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Howard Fuller

Howard Fuller went down to Georgia looking for a party’s soul to heal

Matthew Ladner November 27, 2019

Matthew Ladner

Democratic candidate for president Elizabeth Warren speaking at a rally Sept. 16 in Washington Square Park, New York City. Warren caused a stir last week when speaking to black and Latino charter school parents and supporters in Atlanta.

A recent protest of Elizabeth Warren’s education plan staged by a group of charter school parents at an event in Atlanta – which happened to include civil rights activist and education reform advocate Dr. Howard Fuller – resulted in a conversation between the senator and the parents that caused quite a stir. You can view the entire conversation here.

Go watch the video. I’ll wait.

Okay, good.

So, the big story coming out of this meeting has been Warren’s far-less-than-truthful denial about sending her children to private school. Her campaign subsequently admitted that her son attended public school “until fifth grade,” at which time he apparently attended a couple of different private schools.

But there were plenty of other interesting items in this conversation.

Warren protests at one point that Massachusetts and New Hampshire have good public schools. This, of course, is true, but Massachusetts and New Hampshire are two of the small handful of states with average six-figure incomes for families of four. If you examine data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University on student learning gains by poverty status, this is what Massachusetts and New Hampshire look like:

School effectiveness vs. free/reduced-price lunch eligibility; Massachusetts schools, all students, grades 3-8, from 2009-2016, sized by number of students

School effectiveness vs. school district socioeconomic status; New Hampshire districts, all students, grades 3-8, from 2009-2016, sized by number of students

On both maps, dark green represents high academic growth, and the right side of the charts signify a low percentage of students eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch. So, unless my eyes are deceiving me, the high academic growth schools in New Hampshire and (especially) Massachusetts cluster in the high wealth areas.

These schools may very well be “good,” but they aren’t exactly accessible.

Several of those high-poverty green schools on the left side of the Massachusetts chart are (you guessed it) charter schools. Just in case any of you are thinking this might be unfair and that every state’s growth chart is going to look like Massachusetts’ chart, take a look at this.

Warren claimed a few different times that she doesn’t oppose charter schools; she “just wants them held to the same standards.” Charter schools, however, because they are public schools, teach state standards and give state tests and get rated by the same metrics in all states.

Warren specifically mentioned Michigan as a state where charter schools don’t follow the same rules.

I suggest we exempt Michigan district schools from whatever “rules” Michigan charter schools have been exempted from. Michigan district schools have shown a big dose of academic stagnation over the last decade, whereas students in Michigan charter schools at least show improvement over time despite clustering in what may be the most economically challenged urban area in the country.

There’s more than one way to hold school sectors to the same standards, and it would be a better idea to free Michigan districts than to shackle Michigan charters.

It’s pretty clear watching the video that Howard Fuller has read the senator’s education plan, but the senator graciously offers to review it for him. Fuller, a former superintendent with the Milwaukee Public School System, sagely warns the senator that absent structural changes, many districts simply will absorb the funds she speaks of without improving.

The senator agrees, and cites a childcare block grant program for which she increased funding that suffered that precise fate; the money never reached the teachers. This experience perhaps ought to have informed the senator’s plan more than it appears to have done thus far.

The richest quote from this entire episode may have been one drawn from a New York Times piece about the issue, which quoted charter school operator Margaret Fortune:

“What would be happening in a fair society is we would be asked for our opinions, rather than having candidates saying, ‘I have a plan for you’ — to shepherd you into the very schools that you left on purpose.”

An especially interesting take coming from a black, lifelong Democrat.

November 27, 2019 2 comments

Common Ground Education Politics Progressives and ed reform School Choice

Wishing for more strange bedfellows in educational choice

Scott Kent January 4, 2019

Scott Kent

Editor’s Note: This is the tenth and final of a series of posts where various members of the education choice world share an #edchoice wish. For yesterday’s post, CLICK HERE.

Democratic donkey and Republican elephant butting heads. Vector illustration.

My wish this holiday season is that this nation re-embrace the concept of “politics makes strange bedfellows,” which used to be a well-known adage before the culture forgot how to create a Venn diagram of overlapping goals and interests. Today, the idea of political opposites sharing a metaphorical Serta is viewed as a betrayal by their respective camps, an infidelity to identity.

Nevertheless, few issues are as ripe for bipartisan cooperation as expanding parental choice in education, which, outside legislative chambers, cuts across political, racial and ethnic lines.

Nobody illustrates that better than Howard Fuller and Ben Sasse, perhaps education reform’s odd couple.

Fuller is a 77-year-old African-American who was a student activist during the civil rights movement, a black-power militant (who during this period changed his name to Owusu Sadaukai), a follower of Malcolm X, and a community organizer.

Sasse is 46 years old, white, a native Nebraskan with degrees from Harvard and Yale, a pleated-khakis Republican U.S. senator with a penchant for wonkery.

In the current political climate, they should be yelling at each other on a cable TV news show.

Instead, they each delivered compelling keynote addresses at the annual ExcelinEd summit Dec. 6-7 in Washington, D.C., both making a moral case for education choice – and for finding common ground.

Despite their dissimilar backgrounds and different styles, Fuller and Sasse embraced similar themes. Both rejected partisan and ideological labels that don’t inform so much as they are used to divide.

“I’m a conservative,” Sasse said in the summit’s opening address, “but I think a lot of what we need in this moment is actually quite radical.”

Fuller, who over the last three decades has been one of the leading advocates for parental choice, was emphatic – and typically provocative — in his refusal to choose political sides.

“I want to be clear: I don’t believe in the Democratic Party or Republican Party,” he declared in the following morning’s keynote. “I don’t believe in none of you all. ‘Cause every one of you has rubbed me on my head at one point in my life and called me ‘boy.’”

Each characterized the debate as presenting a false choice regarding public education.

“Education and schooling are not exactly the same thing,” said Sasse, who before being elected to the Senate in 2014 served four years as president of Midland University in his hometown of Fremont, Nebraska. “Education is a goal. Schooling is one of many means to the end. … This system wasn’t ordained by God. There wasn’t some moment where this form of educational delivery was inscribed on tablets.”

Fuller, who is a former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and currently a distinguished professor of education at Marquette University, echoed those sentiments: “There’s religion, and there’s different churches. The fight for parent choice, the fight for all of these options for people, IS what public education is. The Milwaukee Public Schools is not public education, it’s a delivery system. And since it wasn’t created by God, we could actually change it now. We could have different ways of creating the delivery system.”

Instead of being captive to process, they argued, focus on the human element, those most affected by policy.

Sasse explained that the current education system was conceived a century-and-a-half ago during a time of rapid industrialization, when people were groomed for jobs in factories and assembly lines. Schools reflected the homogenized factories. The U.S. economy today is undergoing a different kind of transformation that calls for a different approach to education – one that doesn’t treat students as “merely economic actors.”

“Children are not widgets, they are souls,” Sasse said. “Education is not fundamentally about producing homogenized output. It is about forming and nurturing those little souls. Schools are not assembly lines. They are gardens.”

Fuller noted that the choice movement from his perspective didn’t derive from some abstract concept.

“We weren’t sitting in a basement, with all due respect to Milton Friedman, reading ‘Capitalism and Freedom’,” he said. “Hell, I didn’t even know he had written ‘Capitalism and Freedom.’ This struggle didn’t come out of a free-market ideology. It came out of a struggle for social justice.”

That means giving the poor, “the disinherited and dispossessed,” the same choices in education that wealthier Americans have always enjoyed.

Fuller and Sasse show how people can address a problem from different angles and arrive at the same conclusion – if they are willing to travel outside their designated lanes.

For the many addicted to partisanship, that’s behavior modification on par with quitting smoking or losing 30 pounds.

Still, nothing is as persuasive to a politician as an election result, and Florida’s recent gubernatorial race is an eye-opening example of how support for education choice blurs partisan lines and can be a decisive factor in a close contest. Thousands of parents served notice to both major parties that their top priority is finding the best possible education for their children – and that their vote will not go to anyone who endangers that.

“People are gonna have to work together in spite of our government,” Fuller said at the ExcelinEd summit. “… It’s one of those moments in history where we’re gonna have to concentrate on finding a coalition of the willing.”

Don’t rely on Santa to deliver such a gift. Go create your own education choice miracle.

Scott Kent is strategic communications manager for Step Up For Students.

January 4, 2019 0 comment

Education Politics Know Your History Private Schools Progressives and ed reform School Choice Voucher Left

Betsy DeVos & black empowerment

Ron Matus January 27, 2017

Ron Matus

Private schools have always been essential to black progress in America. As the author of a recent piece in The Atlantic wrote, "“Private means to create a public good were an integral part of black education.”

Private schools have always been essential to black progress in America. As the author of a recent piece in The Atlantic wrote about Betsy DeVos and the African-American roots of school choice, “Private means to create a public good were an integral part of black education.”

Long before anybody used the term “school choice,” black communities were striving for it, often by any means necessary. Which is why black parents, though overwhelmingly Democratic by party registration, are likely to find their views on educational options to be more in line with Betsy Devos, the Republican nominee for U.S. Education Secretary, than the white progressives trying to derail her. Crazy times.

I’m not black, and I’m not a historian. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that fighting for educational freedom has been at the heart of the black experience in America. And yet, somehow, that epic struggle is overlooked in these polarizing fights over school choice – which is a shame, given the possibility it might make the fights less polarizing.

If I were king, I’d make white progressives read Yale Professor James Forman and listen to choice advocate Howard Fuller. In the meantime, if their tribal impulses are getting revved up over Betsy DeVos – and I know from my facebook feed they are 🙂 — I’ll have the audacity to hope they check out this recent piece in The Atlantic, “The African American Roots of Betsy DeVos’s Education Platform.”

The author, College of Charleston Professor Jon N. Hale, offers a brief, nuanced look at choice through the lens of black history. That history isn’t always flattering to the choice “side.” Segregation academies, for example, did happen in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. (Choice supporters have acknowledged that past, and noted how it differs from the ideals that spur today’s choice movement.) But that stain is a small part of a bigger story, in which private schools have been essential to black progress.

Writes Hale:

American history clearly demonstrates that communities of color have been forced to rely upon themselves to provide an education to as many students as possible. Students of color have rarely been provided a quality public education. As James Anderson demonstrated in Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, black communities consistently had to provide their own schools by taxing themselves beyond what the law required, as white officials never appropriated public money equitably by race. Black civic leaders and educators had to forge alliances with philanthropists and “progressive” whites for further financial support.

Barred from the American social order, black educators, in effect, were forced to rely upon private means to meet the educational needs of their own children. African Americans established schools controlled by the community. Such “community-controlled schools” were by necessity administered by African Americans, taught by African Americans, and attended by African Americans.

Hale sums it up this way: “Private means to create a public good were an integral part of black education.”

The Atlantic piece mentions a few examples. We’ve explored others, including some that show how central faith was to many of these efforts.

January 27, 2017 0 comment

School Choice

Fuller: School choice advocates need to care about all kids

Travis Pillow January 5, 2017

Travis Pillow

When Howard Fuller hears criticisms of fellow school choice advocate Betsy DeVos, he may hear echoes from his own past.

Fuller

Before he became superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, Fuller had called for breaking up the school district and helped organize parents in favor of a school voucher program. He had never taught in public schools. The state Legislature had to pass a law waiving a requirement that school district leaders have three years of classroom experience. In his memoir, No Struggle No Progress, he recounts how the NAACP held a press conference denouncing him.

He was an outsider, advocating for systematic change. But he also knew that when he became leader of the local public education system, he would have to care for every child. On a new podcast with Education Next, he says he hopes DeVos will do the same as U.S. Education Secretary.

“The reality of it is, when you go into those kind of positions, you have to deal with issues that are on your plate,” he says, adding: “Betsy does care about trying to change the system, but in my mind that doesn’t mean that she’s going to get in there and say ‘I don’t care about what happens to children who are attending schools in traditional systems.'”

DeVos has faced attacks for her support of school vouchers, her lack of experience in traditional public schools and an agenda that, supposedly, would dismantle public education. But Fuller says those who support parental choice also want to help children who attend public schools.

“I’m a supporter of parent choice. I’m also a supporter of trying to make sure that the traditional public education system works well for kids,” he says. “I believe that poor parents and low-income parents ought to have choice, as those of us with money have. I think anybody who cares about kids, you want to make sure that the traditional system works well, also.”

January 5, 2017 2 comments

Charter Schools

Charter schools are like Snoop Dogg, and other reflections from #NCSC16

Travis Pillow July 1, 2016

Travis Pillow

When he first came on the scene, he was in and out of prison, recording freestyles with his cousins in Southern California. But more than two decades after he first made it big, parents no longer fear him. He’s at home in Katy Perry videos and Old Navy commercials.

In this way, longtime school choice advocate Howard Fuller said Snoop Dogg’s trajectory parallels that of charter schools, which celebrated their 25th birthday this week during a national conference in Nashville. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, it may have been hard to imagine them breaking into the establishment, but now, for all the political battles they face, they’ve become entrenched.

“We’re heading towards being mainstream,” Fuller said during a discussion of what the charter movement can expect at future big anniversary celebrations. “I hope there’s someone out there, selling mixtapes out of the back of their car.”

In Florida, there are still educators launching innovative, inner-city startup schools on shoe-string budgets, from Orlando to Overtown. But in many cases, they aren’t starting charter schools. They’re starting private schools where students rely on school choice scholarships to cover tuition. The barriers to opening a new charter school are getting higher. Startup funding is harder to come by. While they get less funding per student than charters, these private schools are constrained by fewer regulations.

Fuller said charter schools need an “innovation strategy” that embraces entrepreneurial educators looking to break free from conventional schooling models. In that vein, he added, the school choice movement needs to think about all three sectors of public education — four if you count homeschooling — and how they fit together.

(Fuller also gave an opening speech that brought the house down, in which he called for the movement to refocus its energies on “the poor, disinherited, and dispossessed.”)

Philanthropy only goes so far

The Walton Family Foundation decided to give charters a massive anniversary gift: $250 million for school facilities.

In a speech announcing the Building Equity Initiative, Marc Sternberg, the foundation’s K-12 program director, said the foundation wants to help educators worry less about real estate, so they can focus on the classroom. Eventually, it hopes to create space in high-performing charter schools for 250,000 more students.

July 1, 2016 0 comment

School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships

Private schools, choice, and racial exclusion

Travis Pillow April 4, 2016

Travis Pillow

The population of students attending private schools has gotten whiter nationwide, even as the proportion of Black and Hispanic students in public schools has grown, according to a new report. But the report overlooks some compelling evidence that private school choice programs, particularly those aimed at low-income families, could mitigate the imbalance by giving more minority parents access to private schools they couldn’t otherwise afford.

Florida, for example, appears to buck the trend. Between 1998 and 2012, its private schools became less predominantly white, according to an analysis of federal enrollment data release this week by the Southern Education Foundation. The racial balance of Florida’s private schools improved by 4.4 percentage points, the second-best in the nation.

It may be no coincidence that in 2001, Florida began offering tax credit scholarships, which soon became the largest private school choice program in the nation, and, by the end of the 2011-12 school year, helped make private-school education available to more than 40,248 low-income children. (Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog, helps administer the scholarships). This year, the program serves more than 78,000 students, 75 percent of them non-white.

Only one other state — Wisconsin, which pioneered school vouchers — improved the racial balance of its private schools more quickly.

A new report shows black and Hispanic students remain under-represented in private schools across the country.

A new report by the Southern Education Foundation shows black and Hispanic students remain under-represented in private schools across the country.

The foundation’s report, however, sounds an alarm about the proliferation of voucher and scholarship programs. Private schools, it notes, remain “disproportionately white, and often extremely segregated and exclusionary especially in the Southern states.” Enrollment surged in the Deep South after Brown v. Board of Education, as states looked for creative ways to thwart integration. For that reason, the report argues, new efforts to subsidize private school tuition deserve extra scrutiny.

April 4, 2016 0 comment

Education Politics

Big changes coming at BAEO

Travis Pillow February 22, 2016

Travis Pillow

The country’s leading black-led education reform organization could be in for some major changes after 2016.

Howard Fuller

The Black Alliance for Educational Options announced changes were coming in a letter to supporters on Friday, but provided few details on what the future would hold.

Howard Fuller, the chairman emeritus of the organization, said its board formed a committee, which he will lead, and plans to hold a competition aimed at drawing fresh leaders to set a course for what he said could be “BAEO 2.0,” or a successor organization.

“The mission will remain,” Fuller said. “The question becomes, what is the best way in the next period to fight for that mission? It could be an entirely different organizational form. It could be a couple different organizations.”

The mission, which he said will remain sacrosanct: Serving as a black-led advocate for systemic educational change, rooted in values of social justice.

According to the letter, BAEO plans to remain under the leadership of Jacqueline Cooper, its current president, and continue its state-level activities in New Jersey, Tennessee and Louisiana — where it’s been a prominent advocate for school vouchers, charter schools, and other reforms.

February 22, 2016 0 comment

Common Ground Parental Choice Podcast School Choice

School choice and political power: Howard Fuller, podcastED

Travis Pillow August 10, 2015

Travis Pillow

Howard Fuller

Note: This is the third in a series of podcast interviews on Nevada’s new education savings account program. We previously spoke with Seth Rau here and Matthew Ladner here.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

August 10, 2015 0 comment