Know Your History

The 20-year-old scholarship success that might not have been

Patrick R. Gibbons June 11, 2021

Patrick R. Gibbons

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, center, applauds on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives after the passage of the Family Empowerment Scholarship program in 2019.

Twenty years ago, on June 13, 2001, Gov. Jeb Bush signed HB 21, a taxation relief bill that carried within it Florida’s third private school scholarship program. The program, then called the Florida Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship, would enroll its first students in the spring of 2002 and would grow to award more than 1 million scholarships by 2021.

But the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship was not destined to become the nation’s largest private school scholarship of its kind. In fact, it almost didn’t happen.

The bill carrying the program, SB 1048, was nearly killed on the second day of the legislative session. Politics, budget pressures, competing voucher ideas, the need to overhaul Florida’s election system after the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, and an anti-scholarship lawsuit looming overhead, meant the new scholarship’s future was far from certain.

The scholarship program was introduced under companion bills HB 271, sponsored by then-freshman Rep. Joe Negron (R-Stuart), and SB 1048, sponsored by Sen. Ken Pruitt (R-Port St. Lucie). Both versions allowed corporations to earn a dollar-for-dollar tax credit when donating to low-income scholarships.

The House version limited corporate donations to 75% of the taxes due but otherwise did not cap the total available tax credits. The Senate’s bill capped the program at $50 million in available tax credits and limited corporate donors to $200,000 in total tax credits annually.

The House version offered scholarships worth up to $4,000 for private school students, $1,000 for home education students, and $500 to cover transportation costs for students wishing to attend out-of-district public schools. The Senate’s bill offered no scholarships for home education, while the private school scholarship was worth $3,500. The public-school transportation scholarship remained the same.

Florida was spending $7,512 per pupil in public schools at the time according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Both bills limited scholarships to the more than 1 million students who were eligible for the National School Lunch Program, a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential childcare institutions.

School choice advocates quickly organized the handful of existing scholarship parents to meet with legislators, a move that put Democrats in a tough spot publicly.

“I personally resent the parading of Black parents through the halls of this Legislature and holding them up as examples of people who will receive vouchers,” Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Miami) fired back. “I personally resent the stereotype.”[1]

But it was no stereotype.

Those “parading” about the halls of the Legislature were parents of the 51 students on the Opportunity Scholarship in 2001, a program that offered scholarships to students attending public schools the state had given a letter grade of F. At the time, only students attending two high-poverty elementary schools in the entire state qualified, and most of those students happened to be Black.

The House moved swiftly before passing the bill 71-46 on March 8.

The Senate’s bill did not fare as well.

It nearly met disaster in the Senate Education Committee on March 7. Two Republicans, Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla of Miami and Sen. Donald Sullivan of Seminole, joined Democrats to vote down the scholarship bill 8-5.

Diaz de La Portilla argued the bill was “poorly written,” and cited confusion as to whether corporate donors could earn tax credits by buying books rather than funding private scholarships.[2]

Sullivan, however, would provide a way forward by moving to reconsider the vote, which according to the Associated Press, was “a procedural move that kept the bill alive.”[3]

The Senate’s scholarship bill would re-emerge in the Senate Education Committee on March 13, where it passed on a party line vote. It reached the Senate Finance and Taxation Committee on March 28 and again scraped by on a party line vote.

Despite passing in the House weeks before, the senate’s companion bill would linger on life support in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education. By April 11, the bill was dead.

During this time, the Legislature had been negotiating with Bush over his priorities, which included eliminating the intangibles tax and $300 million in tax cuts.

Senators were unsure of where the money might come from. The proposed voucher programs could cost around $50 million or more, while fixing the electoral system could cost another $40 million. Other spending priorities also competed for tax dollars.

“The last couple of years it has sort of been his way or the highway,” Sen. Jim King told the Associated Press about the legislature’s relationship with the governor.[4]

Something would have to give.

The Legislature had been working on two other voucher bills, the smaller of which garnered the most attention and criticism. HB 303 and its Senate companion, SB 504, would create $3,000 private school scholarships for students attending overcrowded public schools.

Bill sponsor Rep. Carlos Lacasa (R-Miami) argued the program was necessary to relieve crowding because the state’s spending of $8.5 billion on school construction had failed to remedy the situation.[5]

An estimated 40,000 to 235,000 students would be eligible — a fraction of those eligible under the tax credit scholarship bill.

“Here we see the main character, Hannibal Voucher, attempting to cannibalize our public school system,” Rep. Bob Henriquez (D-Tampa) said of the bill.[6]

Columnist Daniel Ruth called it the “Gutting Public School System Act.”[7]

Wilson, the representative from Miami, predicted public schools would still be struggling in five years, while Rep. Eleanor Sobel (D-Hollywood) argued it would be helping mostly children from well-off families.[8]

HB 303 passed the House 63-54 on March 21, 2001, but Senate President John McKay and Senate Education Committee Chair Pruitt had no intentions of moving the bill forward. The tax credit scholarship faced criticism too.

“The tax credit bill is a gimmick to get around potential constitutional pitfalls for existing voucher programs,” said Rep. Lois Frankel (D-West Palm Beach). “It’s very clever and very scary.”

“I don’t feel that taking money out of public schools is right,” said Sen. Ron Klein (D-Delray Beach), who sent his own children to private schools.

According to a Tampa Tribune survey at the time, legislative Democrats were more likely than Republicans (32% to 27%) to send their own children to private schools.[9]

By April 24, the specter of a voucher defeat in the Florida Supreme Court passed as the justices declined to hear the case and allowed the October 2000 First District Court of Appeal ruling to stand. That ruling declared the Opportunity Scholarship program did not violate the state’s “paramount duty” to fund public schools.

However, the tax credit scholarship still had no active bill in the Senate.

On May 4, during the waning hours in the last day of the 2001 session, Pruitt filed an amendment to HB 21, a bill that eliminated the intangibles tax, a priority of Bush. The amendment included a $50 million tax credit scholarship program with scholarships worth up to $3,500. The bill passed 25-14 at 8:30 p.m.

As the midnight deadline ticked closer, the bill was sent to the House, where it passed 72-44 at 9:45 p.m.

Bush would fulfill his promise to eliminate the intangibles tax and get $175 million in tax cuts — and Florida would get a new tax credit scholarship program. Two decades later, the program would raise more than $4 billion to fund more than one million scholarships for low-income and working-class students.

It is a success that has never been duplicated by any other state — and one that almost didn’t happen.

[1] Staff Writer. (March 9, 2001). School vouchers lawmaker says blacks are being stereotyped. Miami Herald.

[2] Twiddy, D. (March 7, 2001). Panel Rejects GOP Voucher Bill. Tallahassee Democrat.

[3] Staff Writer. (March 7, 2001). Bush’s priorities seem in jeopardy from start. Associated Press/Bradenton Herald.

[4] Kallestad, B. (March 6, 2001). Tax cut, vouchers and election reform agreement far away. Associated Press.

[5] Kleindienst, L. (February 21, 2001). Key house committee Oks voucher bill; foes said measure would let students avoid the state assessment test that public-school students take. Orlando Sentinel. See also, Hegarty, S. (March 18, 2001). Lawmakers debate 2 new voucher bills. St. Petersburg Times.

[6] Staff Writer. (February 10, 2001). House Democrats criticize school voucher plan. Florida Times-Union.

[7] Ruth, D. (February 9, 2001). A voucher is a voucher is a… Tampa Tribune.

[8] Hallifax, J. (March 22, 2001). Debate on the floor. Tallahassee Democrat.

[9] Feller, B. (April 10, 2001). Voucher views based on beliefs. Tampa Tribune.

June 11, 2021 10 comments

Education Equity Educator spotlight Featured Know Your History News Features

A dream remembered of a man who disappeared

Patrick R. Gibbons February 25, 2020

Patrick R. Gibbons

Fessenden Academy faculty, 1914. Joseph L. Wiley is pictured second from the left in the back row.

On a hot, humid July evening in 1915, Joseph L. Wiley, longtime principal of a private school on the outskirts of Ocala, drove to the Temple Theatre to see a movie. His car was found along West Broadway the next day, but Wiley was not. He had vanished.

Some speculated that the light-skinned, straight-haired black man ran away to pass as a white man. But his affairs at home were in order, and no money had been withdrawn from his bank account. Many of Marion County’s black residents believed he had been murdered.

Wiley, circa 1900.

In addition to being an educator, Wiley worked as farm supervisor, lawyer and banker. As principal of Fessenden Academy, a sprawling 150-acre campus managed by the American Missionary Association (AMA), he was dictatorial with his staff but a maverick when it came to taking orders from his white supervisors headquartered in New York. He dared to teach his black students to dream of an America where “every man and every woman would be accorded every right” in a state that had more lynchings per capita than any in the South.

Little is known about Wiley’s life or career at Fessenden Academy; a fire destroyed most of the school’s records in 1919. What is retold here comes from accounts of locals and historical records from the AMA pieced together by Joe M. Richardson, a former historian at Florida State University, as well as from the 1900-01 school handbook.

Born in Woodbury, Tenn., and described by AMA officials as “Caucasian” in appearance, Wiley enrolled in Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville whose alumni already included W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and Wiley’s future wife, Josephine Hobbs.

In his senior year in 1895, Wiley served as editor-in-chief of the school paper, the Fisk Herald, where he editorialized praise for Booker T. Washington’s call for more colleges and college training for black students as well as vocational training.

Wiley graduated Fisk with a degree in Classics and announced in the Herald that he would spend a year “teaching and rusticating in the rock-ribbed hills and lovely valleys of Cannon County.” He kept busy as a teacher but used his leisure time to study law, passing the Tennessee bar exam in 1896. He spent two years practicing law before deciding his life would be better spent as a “Christian teacher.”

When he arrived on the Fessenden Academy campus in the fall of 1898, the school was known as Union Academy. Union Academy had launched in 1868 in a “tumbledown cabin” barely 16-feet-by-16-feet — only a little larger than the recommended size for a modern-day horse stall — that by 1890 was crammed with 75 students. That year, a wealthy Bostonian, Ferdinand S. Fessenden, took pity on the poor school and provided funds to construct a new 2,500-square-foot, two-story schoolhouse that opened in 1891. While Fessenden’s financial support turned the school around, Wiley’s arrival in 1898 ushered in a golden age for the school, which was renamed in 1900 to honor its benefactor.

According to historian Richardson, the AMA’s financial struggles had forced the organization to shutter schools for black students across the country. Known for keeping principals on a tight leash, the AMA required school leaders to follow the direct orders of their supervisors in New York and to ask permission for all expenditures. But with its focus trained on larger, urban schools, it left the tiny rural school in far-off Florida to its own devices. As long as Wiley stayed within his meager budget, he had free reign to manage the school as he wished.

Within two years Wiley, with the help of his wife, who was known as a brisk, competent and very good teacher, had increased the staff to four teachers who were instructing 238 students.

In 1902, Fessenden began operating an industrial department in agriculture, carpentry and sewing with a $600 gift from the John F. Slater Fund. Its students helped construct additional campus buildings and grew most of the food served in the dining hall.

Meanwhile, the school added ninth and 10^th grades, making Fessenden the only secondary school for black students in the region. Five black women were the first to complete 10^th grade, passed the Florida teacher’s exam and in 1903 joined the ranks of the county’s teaching corps.

William N. Sheats, known as the father of Florida’s public-school system, the state’s first elected public school superintendent and author of Florida’s constitutional ban on racial integration in education, heaped enough praise on Fessenden to pave the way for state appropriations from 1904 to 1908.

As the student census grew, Wiley added men’s and women’s dormitories and expanded the campus with the addition of 37 acres, all without financial assistance from the AMA. He used a $6,500 grant from Andrew Carnegie and $1,500 in additional gifts to build a library, dining hall and classrooms for domestic science courses. When he was unable to find donor support, he financed improvements himself regardless of whether the AMA could reimburse him.

By 1910, the school had 300 students, 50 of whom lived on campus.

Academics at Fessenden Academy became highly respected under Wiley’s watch. Marion County School Board members visited in 1908, finding the school in “most excellent condition and doing splendid work,” praising it as “the best colored school” in the state. When industrial students displayed their work at the county fair in 1914, the Ocala Star Banner described it as “finished work that carpenters, blacksmiths, seamstresses and cooks recognize as the standard of perfection.”

But Wiley didn’t let Fessenden rest on its industrial school’s laurels; he pushed students to excel in reading, Latin, mathematics and chemistry, too.

He refused when Superintendent Sheats asked him to substitute industrial classes for Latin, because in Sheats’ words, “the knowledge of how to do something would be worth more to the colored race just now than a smattering” of Latin. Wiley believed, as did the AMA, that the aim of education was “to make a carpenter a man, not simply make a man a carpenter.”

Wiley also insisted that his students, despite the challenges rural poverty imposed, learn tidiness, politeness and thoughtfulness. He believed, according to Richardson, that, teaching geometry, chemistry, or languages was futile if students were untrained in “Christian character,” good manners and morals.

Wiley also taught students patriotism and encouraged them to consider they were worth more as citizens than as slaves. In his view, the United States offered a “glorious opportunity to teach the world a lesson in brotherhood.” He told his students to “live and achieve,” in order to make the country a better place and to prove it could one day become a haven for the oppressed.

Wiley did have his faults. His was a dictatorial leader. He cut Christmas vacation for his staff to three days. Teachers who failed to meet his exact standards were fired on the spot.

By 1908, he began crossing swords with his new supervisor, Paul Douglass. Though Douglass considered Wiley an excellent principal, he determined he was “incorrigible” and requested his resignation in 1913. True to form, Wiley refused, and continued to manage the school until he disappeared in the summer of 1915.

The loss of Wiley was a devastating blow to Fessenden and its students. The white leaders who managed the local school board and the state county board withdrew their support and the school floundered for a time.

Joseph L. Wiley led Fessenden Academy through 17 years of explosive growth and high academic achievement at a time when whites expected black students to become nothing but laborers. During that time, more than 1,000 students graduated knowing their self-worth as citizens and realizing they were educated men and women worthy of dignity and respect.

Wiley’s dream lives on at Fessenden, which remains open as an integrated public elementary school.

Sources:

Richardson, Joe M. “Joseph L. Wiley: A Black Florida Educator.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4, April 1993.

Richardson, Joe M., and Maxine D. Jones, “Education for Liberation: The American Missionary Association and African Americans, 1890 to the Civil Rights Movement.” The University of Alabama Press, 2009.

February 25, 2020 1 comment

Advocate Voices Education Choice Education Equity Featured Know Your History News Features School Choice Voucher Left

Back to the future on a school choice odyssey

Ron Matus February 19, 2020

Ron Matus

Snow Hill Institute, founded in 1893, educated thousands of students, including H.K. Matthews, before closing in 1973 due to court-ordered desegregation. You can hear Matthews explain the ways in which education choice is an extension of the civil rights movement in a 2013 redefinED podcast at the end of this post.

SNOW HILL, Ala. – There isn’t much left of Snow Hill Institute, an all-black school that once drew thousands of students to this backwoods speck from as far as Mobile and New Orleans. A half-dozen empty buildings, red brick and rotting wood-frame, conjure a century’s worth of ghosts.

H.K. Matthews, class of ’47, unfolds himself from a Camry and is instantly possessed by memories of … a garlic-loving ag teacher named Mr. Brooks. One time, with Mr. Brooks out of the classroom, Matthews and another student started wrestling, inadvertently spilling a bottle of ink on Mr. Brooks’ papers. When Mr. Brooks returned, he whipped them with a leather strap, then, later that day, whipped them twice more.

“I was 17,” Matthews laughed. “Can you imagine a teacher whipping a 17-year-old today?”

Hard to imagine, too, the reign of terror that served as backdrop.

In the 50 years before Matthews was born in 1928, white Alabamians lynched 300 of their black neighbors. When Matthews was 6 years old, a white mob from Florida broke into the jail in Brewton, Ala. – where Matthews now lives – to kidnap and kill Claude Neal, a black man accused of raping and killing a white woman. By the time Matthews and his classmate knocked over that ink bottle, 14 more black men had been lynched in Alabama.

Matthews’ grandmother, who raised him, tried her best to prepare him for this world. So did the school. Sometimes that meant setting high expectations with a strap. Sometimes that meant counseling patience.

“Life is like a revolving wheel,” his grandmother, a teacher, told H.K. on a segregated bus, the first time racism made him cry. “Those who are on top today will be on the bottom tomorrow.”

She and the school drilled the same lessons deep. Faith. Education. Resilience. Self-reliance.

“Whatever I am today,” Matthews said, “my grandmother – and this school – are the responsible parties.”

***

Ramble a half-hour north of the Florida line, past stalky remnants of cotton fields and ramshackle sheds with fresh okra signs. You’ll find the retired Rev. H.K. Matthews in a modest home of trim brown brick. The sign on the front door says, “Southern Charm.” The sign in the yard says, “WE BACK THE FAMILIES OF THE INNOCENT WHO WERE KILLED BY THE BLUE.” It’s a reference to police brutality.

H.K. Matthews, circa 1970

Matthews’ life reads like a Deep South Odyssey. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he was “the Martin Luther King of Pensacola,” an uncompromising leader of both the local NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was beaten at Selma. Arrested nearly 40 times. Twice, he escaped Klansmen waiting to kill him in motel rooms.

Matthews settled in Pensacola after fighting for the Army in Korea. For two decades, he led campaign after campaign to dismantle Jim Crow on the “Redneck Riviera.” He pushed for voting rights, desegregation of lunch counters, better schools for black students. At one point, to get Southern Bell to change its racist hiring practices, Matthews urged every black customer in Pensacola to pay their bills in person – and in pennies. Lickety-split, the company became a little more color blind.

These days, Matthews reaches for his cane if he has to stand too long. But he is still tall, spry, focused, engaged. When he tells any of a thousand stories about being an “agitator,” a smile crinkles the corners of his eyes. When he ends them, he likes to say, “What a ride it’s been!”

The ride continues.

Earlier this month, Matthews joined 150 other black and Hispanic pastors in the Florida Capitol to condemn lawmakers who’d been bullying corporate donors into abandoning the nation’s largest school choice scholarship program. (That program is administered by nonprofits like Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.) “It’s not social justice,” Matthews said, in comments picked up by national news outlets, “to throw thousands of low-income, mostly black and Hispanic students under the bus.” Three days later, the biggest donor to leave announced it was re-joining.

Matthews, left, was among more than 5,000 people who rallied in Tallahassee in 2010 to support school choice.

This wasn’t the first time Matthews spoke out at a critical moment. Ten years ago, 5,000 people marched for school choice in Florida’s capital city – at that time, the biggest choice rally in history. What followed was bipartisan support for legislation that made Florida a national leader in private school choice.

Matthews walked in the front row. And given his own experience with public education in America, it’s no wonder.

***

Snow Hill Institute was founded as a private school in 1893, by Tuskegee Institute graduate William J. Edwards. Its arc parallels the rise of the Rosenwald schools, the 5,000 quasi-public schools, seeded by money from philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, that served as a segregation-era bridge to better schools for black students in the South.

As a condition of his contribution, Rosenwald required black communities to raise the lion’s share of funds for the new schools, and to technically turn the schools over to white public-school districts. The schools were separate by race, unequal in funding. But many were built to cutting-edge architectural designs. They were orders of magnitude better than the sad shacks that passed as public schools for black children. And in an ironic twist, they also often remained in the black communities’ control.

Black teachers. Black principals. Black community decisions over hiring, curriculum, discipline. It’s not hard to find, among Rosenwald alum, a belief that this was a golden age for black education in America.

Rosenwald contributed to Snow Hill Institute. But Edwards (great-grandfather of film director Spike Lee) secured donations from other white Northerners who were the progressives of their day. Within 25 years, what started in a rented log cabin with one teacher, three pupils and 50 cents in savings had become 24 buildings on 1,940 acres, with 400 students and a property value of $125,000, according to a book by Edwards, “Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt.” Graduates dispersed throughout the South, spreading the gospel of self-determination.

Edwards described the spillover effects in Snow Hill.

Twenty-five years ago the people in the neighborhood of the school did not own more than ten acres of land, while today they own more than twenty thousand acres. Twenty-five years ago the one-room log cabin was the rule, today it is the exception. Twenty-five years ago the majority of the farmers were in heavy debt and mortgaged their crops, today many of the farmers now have bank accounts, while a few years ago they did not know what a bank account was.

After Snow Hill Institute became public in 1924, it continued to educate thousands of students, including Matthews. But in 1973, it closed, due to court-ordered desegregation.

Brown v. Board rightfully ended “separate but equal” in public schools. But for many black communities, it ended community control, too. Black teachers lost their jobs. Black students were sent to white schools that were indifferent, if not hostile. Matthews said the tradeoffs shouldn’t be sugar coated.

“How much was lost to assimilation?” he said on the abandoned campus, as crows cawed in the chill.

“All of it.”

***

The team name for Escambia High was “The Rebels.” The band played “Dixie.” By 1972, the black students who now made up 10 percent of this once-all-white public school in Pensacola were done with the relentless hostility. White students waved Confederate flags. Showed up in Klan hoods. Spray-painted “KKK” on walls. Black leaders took their concerns to the school board, but the board was not responsive.

“Their mood was worse than what we had encountered with other institutions,” Matthews wrote in his 2007 autobiography, “Victory After The Fall,” co-authored with history professor Michael Butler. “They were much more hostile, bitter, and closed to compromise … ”

As fall unfolded, fights broke out, students got arrested, white lawmakers stirred the pot. One of them said to others in a Capitol hallway, in words reported on TV news, “Those n****** make me so mad … If I had anything to do with it, I would get a shotgun – no, a submachine gun – and mow them down.”

In December, the district closed the school because of racial unrest. The NAACP and SCLC followed with a list of demands. If the board didn’t act, the groups said, the community would boycott the schools. Right after New Year’s, that’s what it did.

But black students didn’t stay home.

***

Fewer students attending public schools meant less money for the district and its white employees – and more leverage for progress, Matthews reasoned. At the same time, black parents would not tolerate their children being out of class.

So Matthews organized “freedom schools.”

They were inspired by the schools civil rights activists created during “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi. The SCLC in Pensacola turned to black churches to house them, to retired black teachers for instruction. It worked. Hundreds of black students attended classes in core subjects, with black contributions in history and literature infused into the curriculum. The newspaper blasted the schools. A state senator called for the arrest of black parents (for allegedly abetting truancy). But parents kept dropping their kids off.

The boycott continued until a judge issued a temporary injunction against use of the Confederate flag and “Rebel” nickname at Escambia High. The freedom schools in Pensacola closed. But Matthews started them in three other North Florida towns where black communities battled white school districts.

Years before “school choice” became a thing, Matthews was all in.

***

In December 1974, a white sheriff’s deputy in Pensacola chased down a black motorist, Wendel Blackwell, then shot and killed him from three feet away. According to Matthews’ autobiography, a black woman had been in the car with Blackwell. The deputy had been having an affair with her. A few days later, she was found dead beneath a highway overpass. The deputy was never suspended. The state attorney concluded he acted in self-defense.

Matthews led the protests. But as anger mounted, the sheriff’s department arrested him on a bogus charge of extortion, for allegedly trying to force the sheriff to fire the deputy under threat of violence. An all-white jury found Matthews guilty. He was sentenced to five years in prison. After 63 days, one Florida governor, Reuben Askew, commuted his sentence. Another, Bob Graham, pardoned him. But in the aftermath, Matthews could no longer find work in Pensacola.

“Blackballed?” I asked. “Whiteballed,” he said.

Matthews lives in a modest home of trim brown brick a half-hour north of the Florida line, surrounded by photographs and newspaper clippings documenting his adventurous past.

Matthews returned to Alabama. For 40 years, he served as pastor of Zion Fountain AME Zion Church in Brewton. But he never stopped getting into “good trouble.”

In 2015, he was among many speakers – but the one with the most notoriety – who urged the county commission in Pensacola to cease flying the Confederate flag over government property. On his way home, a truck with Confederate flags flapping began tailing his Altima. It switched lanes when he switched lanes. It followed him into Alabama. Rounding a familiar curve with a side road, Matthews, then 87 years young, cut the lights, turned sharp and checked the rear view. “The truck kept on,” he said.

“What a ride it’s been!”

***

A half-century after integration, 10 schools on Florida’s list of “persistently low-performing” schools are in Pensacola. All 10 are predominantly students of color. Eight are majority black. Decade after decade, community after community, the same sick story plays like a broken record.

Back at Snow Hill, Matthews shook his head. In the darkest of times, black communities scratched out ways to build schools that worked for their children. Today, they have more tools than ever to build more, better, faster.

“Why not another Snow Hill Institute?” Matthews said.

“Why not 1,000 of them?”

In case it isn’t clear, Matthews wasn’t asking.

February 19, 2020 0 comment

ArchivED Education and Public Policy Education Politics Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice

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

Travis Pillow October 26, 2019

Travis Pillow

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

ArchivED Bipartisanship Education and Public Policy Education Politics Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice Vouchers

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 20^th 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 20^th 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

ArchivED Catholic Schools Education Equity Faith-based Education Know Your History Religious Education School 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

ArchivED Education Equity Know Your History Parent Empowerment Parental Choice Progressives and ed reform School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships Voucher Left Vouchers

archivED: Progressives have long supported vouchers, education choice

Ron Matus October 5, 2019

Ron Matus

Despite what the story lines too often suggest, school choice in America has deep roots on the political left, in many camps spanning many decades. Mississippi Freedom Schools, pictured above (the image is from kpbs.org), are part of this broader, richer story, as historian James Forman Jr. and others have rightly noted.

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED will revive 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 2012, is nevertheless still relevant, reminding us it’s impossible to stereotype families who use vouchers and tax credit scholarships.

Think school choice is solely a conservative idea? Think again.

* After the Civil War, blacks in the South who were tired of waiting for the government to organize schools – or who were dissatisfied with the quality – built schools themselves.

* During the civil rights movement, activists in both the north and south established alternatives to segregated, second-rate schools.

* In the 1960s, leading progressives proposed private-school vouchers because of anger over failing inner-city schools.

Historical gems like these sparkle throughout “The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First,” a 2005 academic journal piece by Georgetown University law professor James Forman Jr. From Reconstruction to the civil rights era to the “free schools” and “community control” movements – indeed, for most of American history – progressives have been a leading voice for choice.

So forget what you hear from choice critics and read in the newspaper. The parents who use vouchers and tax credit scholarships to help their kids can’t be shoved into one political box or another. The same goes for the political and philosophical roots that sprouted those options. Conservatives have advanced compelling reasons for school choice. So have progressives.

Writes Forman:

“School choice – especially vouchers and, to a lesser extent, charter schools – is generally understood to have a conservative intellectual and political heritage … choice is associated with free-market economist Milton Friedman, attempts to defy Brown, wealthy conservative philanthropists, and the attacks on the public school bureaucracy by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.”

“It turns out that conventional history is incomplete … too often missing from the historical account is the left’s substantial – indeed, I would say leading – contribution to the development of school choice. In this Essay, I trace that history, arguing that school choice has deep roots in liberal educational reform movements, the civil rights movement, and black nationalism … “

Forman doesn’t hide his agenda. He wants to give modern progressives – the source of so much passionate opposition to choice – good reason to think twice.

“While some liberals have embraced choice proposals, others have rejected them on the grounds of their segregationist heritage. The incomplete view of history has distracted some from the issue that I think matters most, which is how choice is implemented. Accordingly, understanding the history of progressive choice proposals – including even school vouchers – might offer today’s liberals a way to have a more nuanced conversation about school choice.”

October 5, 2019 0 comment

Education and Public Policy Education Research factcheckED Florida Education Revolution Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Know Your History Myth Busters School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships Vouchers

Busting myths of 20 years ago

Patrick R. Gibbons September 27, 2019

Patrick R. Gibbons

Florida’s then-Gov. Jeb Bush testifying before a U.S. House committee Sept. 23, 1999.

Twenty years ago this week, Gov. Jeb Bush spoke before the House Education Budget Committee about Florida’s recently passed A+ Plan and the state’s first voucher, the Opportunity Scholarship Program.

“It’s been fun, in all honesty,” Bush said with a smirk, “to watch the myths that have been built up over time when you empower parents.”

Those myths were shattered, Bush said, though he admitted the program was only just a few months old at that point. Nevertheless, two decades of evidence have proved him correct.

By the time of Bush’s presentation, the Opportunity Scholarship had awarded scholarships to 134 students at two schools in Pensacola. Seventy-six of those students used the program to attend another higher-performing public school, while 58 used the voucher to attend a private school, according to Bush’s testimony.

The first myth Bush called “the brain drain,” which occurs when only the high-achieving kids leave public schools. But according to Bush, the students on the program were no more or less academically advantaged than their peers who remained behind.

The second myth was that vouchers would only benefit higher-income students. “Eighty-five percent of the students are minority,” Bush said. “Eighty-five percent qualify for reduced and free lunch. This is not a welfare program for the rich, but an empowerment program for the disadvantaged.”

The third and final myth he called “the abandonment myth” — schools where students leave will spiral ever downward.

Twenty years later these myths remain busted.

Eleven years of research on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship show the critics’ claims ring hollow.

• Students attending private schools with the help of the scholarship are among the lowest-performing students in the public schools they leave behind.

• Today, 75 percent of scholarship students are non-white, 57 percent live in single-parent households, and the average student lives in a household earning around $27,000 a year. Researchers at the Learning Systems Institute at Florida State noted that these students are also more economically disadvantaged than their eligible public-school peers.

• More importantly, scholarship students are achieving Jeb Bush’s goal of gaining a year’s worth of learning in a year’s time.

• Even the abandonment myth remains untrue. Overall, public schools with large populations of potentially eligible scholarship students actually performed better, as a result of competition from the scholarship program, according to researchers David Figlio and Cassandra Hart.

When Jeb Bush took office just 52 percent of Florida’s students graduated. Today 86 percent of students graduate. According to the Urban Institute, students on the scholarship are more likely to graduate high school and attend and later graduate from college. State test scores on the Nation’s Report Card are up considerably since 1998 too. And when adjusting for demographics, Florida, which is a majority-minority state, ranks highly on K-12 education compared to wealthier and whiter peers.

There’s still room for improvement. But the naysayers at the turn of the century have been proven wrong.

September 27, 2019 0 comment