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MLK

Charter SchoolsEducation PoliticsProgressives and ed reformSchool ChoiceVoucher Left

From MLK’s “field general” to charter school champion

Ron Matus August 3, 2016
Ron Matus

Wyatt Tee Walker, at right, was chief of staff to Martin Luther King Jr. and the first full-time executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was also instrumental in starting the first charter school in New York. He is among many noteworthy bridges between the civil rights and school choice movements.

Wyatt Tee Walker, at right, was chief of staff to Martin Luther King Jr. and the first full-time executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was also instrumental in starting the first charter school in New York. He is among many noteworthy bridges between the civil rights and school choice movements. (Image from encylopediaofalabama.org)

This is the latest post in our series on the center-left roots of school choice.

Few civil rights leaders in America were in the thick of things as much as Wyatt Tee Walker. He was chief of staff to Martin Luther King Jr.; the first, full-time executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and the lead strategist behind the Birmingham campaign – the clash that seared Bull Connor, fire hoses and police dogs into America’s consciousness and spurred passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Voucher Left logo snippedBut Rev. Walker’s difference-making didn’t end there. Decades later, he played a key role in the push for school choice, making him, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King III, another noteworthy bridge between the two movements.

“All of the experience I gained in the human rights struggle was applicable to this new frontier of human rights,” he writes in the forward to “A Light Shines in Harlem,” the 2014 book by journalist Mary C. Bounds that chronicles New York’s first charter school, which Walker helped to create. “In my most reflective moments, I believe this is where Dr. King would be if he were still alive! In the charter movement, I am continuing the work of Dr. King that has far-reaching meaning.”

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently honored Walker with a lifetime achievement award and this moving video tribute. He was vital to passage of New York’s charter school law in 1999, then to creation of the Sisulu Children’s Academy in Harlem, named for South African freedom fighter Walter Sisulu. Now called Sisulu-Walker Charter School, it boldly blazed the trail for Empire State charter schools, including the 200-plus now in New York City alone.

Those contributions are worthy of recognition in their own right. But they also offer yet more evidence of the oft-hidden ties between school choice, the civil rights movement and progressive politics. I know, I know; I’m a broken record. But I’d like to respectfully ask, again, that folks on the left who dismiss choice, because they think it sprung from an enemy camp, to consider Walker and so many others whose visions of social justice include expansion of educational freedom.

Clearly, it’s not profiteering and privatization that drive them. It’s a desire to find high-quality options for children who need them the most. In the case of African American communities, that powerful impulse, to use any and all resources to create the best possible alternatives, goes back centuries, fueled by racist laws that denied educational opportunities, then by laws and practices that resulted in schools that were inferior, or didn’t work, or both.

Besides serving as Dr. King’s trusted aide, Walker had been a local NAACP president and a state director of the Congress of Racial Equality. In the late 1960’s, he moved to Harlem to become senior pastor of the influential Canaan Baptist Church. There, he continued to fight for better jobs, affordable housing and a long list of other issues that fellow progressives would find compelling. Eventually, he turned to his community’s educational challenges, and, in his view, the failure of traditional public schools to address them.

Walker rallied other inner-city ministers to support the bill that became New York’s charter school law. He offered space in his church to the Sisulu school. He welcomed private funding. Despite some ups and downs, the school ultimately succeeded, improving thousands of lives in the “capital of black America.”

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August 3, 2016 1 comment
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Achievement GapKnow Your HistoryProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

The unrealized dream of educational justice

Special to redefinED August 29, 2013
Special to redefinED
Gant

Gant

Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final post in our series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. Vernard Gant is director of Urban School Services with the Association of Christian Schools International.

by Vernard T. Grant

As the nation marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, speculation abounds as to what the content of that speech would be if delivered today. It is noteworthy that in all of his speeches and writings, Dr. King had little to say about education beyond segregated schools and low performance by black students. He apparently thought that once the racial barriers of discrimination and social injustices were removed, educational disparities would self-correct. It would not be much of a stretch to suggest he would be appalled to discover that according to the latest NAEP report, black children in 2011 are still not performing in reading at the level of white children in 1970 (just two years after his death).MLK snipped

Here’s my take on what his reaction would be, a slight variation on the words from his speech: It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro [children] a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of [educational] justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of [educational] opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of [educational] freedom and the security of [educational] justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. [Brackets mine]

Just as in the days of the civil rights movement, a grave injustice is transpiring today that is adversely and profoundly impacting its victims. A quality education, essential for cashing the promissory note that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is being systematically denied families that do not have the economic means to secure one for their children.

A quality education is a purchased commodity. It depends on the financial wherewithal of individual families. It can be purchased either by paying tuition to private schools, or by paying higher mortgages and property taxes in neighborhoods with high-performing public schools. Parents who have low and moderate incomes simply do not possess the financial means to secure such an education for their children. They are bound to accept what is offered in schools assigned on the basis of where they live. They have no choice and no freedom in their children’s education. To compound matters, they are often told, from the public’s standpoint, that they should never have a choice because if they did, it would financially cripple the public school system. Translation: the important thing is not the best interest or well-being of the child, but the best interest and well-being of the system.

To add insult to injury, parents are told this by opponents of school choice and educational justice, all of whom exercise choice in where their children go to school. As a general rule, people of means naturally send their children to schools that effectively educate them. No caring parent (no matter how dedicated to a cause) would put their child in a school and sacrifice his or her education on an altar they know would fail their child. The tragedy is in the hypocrisy; what these individuals practice personally (school choice for their own children), they oppose politically for other folks’ children. They act in the best interest of their children, but insist the children of less economically advantaged families remain bound to a system that does not benefit them but rather benefits from them.

What is needed today and what Dr. King would call for is educational justice.

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August 29, 2013 0 comment
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Achievement GapParent EmpowermentProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

Parental choice would honor the Dream

Peter H. Hanley August 28, 2013
Peter H. Hanley
Hanley

Hanley

Editor’s note: This is the third post in our series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s Dream speech.

It was January 18th, the Saturday of the MLK weekend in 1997, when I printed out the “I Have a Dream” speech. I’m not completely sure why, except that I was transitioning in my life from international business to education reform. The powerful language and ideas King conveyed, especially the notion that we had defaulted on our promissory note, captured me then and have stayed with me. The speech has been in my briefcase ever since. Multiple times each year, I pull it out when I need to refresh my memory as to why I remain engaged in what is often such an arduous struggle.

By now, I hope, people are familiar with the dismal stats. Our schools remain mostly separate and unequal. Schools that enroll 90 percent or more non-white students spend $733 less per pupil per year than schools that enroll 90 percent or more white students. That’s enough to pay the salary of 12 additional new teachers or nine veteran teachers in an average high-minority school with 600 students. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend those high minority schools, whereas the average white student is in a school that’s 77 percent white. Whites now constitute only 52 percent of K-12 demographics.MLK snipped

Meanwhile, only 19 percent of Hispanic 4th graders and 16 percent of black 4th graders scored proficient or above on the 2011 NAEP reading exam. About half of Hispanic and black students were “below basic,” the lowest category. Even our best students often leave the K-12 system unprepared, as best evidenced by a 60 percent remediation rate in the first year of college and large numbers of dropouts.

Although progress has been made, America remains in default on its promise of access to a high quality educational experience for all. In the words of Dr. King, we are addicted to the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” and mired in a “quicksand of racial (as well as class) injustice.” Powerful adult interest groups continue to benefit. That part is analogous to the civil rights struggle of the 50’s and 60’s, though thankfully so far without the snarling dogs, fire hoses and bullets. My frustration with the pace is that the vision of justice, of what is right and what is possible, is so clear. We see hundreds of charter schools, private schools and traditional public schools achieving at high levels with children of all classes and ethnicities. When we know better, as we do, we should do better. But mostly we do not.

Parental school choice alone is no panacea. Standards need to be raised; teacher recruitment, preparation, training, evaluation, and compensation systems dramatically restructured; and technology integrated to improve efficiency. But Dr. King would likely look askance at using school district attendance boundaries to corral families the way we do cattle, allowing them in and out only when it pleases the owner. This system is inherently unjust, immoral, and even evil when it condemns families to poor performing schools year after year, generation after generation. It forcibly segregates us from one another. Without choice, we de facto have Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate, but equal” that has never actually been equal. Often it destroys hope.

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August 28, 2013 0 comment
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Achievement GapBipartisanshipBlog GuestSchool ChoiceTax Credit Scholarships

Darrell Allison: Access denied, from lunch counters to zip codes

Special to redefinED August 27, 2013
Special to redefinED
Allison

Allison

Editor’s note: This is the second in our series of posts commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Darrell Allison is president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina.

Is school choice the civil rights issue for the 21st Century? I say it’s always been an issue.

While the battles, faces, and nuances have changed, we are still wrestling with core questions of equality, education as a means of opportunity, and creating a just society.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four young men from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Ezell Blair, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond, were refused service at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. because of the color of their skin. In response, they turned the nation’s attention to injustice and inequality by remaining in their seats until closing time. The sit-in continued the following day; pretty soon, after significant media attention, sit-ins were happening elsewhere in North Carolina and in cities across the South.MLK snipped

In 2013, four courageous young men followed in their footsteps by bringing attention to educational injustice to the North Carolina legislature. Reps. Marcus Brandon and Ed Hanes (both Democrats), and Brian Brown and Rob Bryan (both Republicans), each took political hits and overcame harsh rhetoric as they jointly sponsored The Opportunity Scholarship Act.

Opportunity Scholarships give students from low-income and working-class families the ability to attend non-public schools that could better meet their needs. The hard reality is, not much has changed since the 1960s when it comes to educational choices. Wealthy parents have always had access to an array of options that many lower-income, mostly minority students do not. This was the justification behind Opportunity Scholarships – to provide the same equality of choice to poor families.

As Dr. King once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere … whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” In North Carolina, we have a 30 percentage point achievement gap between non-poor and economically disadvantaged students, a 30 point gap between whites and blacks, and a 24 point gap between whites and Hispanics. If we treat Dr. King’s quote as truth and not a catchy saying, where is the moral outrage?

These statistics reveal a great divide – one that Brown v. Board of Education sought to address in 1954. The landmark case recognized segregation in public education was wrong. However, I contend that Brown v. Board was not simply and narrowly about placing black kids in classrooms with white kids. It was, at its very core, a school choice issue because one of its underlying premises was the quality of education was not the same for minority students compared to their white counterparts.

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August 27, 2013 2 comments
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Blog AdministrationEducation PoliticsParent EmpowermentSchool ChoiceTax Credit ScholarshipsVouchers

Parental school choice spurs surprising reactions from advocates of the poor

John Kirtley August 26, 2013
John Kirtley

As a white person from Iowa, I am always hesitant to write about the racial aspects of ed reform and parental school choice. I feel it is always better to have others with more credibility speak of it. But this weekend I saw two things that compelled me to write.

Kirtley: On the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's great speech, a black U.S. attorney general working for the nation's first black president filed a lawsuit to halt a program that is helping low-income black families in Louisiana choose a better school for their children.

Kirtley: On the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s great speech, a black U.S. attorney general working for the nation’s first black president filed a lawsuit to halt a program that is helping low-income black families in Louisiana choose a better school for their children.

On Saturday, I read that the U.S. Justice Department is suing the state of Louisiana to block vouchers for students in public school districts that are under old federal desegregation orders. The statewide voucher program, officially called the Louisiana Scholarship Program, lets low-income students in public schools graded C, D or F attend private schools at taxpayer expense. This year, 22 of the 34 school systems under desegregation orders are sending some students to private schools on vouchers.

The Justice Department’s primary argument is that letting students leave for private schools can disrupt the racial balance in public school systems that desegregation orders are meant to protect. Sounds like a good idea, right?

But here’s the thing: according to the Louisiana Department of Education, 86 percent of the children on the program are black. Only 9 percent are white.

If roughly 90 percent of the kids on the program are black, I don’t really understand how them moving to private schools that would better serve them would worsen segregation in the public schools. Are they leaving schools that are mostly white? If so, should they be forced to stay there even though they aren’t being well served? How would you explain that to their parents?

On the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s great speech, a black attorney general working for a black president filed a lawsuit to halt a program that is helping low-income black families in Louisiana choose a better school for their children. This law was not just backed by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal,  but was sponsored and supported by numerous black Democratic legislators. Half of the Senate Democratic caucus and a quarter of the House Democratic caucus in the Louisiana legislature backed the initial expansion of the program from its New Orleans origins.

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August 26, 2013 0 comment
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Know Your HistoryParental ChoiceReligious EducationSchool Choice

MLK and God’s schools

John E. Coons August 26, 2013
John E. Coons
Coons

Coons

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts we’re running this week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

I grew up in a Minnesota city of 100,000 with – in my time – one black family. My introduction to the reality of public school segregation came in 1962 as – now at Northwestern in Chicago – I agreed to probe the public schools of the district on behalf of the U.S. Commissioner of Education. The racial separation was there as expected, but there was one big surprise; I was astonished to find enormous disparities, not only in taxable local wealth – hence spending – among the hundreds of Illinois districts, but even in individual school-by-school spending within the Chicago district itself. I wrote about both problems, sprinkling research with “action” including marches and demonstration both in Chicago and in Selma (prior to the main event there).MLK snipped

My interest in deseg politics had already provoked a law review article on the risks of anti-trust liability for King et al. who were planning boycotts of private discriminators. On the strength of that essay, Jack Greenberg, then director of the NAACP Inc. Fund, invited me to meet with King and his lieutenants at dinner in Chicago to discuss the question. We spoke at length – mostly about boycotts but also about schools. By that time I was already into the prospects for increasing desegregation in Chicago, partly through well-designed school choice.

I won’t pretend that I recall the details of that evening. What I can say is King’s mind was at very least open to and interested in subsidies for the exercise of parental authority – which clearly he valued as a primary religious instrument. I took my older boys next evening to hear him at a South Side church and, possibly, to follow up on our conversation, but he had to cancel. We heard sermons from his colleagues, some to become and remain famous. I did not meet King again.

King’s “Dream” speech does not engage specific public policy issues – on schools or anything else. Essentially a sermon, it is a condemnation of the sins of segregation and an appeal to the believer to hear scripture, with its call for indiscriminate love of neighbor, as the life-task of all who recognize the reality of divine love for us – his image and likeness. It is purely and simply a religious appeal that declares the good society to be one that rests upon benign principles that we humans did not invent but which bind us. I don’t know King’s specific understanding of or attitude toward non-believers, but this document clearly rests the realization of the good society upon its recognition of our divine source and its implication of the full equality of all persons.

Given that premise and the Supreme Court’s insistence upon the “wall of segregation” in the public schools, plus – on the other hand – the right of parents to choose a private religious education, the logic is rather plain.

Private schools live on tuition, and many American families couldn’t afford to enroll then or now. If low-income families were to exercise this basic human right and parental responsibility enjoyed by the rest of us, government would have to restructure schooling to insure access to an education grounded upon, and suffused with, an authority higher than the state. Given the economic plight of so many black parents, the only question would be how to design the system to secure parental choice without racial segregation by private educators.

And that possibility was to be the principal crutch of “civil rights” organizations in hesitating about subsidized choice.

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August 26, 2013 0 comment
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Achievement GapParental ChoiceProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

Dr. King, the Dream & educational progress

Ron Matus August 23, 2013
Ron Matus

Fifty years ago next week, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech to 250,000 people in Washington D.C. It remains one of the greatest speeches in American history, offering a sweeping vision of hope and equal opportunity in the midst of so much fear and turbulence.

MLK snippedMany of us will reflect on how far we have come, and how far we have to go, since Dr. King energized millions with his words – and there’s no doubt education will be part of those discussions. To that end, we’re running a series of posts next week on the Dream and our schools.

We asked our bloggers to consider a scenario described by education leader Howard Fuller: On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students sit down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. and are denied service. They spark the lunch counter movement, helping to focus the nation’s conscience on racial segregation. Now, four black students sit down at a lunch counter and they’re welcomed like other diners. But they can’t read the menu.

What do racial achievement gaps say about the state of Dr. King’s dream? How does our current education system expand or contract his vision of social justice and equal opportunity? Is there reason to be hopeful when it comes to school choice, educational quality and the academic success of low-income and minority children? Please join us, beginning Monday, to read what some of our bloggers have to say. And please add your thoughts to the discussion.

August 23, 2013 0 comment
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