It’s a plus in the long run.”

HD 109 is 20 minutes, but a world away, from the condo towers gleaming along Biscayne Bay. It’s split between blacks and Hispanics. It’s shaped like a gun.

Liberty City sits where the grip is. The neighborhood of Brownsville, once dubbed Miami’s most blighted, is where the barrel begins. The city of Opa-Locka is where the sight would be. By some measures, it’s one of the most dangerous cities in America.

As night fell, Bush turned towards Ali Baba Avenue, once a notorious drug hole. He stopped between a zippy mart with a Lotto sign and a tiny apartment complex with plywood-covered windows. A woman emerged from the shadows, a man on a plastic sheet – asleep? – on the ground behind her.

“My friend,” Bush said through the car window. “This Bush.”

“Hey!” the woman chirped. “How are you sweetie?”

The two clasped hands. Turns out, the woman worked on Bush’s campaign. He thanked her for the help, then asked about the man on the ground. She assured him the man was okay.

HD 109 is full of good people doing good things, Bush said over and over. But that guy on the ground?

“I got spots,” he said, “where a lot of that takes place.”

Bush riffed on his district’s challenges. Better roads, better jobs, better housing … safer, cleaner neighborhoods “so our children can have a different perspective on life.” He kept repeating: The people in HD 109 “have a lot of needs … need assistance … just need our share … ”

Same with schools. The Miami-Dade district is on the rise, arguably one of the best urban districts in America. At the same time, half its low-income students aren’t reading at grade level.

Given its depth of poverty, Bush said it’s no surprise HD 109 has among the highest concentrations of school choice scholarship students in the state. Some 2,330 use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, for lower-income students, to attend 28 private schools. Bush said the students in his district “benefit immensely from … not only the public schools but schools of choice.”

He said he supports them. All of them.

It remains to be seen how many other elected Democrats do.

November 30, 2019 0 comment
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Advocate VoicesArchivEDCustomizationEducation EquityPodcastSchool Choice

archivED: Virginia Walden Ford on two generations of school choice advocates

Travis Pillow November 23, 2019
Travis Pillow

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit a November 2016 interview with Virginia Walden Ford, an education choice advocate and pioneer, in advance of three Florida appearances Ford will make in December to promote the new film Miss Virginia.

Two of Virginia Walden Ford’s children went to public schools and thrived. They had access to mentoring programs and classes that nurtured their talents. But it was the experience of her youngest child, William, that led her to become a school choice advocate.

In middle school, he started to show signs of academic struggles. At the same time, drugs and gang activity were on the rise in the family’s working-class neighborhood in the nation’s capital.

“I always said I would never lose my kids … to the streets, but I knew that if I didn’t do something, then the possibility that this child would not succeed was right staring me in the face,” Ford says.

She found a private scholarship that allowed him to enroll at Archbishop Carroll High School, where he started doing better “almost immediately.” He told his mother that, for the first time, he felt surrounded by adults who cared about his education almost as much as she did.

“That was my first time realizing that if a child is an environment that meets his needs, then he will thrive and he will excel,” Ford says.

That’s the kind of turnaround story Denisha Merriweather can relate to. She changed her own academic trajectory after enrolling in a private school with the help of a Florida tax credit scholarship. On the latest edition of our podcast, she talks with Ford about using her own experience to advocate for educational options in the political arena.

Ford helped launch D.C. Parents for School Choice in 1998, and became an advocate for the Opportunity Scholarship Program. After years working in education reform in the nation’s capital, she recently returned to her home state to serve as executive director of the Arkansas Parent Network.

As a child, she was part of a group of black students chosen to help desegregate the Arkansas public school system, a decade after the Little Rock Nine first broke the color barrier. She says her parents, both educators, taught her that her involvement in her children’s education did not end when she dropped them off at school. She needed to be an advocate.

Ford talks with Merriweather about navigating the tribalism of school choice politics, the awkwardness that comes with praising pro-school choice Republicans when many of her friends are Democrats, and brushing off accusations that she serves as a “mouthpiece” for various groups. She says she tells fellow parent-advocates to carry pictures of their children to help stay focused on what matters.

“Every time you get discouraged, and every time you get sad, and every time you lose a battle, look at those children and say, ‘You are who I’m working for, you are who I’m fighting for, and I won’t give up,'” she says.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/VFW-podast-edited.mp3
November 23, 2019 0 comment
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ArchivEDEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsParent EmpowermentPodcastSchool ChoiceVouchers

archivED: Revisiting a podcast with Jeb Bush

Denisha Merriweather November 16, 2019
Denisha Merriweather

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush spoke with former Step Up For Students intern Denisha Merriweather in June  2016 about school choice, parent empowerment and the politics of education.

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit a June 2016 interview with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush conducted by former Step Up For Students intern Denisha Merriweather.

When it comes to politics, I’m not alone. Many members of my generation don’t align with either major political party. Our views don’t always fit the traditional left-right mold. But we also aren’t tied to the status quo. We are willing to break from tradition to make a difference.

Our willingness to embrace change is one cause for optimism that Jeb Bush said he found in this crazy political season. In a new interview, we talked about education politics, the importance of creating new educational options, and what politicians might learn if they spent more time in the classroom.

The former Florida governor says that on the campaign trail, he saw a backlash against some aspects of education reform. The solution, he said, is to use a bottom-up approach that puts more power in the hands of parents by giving them more choices and better information.

“If you start with the premise that this about educating children, and families are the most important political jurisdiction for their child – to be nerdy about it – the money would follow the child, not the school system,” he said.

One promising way to do that, he said, is to give parents education savings accounts, which will allow them to send their children to public schools or private schools, or to teach their children at home, or hire tutors and therapists, or even (my favorite) save for college.

While running for president, he released a plan that would have allowed states to create ESAs that could help parents pay for every stage of their child’s education, from preschool to grad school. And it would have given low-income parents direct control of federal Title I dollars that would have gone to their child’s school.

As I think about my own student loans, the notion that ESAs could be used to save for higher ed certainly piques my interest.

Bush has returned to his role as chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and he said one of the organization’s top priorities is identifying states that are prepared to be “bold” about creating ESA programs. Scholars were talking in the late 1970s about an idea that sounded a lot like education savings accounts, but nothing came of it. Fortunately, this new iteration of the concept does not seem to be lying dormant.

Some opponents of school choice have implied low-income parents don’t know enough to pick the best school for their child. All too often, people who oppose giving them options have a patronizing attitude.

Educators need to respect the ability of low-income parents to decide what’s best for their children, Bush said.

“The government doesn’t trust people near or at the poverty level,” he said. “For some reason they think they are stupid. They’re just poor. ”

To make those decisions, he said, all parents need better information, like a report card on the schools in their area, and detailed information on how their own children are progressing, so they’ll know which schools might be a good fit. This isn’t exactly a radical new invention. But for most parents, that simply doesn’t exist, and it should.

Parents need to be informed of the options that exist around them. If they don’t have that information, they’ll probably send their kids to the school that’s right around the corner, the one the bus goes to, even if they may be better off somewhere else – like I was.

Bush said that when he was governor, he sat in courtrooms hearing family law cases to learn about problems in the state’s child welfare system. To learn about education, he visited hundreds of schools around the state. He joined principals knocking on the doors of children who were chronically absent, and spent time in teachers’ lounges.

“They thought I had horns because I was for vouchers, but I learned a lot from them,” he said of the educators he met in public schools. “They’re not the problem. It’s the system that’s not working.”

Everybody has their plan or their theory or their own advice to give, but many times, politicians don’t actually have first-hand knowledge when they make decisions that can change children’s lives. If they spent more time in schools, or talking to low-income families about their kids, that might help pull education out of the ugly vortex that’s consuming national politics.

“Don’t you think that there should be a left-right coalition for reform, when you’re empowering low-income families?” Bush asked during our interview. “I don’t think that has to be a Democrat issue or a Republican issue.”

Gov. Bush has been advocating for school choice for more than 20 years now, and his zeal doesn’t seem to be fading.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Jeb-Bush-Podcast.mp3
November 16, 2019 0 comment
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ArchivEDCharter SchoolsCourse ChoiceEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsPodcastSchool ChoiceVoucher LeftVouchers

archivED: Revisiting a podcast with Marcus Brandon

Ron Matus November 9, 2019
Ron Matus

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit a September 2015 interview with a voucher advocate who has fought for the educational rights of disabled and low-income students.

Marcus Brandon’s resume starts off like a progressive’s dream.

National finance director, Dennis Kucinich for president. Staffer, Progressive Majority. Deputy director, Equality Virginia. But once it rolls into Brandon’s education accomplishments, some fellow progressives get whiplash. During two terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, Brandon was a leading force behind bills that created vouchers for disabled and low-income students, and removed the state’s cap on charter schools.

Inconsistency? Not for Brandon, a rising political star whose family’s civil rights bona fides are unquestioned.

“I tell people that my views on education are the most progressive stance that I have,” Brandon told redefinED. “Progressives have to take a real hard look at the way they view education because I’ve always been brought up, in the civil rights movement and all of that, (to) fight for equal opportunity and equal access for everybody.”

Brandon, who now directs the Carolina CAN education advocacy group, isn’t an anomaly. A growing list of influential liberals, progressives and Democrats are increasingly supportive of school choice. In the process, they’re wrenching the left back into alignment with its own forgotten history – a history that is especially rich in the African-American experience.

Milton Friedman would merit a few paragraphs in a book on this subject. But there’d be whole chapters devoted to the educational endeavors of freed slaves and black churches. To Mississippi freedom schools and Marva Collins. To the connections between Brown v. Board of Education and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.

“School choice is not new for African-Americans,” said Brandon, whose family played a role in the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., which toppled segregationist dominos nationwide. “It is very much a part of our history for the community to be involved with the school. It’s very much a part of our history for the churches to start their own school. That is just as deep in our history as any part of our history. … It mind-boggles me that the people who are fighting this will forget that.”

The evidence is in plain sight. A who’s who of black Democrats have explained their support for school choice in many ways, in many forums (see here, here, and here for starters). Progressives who are still skeptical should consider James Forman Jr.’s paper, “The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First.” Or check out the annual gathering of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Or look at the polling, which shows deep support for school choice in black communities.

Better yet, they should pause and consider the pleas of black parents.

In the meantime, they should hear out one of their own. (A podcast with Brandon is included below.)

Brandon’s support for vouchers and charter schools led fellow progressives to threaten to run him out of office, and worse. (Those kinds of attacks on black choice supporters aren’t an anomaly either.

Consider hit pieces like this one. And headlines like this.) What they should have done instead, he suggested, was consider choice on its merits – and the hypocrisy of many choice critics.

“You get a lot of harsh rhetoric from progressives … who would never send their child to my school one day of the week. That’s why I have a problem with that,” Brandon said. “They’re like, ‘Keep your kids there, keep your kids there.’ But at the end of the day they would never send their kids to my school.

“I remember being in a parade one time, and one progressive yelled at me, ‘You’re privatizing schools.’ And I asked her, ‘Would you send your kid to my school?’ And every time I ask that question the conversation gets very silent. And so what African-Americans need to do is understand that. Our leaders need to understand that those that are leading this fight (against school choice) do not send their kids to our school. And so what are we going to do?”

It’s not progressive, he said, to keep looking the other away.

“We’ve allowed these educational outcomes and these policies to go on for 40, 50 years, and then we say we’re going to continue that and someone says that’s progressive,” Brandon said. “If you have data that shows consistently that there is one particular segment of the population that doesn’t do well under a system, well that’s not progressive.”

Actually, he said, it’s “extremely conservative.”

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Rep-Brandon_mixed-and-shrunk.mp3
November 9, 2019 0 comment
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archivED: Revisiting a podcast with school choice and political power Howard Fuller

Travis Pillow November 2, 2019
Travis Pillow

Howard Fuller, founder and director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, served as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and became nationally known for his support of fundamental education reform.

Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit an August 2015 interview with civil rights activist, education reform advocate and academic Howard Fuller.

Ever since social justice advocates joined forces with free-market conservatives to create the groundbreaking Milwaukee Parental Choice program in the early ’90s, there have been ideological divides in the school choice movement.

Because most places have fewer school options than parents want, and private school choice programs have usually targeted disadvantaged students in some way, similar left-right coalitions have formed all over the country.

Howard Fuller sits squarely in the social justice camp. When other private school choice supporters try to make eligibility universal, he often objects, on behalf of disadvantaged students he fears will be short-changed and in support of principles staked out by the late Polly Williams and others who helped create the Milwaukee voucher program.

Hence his concerns about the new, near-universal education savings account program recently created in Nevada. In our latest podcast interview, Fuller says this sort of intramural debate is almost inevitable in a movement that spans ideological boundaries.

“The only way we could have avoided that would have been to say we’re not going to have parent choice for low-income people, because you couldn’t get to where we got to without pulling together the type of coalition that was pulled together,” he says.

Despite their philosophical differences, Fuller can find some agreement with those, like Matthew Ladner, who support universal eligibility.

Fuller says it can make sense to offer scholarships to some families higher on the income scale, especially if funding levels are “graduated” so they receive smaller amounts. That can help build a stronger base of political support. However, he says, there should still be a cut-off at some point, so school choice programs aren’t subsidizing private-school tuition for the wealthy.

He acknowledges some of the points Ladner and others have made. Even the wealthiest families, he says, have access to public schools, which sometimes are walled off in exclusive enclaves inaccessible to low-income families. That said, Fuller notes state laws tend to treat public and private schools differently.

“Maybe what’s happening is, the generation behind me (in the school choice movement) doesn’t make those same distinctions that I’m making,” he says.

Ultimately, Fuller says, he’s trying to raise a deeper issue. Private school choice programs should aim to be social equalizers. It’s the poor who are most short-changed by the existing education system, and who often lack the political power to fix that inequity.

“I’m always looking at the fact that no matter how we try to skim over it, talk about it, intellectualize it, or whatever, the system is set up to favor people who have more resources,” he says. “… If we do not fight to make sure that there are programs out here that give poor people a leg up, give them some more opportunity — if we don’t fight for that, it’s not going to happen.”

Can Nevada’s universal program do more for low-income families? We recently discussed the possibilities with Seth Rau, who’s working on the ground there.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Fuller-Podcast.mp3
November 2, 2019 0 comment
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ArchivEDEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsKnow Your HistoryProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

archivED: For school choice foes, a more complete history of vouchers and race

Travis Pillow October 26, 2019
Travis Pillow

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in July 2017, chronicles several chapters from the movement’s rich past.

In the 1900’s, Mary McLeod Bethune founded a private vocational school as an alternative for black students Florida had relegated to separate-and-unequal public schools. In the 1910’s, a group of Catholic nuns clashed with segregationist politicians. Their crime? Educating black children. In the 1960’s, civil rights activists sought to protest schools that systematically shortchanged black students. So they created their own.

Fast forward to 2017. Politicians can no longer segregate public schools by law. State constitutions in Florida and elsewhere mandate public school systems that provides for all students according to “uniform” funding standards. Educators who, like their predecessors of the last century, want to create alternatives that better serve their communities, no longer face prosecution. And they have new options that didn’t exist a century ago. They can start new private schools. 

In Florida, if they comply with state regulations, their students can turn to one of the nation’s four largest private school choice programs* to help pay tuition.

A long, winding road brought us here. It includes some dark passages that, recently, became fodder for scurrilous attacks on the school choice movement. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called scholarship programs like Florida’s “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

Her charge rests on a short-lived, but real, chapter of history. Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians began devising a “massive resistance.” In some communities, they even shut down public schools. In their place, they let students take tuition tax credits to attend private “segregation academies.”

The Center for American Progress chronicled that episode in a recent (and flawed) report. It unveiled the research at an event hosted by Weingarten’s group. The report focuses on Virginia’s Prince Edward County, where segregation academies flourished. Courts put the kibosh on those efforts by the end of the 1960s, and definitively outlawed them in the ’70s.

Still, as they responded to some pushback on their report, the CAP authors argued the school choice movement has failed to reckon with this history. That’s not quite right.

In fact, a group of progressive school choice thinkers confronted that history while it was unfolding. The authors of a 1970 report looked with concern at attempts to evade court-ordered desegregation through so-called freedom of choice. They concluded:

It would be perfectly possible to create a competitive market and then regulate it in such a way as to prevent segregation, ensure an equitable allocation of resources, and give every family a truly equal chance of getting what it wants from the system.

That group was led by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, liberal academics with an eye toward equity also began crafting visions for vouchers that would still be timely today.

The intellectuals of the Voucher Left sometimes crossed swords with the likes of free-market economist Milton Friedman. He launched the “Voucher Right” with a seminal essay calling for vouchers — coincidentally around the same time southern racists were hatching plans to resist segregation. As Rick Hess and Matt Barnum note, Friedman drew not on segregationist impulses, but on the ideas of 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe pushed Friedman’s ideas further in their influential book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools. They argued, in brief, that education bureaucrats had sapped schools of their vitality. The solution, in their view, was to create a new public education system that encompassed all schools — including those considered private — and give students the means to choose among them.

That same year, the voucher left and voucher right found a way to work together. Urban progressives like Wisconsin state Sen. Polly Williams joined forces with Friedman acolytes in the Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson’s administration to create the first modern voucher program.

That wouldn’t be the last time they joined forces. Last year in Florida, school choice advocates led by Martin Luther King III rallied to protect the nation’s largest private school choice program, which this year will serve more than 100,000 low-income and working class students — 70 percent of them children of color.

That program was created under Jeb Bush, a Republican governor, and expanded through multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation. The protest challenged a lawsuit led by the president the American Federation for Teachers’ Florida affiliate. And that lawsuit ultimately failed.

This brings us back to the Center for American Progress.

Randi Weingarten leads a national organization that has battled private school choice at every turn, and repeatedly lost. When some Voucher Left ideas first gained traction in Washington (albeit in milder forms, like private school tuition tax credits), nationwide teachers unions began wielding their newfound influence in the Democratic Party to stamp out support.

It’s hardly out of character for the unions to attempt to cast voucher advocates as racists, amp up their calls the slow down charter schools, or attempt to tie every diverse corner of the school choice movement to President Donald Trump.

The question is why a center-left think tank, long known for its reasonable positions on education reform, would work so hard to help them, resting its attacks on such a thinly constructed factual foundation.

Note: See also this article by Andrew Rotherham, which traces a similar historical arc.

*The four scholarship programs are Tax credit scholarships, McKay and Gardiner Scholarships for children with special needs, and Voluntary Pre-K scholarships.

October 26, 2019 0 comment
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ArchivEDBipartisanshipEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsKnow Your HistoryProgressives and ed reformSchool ChoiceVouchers

archivED: Both Democrats and Republicans have switched on education choice

Doug Tuthill October 19, 2019
Doug Tuthill

For a variety of reasons, neither political party expressed much interest in public funding for private schools until the 1960s and 70s.

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in October 2012, reflects upon the complex and often conflicting political, economic and social forces that have caused both Republicans and Democrats to struggle with the issue of public funding for private education choice.

Long-time Democratic education activist Jack Jennings, in a recent Huffington Post column, argued that Republican support for private school choice is a somewhat recent (i.e., the last 45 years) phenomenon, driven by a political desire to appeal to segregationists and weaken teacher unions.  Jennings writes, “The Republicans’ talk about giving parents the right to choose is a politically expedient strategy …  Just beneath the surface of the education rhetoric are political motivations to thwart integration, weaken the Democratic coalition, and cripple the teachers’ unions.”

Jennings is being disingenuous by not acknowledging that Democrats have also changed their position on public funding for private school choice over the years. Democrats George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey both ran for president on platforms supporting tuition tax credits for private schools, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was the U.S. Senate’s leading advocate for giving parents public funding to attend private schools. The Democratic Party reversed its support of public funding for private school choice in the late 1970s – as a political payback to the National Education Association for giving Jimmy Carter its first ever presidential endorsement.

Jennings’ assertion that Republican support for publicly-funded private school choice didn’t exist prior to the 1960s would be news to the founders of the Republican Party, most notably William Henry Seward. Seward (pictured here) helped create the Republican Party and was one of Abraham Lincoln’s primary rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. After losing, Seward served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State during the Civil War.

Prior to seeking the presidency, Seward was elected governor of New York in 1838 as a member of the Whig Party. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, in his 1839 New Year’s Day inaugural address, Seward attempted to broaden his party’s political base by reaching out to “the Irish and German Catholic immigrants who formed the backbone of the state Democratic Party” (p. 82). As part of what Goodwin describes as Seward’s “progressive policies on education and immigration,” Seward “proposed to reform the school system, where the virulently anti-Catholic curriculum frightened immigrants away, dooming vast numbers to illiteracy, poverty, and vice. To get these children off the streets and provide them with opportunities to advance, Seward hoped to divert some part of the public school funds to support parochial schools where children could receive instruction from members of their own faith” (p. 83).

Seward’s attempts to give Catholic children access to more appropriate learning options drew a sharp rebuke from anti-Catholic Protestants. They accused him of tearing down the wall between church and state. At this time in U.S. history, the word “church” in the phrase separation of church and state meant the Catholic Church.

An eclectic array of political forces came together to found the Republican Party, including anti-slavery Whigs, Democrats, newly arrived immigrants and Know Nothings. The Know Nothings were an anti-immigrant party that did well in Massachusetts state elections in 1850 and helped pass the nation’s first mandatory school attend law in 1852. It was designed to push Catholic students into Protestant public schools, where they were required to read the Protestant King James Bible. While the immigrants within the new Republican Party were supportive of Seward’s position, the Know Nothings and other native Protestants were adamantly opposed, so a political stalemate ensued until the last year of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency.

In 1875, President Grant, a Republican, decided to use the rapid expansion of Catholic immigration and Catholic schools as a political issue to help his preferred successor, James Blaine of Maine, win the 1876 presidential election. Catholic immigrants in urban areas had become a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Catholic schools were expanding rapidly and, in many states, receiving public funds to educate the poor.  Sensing a political opportunity, Grant proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing public funding for religious schools, knowing this would strengthen Protestant support for the Republican Party and Blaine’s candidacy. This amendment failed to pass the Senate and Blaine’s candidacy got derailed by an alleged bribery scandal. But eventually, 33 states did add similar amendments to their state constitutions, which today are known as Blaine Amendments.

Widespread anti-Catholic hostility continued well into the 20th Century and didn’t end politically until John F. Kennedy’s presidential election in 1960. Consequently, both political parties expressed little interest in public funding for private schools until the 1960s and 70s. Jennings claims Republicans changed their position to help whites avoid attending integrated schools, and this certainly explains why some Republicans embraced school choice in the 1960s. But many Democrats also did so at this time for the same reason.  In the 1960s, opposition to school integration at the local and state levels was bi-partisan.

Strangely, Jennings ignores the influence Milton Friedman had on the Republican Party’s current position on school choice. Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics, was an advisor to President Reagan and is widely regarded as one of the most influential economist in the 20th Century.  He spent more than 50 years promoting free markets in public education, and introduced the concept of vouchers into public education.  Few Republicans would disagree that Friedman’s work is the intellectual basis of the party’s current position on public funding for private school choice.

Conflicting political, economic and social forces have caused both political parties to struggle with the issue of public funding for private school choice over the last 150 years. To suggest otherwise is a misread of history.

 Writer’s Note:  The Team of Rivals quotations come from the 2006 Simon & Schuster paperback version.

 

October 19, 2019 0 comment
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ArchivEDCatholic SchoolsEducation EquityFaith-based EducationKnow Your HistoryReligious EducationSchool Choice

archivED: The sisters of St. Joseph

Patrick R. Gibbons October 12, 2019
Patrick R. Gibbons

St. Benedict The Moor School, St. Augustine, Fla.

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in May 2016, tells the story of three Catholic nuns who fought to educate black children who were “pushed to the margins by oppressive public institutions.”

A century ago, three Catholic sisters in St. Augustine, Fla., were arrested for something the state Legislature had recently made a crime: teaching black children at what in the parlance of the time was known as a “negro school.”

The ensuing trial propelled a 266-year-old French Catholic order and America’s youngest Catholic Bishop into the middle one of the wildest and most racially charged gubernatorial campaigns in Florida history. A hundred years ago today, the white sisters won their legal battle, vindicating the rights of private institutions like the Saint  Benedict the Moor School that fought to create educational opportunities for black children in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Black parents’ demand for quality education didn’t begin with Brown v. Board, but hundreds of years before, in chains and in secret. But near the turn of the twentieth century, as Jim Crow laws reversed the progress made under post-Civil War reconstruction, public institutions intended to uplift freed blacks became increasingly inadequate and unequal. Black parents often turned to their own churches or to missionary aid societies, like the Sisters of St. Joseph, to educate their children.

The story of the three white Catholic sisters has been examined over the years by multiple scholars, whose work informs this post. And while details in the historical record are at times murky and ambiguous, the episode sheds light on the countless struggles across the South to educate black children who were pushed to the margins by oppressive public institutions.

Founded in 1650 in Le Puy-en-Velay, a rural mountain town in southern France, the Sisters of St. Joseph took up a mission to serve, educate and care for the poor and disadvantaged. For the next 200 years, the sisters pursued their mission throughout France until they were invited to Florida by Bishop Augustin Verot after the end of the U.S. Civil War.

Verot, a native of Le Puy, recruited eight sisters for a new mission: To educate newly freed slaves and their children.

The sisters established Florida’s first Catholic school for black students in 1867 along St. George Street in St. Augustine. They would go on to establish schools in Key West and in Ybor City. With the financial backing of a wealthy heiress, Saint Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of St. Joseph opened St. Benedict the Moor School in 1898.

The Sisters of St. Joseph, along with other religious groups like the Protestant American Missionary Association, educated black students in private and public schools in Florida for several decades. But then the legislature lashed out against their efforts. “An Act Prohibiting White Persons from Teaching Negroes in Negro Schools” unanimously passed through both chambers without debate, and was signed into law on June 7, 1913.

At the time, the Sisters of St. Joseph, Sisters of the Holy Names, and other Catholic orders operated schools for black children throughout the state. According to historian Barbara Mattick, St. Joseph’s school in Pensacola educated 190 students; St. John the Evangelist in Warrington had 34; St. Francis Xavier School in Key West, had 95; St. Benedict the Moor, in Ybor City, educated 125 students; St. Peter Claver in Fernandina had 29; St. Peter Claver in Tampa had 125; St. Benedict the Moor in St. Augustine taught 65.

Bishop William John Kenny turned to his legal counsel, Alston Cockrell, for advice about the new law.

Cockrell believed the law to be unconstitutional. “This discrimination, in my opinion, makes the act void,” he wrote. He advised the bishop to ignore the law and continue teaching black children, or to establish a test case and challenge the constitutionality of the law.

Kenny died in October of 1913, but his successor, 34-year old Bishop Michael Joseph Curley, followed Cockrell’s advice. When authorities asked Curley to remove white teachers from black schools, he refused, and vowed to fight the law all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine were celebrating the 50th anniversary of their mission to educate black students of Florida in April 1916, when the sheriff arrived. On orders from Gov. Park Trammell to enforce the law, the sheriff arrested Sister Mary Thomasine Hehir, Sister Mary Scholastica Sullivan and Sister Mary Benignus Cameron. The charge: being a white teacher and “unlawfully teaching negroes in a negro school.”

The arrest of three Catholic sisters attracted national attention and may have even helped propel an open bigot and conspiracy theorist to Florida’s highest elected office.

Sidney Catts, a Baptist preacher, insurance salesman and populist Democrat running for Governor in 1916, concocted elaborate conspiracy theories designed to stoke the fears among Protestant white voters of his day.

On the campaign trail in 1916, the flamboyant Catts made outrageous accusations that Catholics at St. Leo Abbey in San Antonio, Fla., were hording weapons under the church to aid blacks in an armed revolt on behalf of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. A successful revolt, he warned, would result in Pope Benedict XV moving the Holy See from the Vatican to Pasco County. Once there, the theory ran, the Pope would order all Protestant churches in the state to be closed.

For Catts, the trial of the three sisters for defying state race laws lent credence to these ideas. Highlighting the trial on the campaign trail, Catts argued that Catholics wanted to destroy public schools, and overturn the democratically approved social order of Jim Crow. According to Mattick, the historian, the sisters of St. Joseph and their defiance of state law were  portrayed “as an example of how Catholic power spelled changes in Southern racial arrangement.”

Sidney Catts initially won the Democratic nomination, but a recount forced him into the Prohibition Party. He would go on to win the general election.

Meanwhile, following the arrest of the sisters, black schools across the state remained closed as they awaited a verdict.

On May 20, 1916, Judge George Cooper Gibbs ruled that the 1913 law violated the state constitution and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Gibbs held that the law discriminated against people not only because of the color of their skin, but because of their profession. He wrote:

Has a white teacher any the less right to sell his services to negro pupils than a white doctor to negro patients, or a white lawyer to negro clients, or a white merchant as a right to sell his goods to negro customers, and vice versa?

St. Benedict the Moor School in 2011. Source, Google Maps.

Ultimately, the judge ruled that the law barring the teaching of black children could only apply to public schools. In his determination, the state had no authority to regulate private schools in such a manner. Segregation in Florida Public Schools would continue for another half-century, but dozens of black private schools were allowed to remain open thanks to his ruling.

St. Benedict the Moor School eventually closed in 1968 as Florida began to desegregate its public schools.

The Sisters of St. Joseph — like countless other educators across the South, from Mary McLeod Bethune to the founders of the Mississippi Freedom School — found a way to educate black students at a time when many public institutions and leaders would not. Their struggles reveal how new and alternative educational options have always had to fight for their survival. But they make today’s fights look easy by comparison.

Sources:

Adams, Nathan A. “Florida’s Blaine Amendment: Goldilocks and the Separate but Equal Doctrine,” Saint Thomas Law Review, Fall 2011.

Mattick, Barbara E. “Ministries in Black and White” Ph.D. dissertation in History, Florida State University, 2008.

McGoldrick, Sister Thomas Joseph, “Beyond the Call, The Legacy of the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine, Florida.” 2007.

McNally, Michael J. “Catholic Parish Life on Florida’s West Coast, 1860-1968,” (C) Michael James Timothy McNally, 1996.

October 12, 2019 0 comment
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