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Voucher Left

Education ChoiceFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipNewsParent EmpowermentParental ChoicePrivate School ScholarshipsPrivate SchoolsSchool ChoiceStudent spotlightStudentsTax Credit ScholarshipsVoucher Left

A school choice scholarship changed this LGBTQ student’s life – and may have saved it

Ron Matus January 18, 2021
Ron Matus

 

Marquavis Wilson, right, attends West Park Prep in Hollywood, Florida. A Florida Tax Credit Scholarship allowed his mom, Lamisha Stephens, to send him to the LGBTQ-affirming faith-based private school after he was bulled at his district school for his sexual identity. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

Editor’s note: To hear Lamisha Stephens and her son, Marquavis Wilson, tell the story in their own words, watch the video at the end of this post.

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – In fourth and fifth grades, Marquavis Wilson was tormented because of his sexual identity. In public schools, he was taunted with repeated slurs, teased for how he walked and talked, told he was going to hell. His life was a blur of fights and suspensions. “I am not the type of gay boy who takes stuff,” Marquavis said. “I stuck up for myself.”

But the bullying and battling took a toll. Marquavis no longer wanted to go to school. His grades fell to D’s and F’s. He told his mom, Lamisha Stephens, he wanted to kill himself.

Stephens knew she had to make a change. First, she secured a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, a school choice scholarship for lower-income students. Then she enrolled Marquavis in West Park Preparatory School, a tiny, faith-based private school she concluded would be the safe haven he needed.

It was. Now 16 and in tenth grade, Marquavis is no longer fighting. His grades have improved to B’s and C’s. He’s thinking about college and careers.

He said the scholarship and the school changed his life.

His mom said they saved his life.

Lamisha Stephens. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

“If Marquavis hadn’t come to this school,” said Stephens, a part-time supervisor at a delivery company, “he would probably be a dropout. Maybe in jail. Or he wouldn’t be here with us.”

“He would probably have taken his life,” she continued, “because he was tired of the bullying.”

Marquavis’s story reflects the tragic reality of hostility and intolerance for far too many LGBTQ students. At the same time, it offers a strong counterpoint to misleading narratives pushed by opponents of education choice. In Florida and other states, some religious schools have come under fire for policies adhering to their faith. But LGBTQ students themselves tell a more complicated story.

The most recent survey from the LGBTQ advocacy group GLSEN shows LGBTQ students in public district schools experience bullying, harassment and assault at higher rates than LGBTQ students in private religious schools. (For the details, go to survey page 119.) Given that backdrop, it’s no surprise that schools of choice aimed at LGBTQ students are springing up (see here, here and here), and that LGBTQ students are among those using – and in some cases, being saved by – education choice scholarships.

In Marquavis’s prior public schools, Stephens said she was having conferences with school officials every other week. Students weren’t the only problem.

At one point, a school security guard asked Marquavis if he had been molested, suggesting a link between molestation and sexual identity. “No,” Marquavis responded, “God made me this way.” Stephens complained to the principal. Eventually, she said, the guard was disciplined for inappropriate remarks.

Marquavis is athletic, confident, reflective, honest. His words sometimes roll out in torrents before he punctuates them with a “so” … or a “you know” … or, sometimes, a quick smile.

He said he was nervous when his mom told him he would be going to West Park Prep. The K-12 school is predominantly Black, with 110 students, nearly all of them on choice scholarships. He wondered if he’d have to fight there, too.

But his new classmates embraced him.

“On the first day,” Marquavis said, “all the kids were coming up to me. They were talking to me, asking what school I was from. They were friendly. All of them. It was unexpected.”

The school feels like a family, Marquavis said. The founder and principal, Jovan Rembert, encouraged him to be himself. He said no bullying or disrespect would be tolerated, ever.

“He was like, ‘Don’t let people get in your head,’ ” Marquavis said. “I told him about my past, and he said that’s not going to happen here. He kept his word.”

Marquavis found a safe space at West Park Prep that has allowed him to focus on being a student again.

Marquavis said there was only one incident involving his sexual identity at West Park. A new student called him a slur and was quickly suspended. The student apologized to Marquavis when he returned – and the two have been friends ever since.

Tragically, Rembert died in March, struck by a car when he went to check on an accident involving some of his students. But the warm, welcoming culture he established lives on, said teacher Billy Williams.

Last December, Williams said, Marquavis and other members of the dance team were set to rehearse for the holiday show when they veered into a little free-styling. Marquavis, comfortable among friends, poured his personality into a few new moves. “His body language and freedom of expression was so different,” said Williams, who worked in public schools 13 years before joining West Park full time. “But what was so magical was all the students embraced it. They hyped him up.”

The safe space allowed Marquavis to focus on being a student again. “He has more confidence in participating in group activities,” Williams said. “He’s more vocal. He speaks up. He asks questions.”

He’s thinking about the future, too. A diploma. Then college maybe. Then, maybe, a career in fashion.

Marquavis said without the scholarship and the new school, the fighting would have continued until he got expelled or dropped out. But West Park Prep won’t let him fail, he said.

“It’s like all love here,” he said. “It’s really all love.”

January 18, 2021 1 comment
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Advocate VoicesEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedKnow Your HistorySchool ChoiceSpotlightsVoucher 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.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/HKMatthewspodcast.mp3
February 19, 2020 0 comment
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archivED: Revisiting a podcast with Marcus Brandon

Ron Matus November 9, 2019
Ron Matus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Rep-Brandon_mixed-and-shrunk.mp3
November 9, 2019 0 comment
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archivED: 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
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From public school teacher to rebel for educational choice

Ron Matus September 11, 2019
Ron Matus

Former public school teacher Nadia Hionides has successfully melded the anti-establishment views of her youth with her passion for empowering families to make the best educational choices for their children.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – First day of school. Pick-up time. As 375 giddy students clotted in The Foundation Academy  courtyard, Nadia Hionides, the K-12 school’s founder and principal, made the rounds. She asked returning students how their summers went. She asked the new ones if they made new friends yet.

One girl toggled from cheerful and chatty to turning her head and staring, expressionless, as if listening for something in the distance. Another girl curled her lips into a tight smile as eyes cloaked by mascara locked with Ms. Nadia’s. The girl’s mom enrolled her because bipolar disorder necessitated a learning environment that was less rigid, more patient. Hionides talked most with a shy but smiley new girl, connected via tubes to an oxygen tank. At her prior school, the girl had been placed in a class with a wide range of special needs – and, in her parents’ view, not challenged academically. That won’t happen here, Hionides said.

“Some kids take a little more work, some take a little more time,” she said. “But here they feel like they belong.”

Half-hidden in Florida’s pruned-palm sprawl, the 32-year-old Foundation Academy bloomed organically from Hionides’s convictions about teaching and learning.

Nadia Hionides: Educational choice is “a rebellion.”

A former public school teacher, Hionides, 66, was repulsed by the dictates, the labeling, the testing, the tracking. She aimed to create a school for “gifted kids,” heavy on inquiry and arts and community service, that was accessible to all kids. With a big assist from Florida’s assortment of educational choice scholarships, that’s what happened.

The Foundation Academy sits on 23 acres buffered by pines. It’s intentionally and voluntarily diverse. Forty percent of its students have been diagnosed with “disabilities.” Fifty-four percent are non-white. Eighty-six percent use state educational choice scholarships, predominantly the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for lower-income students (administered by nonprofits such as Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog) and the McKay Scholarship for students with disabilities.

Too many disadvantaged students “don’t get art, they don’t get to go on field trips, they don’t get to do all these STEM things,” Hionides said. “We give them the same enrichment. We give them the same privileges. It’s called equity and justice.”

If those sound like progressive buzzwords, they are. Fifty years ago, Hionides, a self-described “hippie from New York, man,” was chanting “power to the people,” fist up, to protest the Vietnam War. Now she’s preaching “power to the people” to expand educational options. She sees a direct link between the anti-establishment views of her youth, and the values that guide her take on public education.

“It’s a rebellion,” she said of educational choice. “You are empowering yourself to make the choice for your child. You’re not bowing down to the man. This money is now your opportunity.”

“I grew up in an era where you said, ‘We’re going to stick it to the man,’ “ Hionides said. Educational choice “is a continuation of that era.”

The Foundation Academy revels in non-conformity.

Its website says it was “founded on Christ’s values of faith, hope, and love.” It holds Bible study every morning. But there are also Tai Chi classes; a deep immersion in the arts, particularly theater; and an environmental consciousness that manifests itself in an organic garden, a solar-powered aquaponic farm and a “Three R’s” class where students re-use, repair and recycle things like old furniture. The crosses on the walls can’t be missed. Neither can the piano guts hanging as artwork, the abstract sculpture that graces the front of the school, the John Deere tractor out back.

All of it serves a purpose. “Kids generally feel like misfits,” Hionides said in a 2016 interview. “But when they come to The Foundation Academy, they see everyone’s a misfit.”

Purple hair? No prob. Nose ring? Do you. Diversity, respect, acceptance, affirmation – all are core to The Foundation Academy culture. Over the years, the school has also served dozens of openly LGBTQ students, including some who were bullied relentlessly in their prior public schools.

Success here is not defined by test scores. The most recent testing analysis of tax credit scholarship schools shows academy students falling three percentile points in reading and math relative to students nationally. Hionides said it’s because the school puts zero value on standardized tests – and makes no bones about it. (A growing body of evidence supports her skepticism.)

Learning at The Foundation Academy is assessed through presentations, projects, portfolios. Six years ago, Hionides started the Jacksonville Science Festival to spur more students in more schools to learn through inquiry projects. It began with 1,500 students. It’s grown to 4,000.

Hionides makes a point of being visible and showing students she cares. “Kids generally feel like misfits,” she said in a 2016 interview. “But when they come to The Foundation Academy, they see everyone’s a misfit.”

The Foundation Academy is inspiring teachers too. A half-dozen of its 40 staffers are former public school teachers, including Courtney Amaro, a 10-year veteran who’s been at the school seven years. She stumbled on it when she took students from her prior school to the science festival. She saw kids like the ones she was teaching – low-income, mostly minority – making poised presentations on head-spinning subjects. “The light bulb went on,” Amaro said.

Two months later, she joined the rebellion.

The rebel leader won’t fit into anybody’s box either. Hionides is a Democrat. She voted for Bernie in 2016. But she often votes Republican in general elections because she can’t stand how Democratic leaders have demagogued educational choice.

Hionides’s parents immigrated from Egypt to New York when she was seven. (She’s of Greek, Lebanese and Cypriot descent.) Her father got a job at his brother’s fish meal business. She and her siblings attended public schools. She did well, she said, except on standardized tests. When she got accepted into college despite less-than-stellar test scores, “I kissed the floor.” She went on to earn a master’s in education from the University of Pennsylvania.

She taught in an inner-city elementary school. In a state-supported boarding school for students out of chances. In a center for adults with mental health issues. In all, she emphasized project-based learning. Her students loved it. Her administrators didn’t. “It wasn’t black and white, it wasn’t kids sitting in a row, it wasn’t teachers standing up in front of the class,” she said.

Hionides and her husband moved to Jacksonville in 1982. She started The Foundation Academy six years later. In the office of her family’s motel, she taught her daughter, her daughter’s friend and the sister of her daughter’s violin teacher. The latter was a “hellion,” bright but prone to bad decisions … like doing donuts on an ex-boyfriend’s lawn. The violin teacher “said please, please, please, can you help my sister?” Hionides said. “I said, ‘Why not’?”

The Foundation Academy grew from there.

In Florida’s rich environment for educational choice, Hionides said, there’s nothing to stop other educators from doing and growing their own thing too. Teachers who feel crushed in their current schools should start their own, she said.

And stick it to the man.

To hear more from Hionides about educators starting their own schools, click on the audio file below.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Nadia-Hionides-EDIT.mp3
September 11, 2019 0 comment
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Education PoliticsJack CoonsProgressives and ed reformSchool ChoiceUnionismVoucher LeftVouchers

Happy Labor Day!

Ron Matus September 2, 2019
Ron Matus

Editor’s note: On this Labor Day, we reach into the redefinED archives to reprise a post authored by Step Up For Students’ director of policy and public affairs, Ron Matus. This post, which originally appeared in April 2016, ran as part of our occasional series on the center-left roots of school choice and links labor leader Cesar Chavez to the school choice movement.

More than 30 years ago, liberal activists working to get a revolutionary plan for school vouchers on the California ballot approached labor leader Cesar Chavez, according to one of those activists, Berkeley law professor Jack Coons.

The co-founder of the United Farm Workers (Si Se Puede!) told Coons he liked school choice, but as far as supporting it publicly, No se puede. Doing so would put the teacher union’s generous financial support for his union at risk, he said.

Other evidence suggests Chavez wasn’t just politely telling a fellow traveler no. More on that in a sec. In the meantime, it’s worth noting the Chavez anecdote isn’t the only example of labor unions occasionally backing school choice or, in a few cases, outright distancing themselves from their teacher union brethren.

Consider:

  • In the 1990s, Pennsylvania Teamsters went whole hog for a voucher proposal from Republican Gov. Tom Ridge, even sending busloads of members to pro-school-choice rallies. Union leaders wanted vouchers because “first, it would help all Pennsylvania school children to a better education, and second, our members want it,” said a 1995 Teamsters newsletter. It continued, “Working-class parents who want to send their children to parochial or any other private school now face a double hit – tuition costs and high property taxes. Our members should have the option of using some of their state tax money to have their children education at the school of their choice.”
  • In 2011, two other, albeit smaller Pennsylvania unions backed another choice proposal, this one to create vouchers and expand that state’s tax credit scholarship program. The bill was co-sponsored by state Sen. Anthony Williams, a pro-school-choice Democrat. School choice scholarships “will rescue thousands of kids currently trapped in failing schools. This is not a partisan issue,” one union leader said. The bill “provides school choice to lower income families in a fiscally responsible way, without hurting public schools … ,” said another.
  • This year, for the third year in a row, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is backing an education tax credits plan that has significant labor support and came agonizingly close to passing, in a true-blue state, in 2014 and 2015. At least 30 unions have signed on and been vocal, including those representing police, firefighters, plumbers and sanitation workers.

To be sure, I’m not suggesting union alliances against choice are about to crumble, and I can’t pretend to know if extenuating circumstances led these unions to make a break. But I think it is fair to say these examples shed more light on the myth that only conservatives and libertarians see the value of having more educational options for kids. The Netherlands, a union-friendly nation, and a pretty liberal one at that, embraced one of the planet’s most complete systems of school choice a long time ago.

I also think it’s fair to suggest from these examples that teacher unions, like the NAACP, risk becoming increasingly isolated from traditional allies because of head-scratching positions that leave those allies on the outs with their kids.

In our back yard, more than 800 parents of students using tax credit scholarships in Florida work for public school districts, according to data from Step Up For Students.* Some of those parents are public school teachers. Some, in fact, are teacher union members. But because of the income eligibility requirements, I’d guess the majority are custodians, bus drivers and other blue-collar workers – workers represented by the likes of AFSCME and the SEIU.

If the Florida teacher union succeeds in its lawsuit to kill the scholarship program, some of its members may rejoice. But tens of thousands of parents, including hundreds in other labor unions, will be heartbroken. I can’t imagine how that would be good for solidarity.

Back to Cesar Chavez.

In the early 1970s, farm workers in Blythe, Calif. started their own on-a-shoestring private school because they were fed up with conditions in public schools. Parents met at the local United Farm Workers hall to get the ball rolling, as longtime choice advocate Alan Bonsteel notes in the 1997 book he co-authored, “A Choice for Our Children.” The father of the woman who would become the school’s director, Carmela Garnica, was a UFW organizer.

The Escuela de la Raza Unida became a community gem. Garnica, a Democrat, became a voucher proponent. Chavez became a frequent visitor.

Si se puede? For vouchers?

It’s not as farfetched as people think.

September 2, 2019 0 comment
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Lessons from a school choice trailblazer

Ron Matus August 3, 2019
Ron Matus
school choice

Civil rights activist Mary McLeod was a school choice pioneer, opening a private, faith-based school for African-American girls in Daytona in 1904. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Editor’s note: Throughout August, redefinED is revisiting stories that shine a light on extraordinary educators. Today’s spotlight, first published in June 2016, tells the story of civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who is best known for founding the private, faith-based school that became Bethune-Cookman University. Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis asked that Bethune’s statue replace the likeness of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith as a representative of Florida in the U.S. Capitol. DeSantis’ request came on the 144th anniversary of Bethune’s birth. The statue is expected to arrive at the nation’s capitol from Italy, where it is being crafted, in 2020.

How fitting: The choiciest of school choice states may soon be represented in the U.S. Capitol by the statue of a school choice pioneer.

A state panel nominated three legendary Floridians for the National Statuary Hall last week, but the only unanimous choice was Mary McLeod Bethune. The civil rights activist and adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt is best known for founding the private, faith-based school that became Bethune-Cookman University.

Assuming the Florida Legislature gives the Bethune statue a thumbs up too, more people, including millions of tourists who visit the hall each year, may get to hear her remarkable story. And who knows? Maybe they’ll get a better sense of the threads that tie the fight to educational freedom in Bethune’s era to our own.

With $1.50 to her name, Bethune opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904. There were public schools for black students in early 1900s Florida, but they were far inferior to white schools.

Bethune’s vision for something better was shaped by her own educational experience.

She attended three private, faith-based schools as a student. She taught at three private, faith-based schools before building her own. In every case, support for those schools, financial and otherwise, came from private contributions, religious institutions – and the communities they served. Backers were motivated by the noble goal of expanding educational opportunity. Black parents ached for it. That’s why, in the early days of her school, Bethune rode around Daytona on a second-hand bicycle, knocking on doors to solicit donations. That’s why her students mashed sweet potatoes for fund-raiser pies, while Bethune rolled up the crust.

Failure was not an option, because failure would have meant no options.

Goodness knows, I’m no expert on Mary McLeod Bethune. But given what I do know, I think she’d be amazed at the freedom that today’s choice options offer to educators. More and more teachers, especially in choice-friendly states like Florida, are now able to work in or create schools that synch with their vision and values – and get state-supported funding to do it.

Bethune was forever hunting dollars to keep her school afloat, and it wore her down. In 1902, she asked Booker T. Washington for money. In 1915, she asked philanthropist and civil rights advocate Julius Rosenwald for money. In 1920, she made a pitch on the letters page of the New York Times. (All of this can be found in “Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World,” a nice collection of Bethune’s writing.)

In 1941, Bethune even asked FDR. “I need not tell you what it has meant in Florida to try to build up a practical and cultural institution for my people,” she wrote to the president. “It has taken a wisdom and tact and patience and endurance that I cannot describe in words.”

“We are now in desperate need of funds,” she continued. “My nights are sleepless with this load upon my heart and mind.”

I can’t help but wonder what a superhero like Bethune could have done, had Florida had vouchers and tax credit scholarships a century ago. I don’t mean to dismiss the inequity in funding for choice programs – it’s real, and it deserves more attention – but inequity is relative. The funding streams available for low-income students today would have allowed Bethune to park the bike, forget the pie crust and focus on her core mission.

It would also have allowed her to rally more to the cause.

Bethune, who initially hoped to be a missionary, understood how much education and faith are intertwined for so many parents, and that it doesn’t make sense to pit public against private, or one school against another.

In 1932, she weighed in on a feud between state teacher colleges with an essay that foreshadows the all-hands-on-deck views of many of today’s choice supporters. She referenced the massive number of truant African American students and the “pitiful handful” that graduate from high school. “Unfriendly rivalry was never more needless, never more inexpedient among the schools of Florida than just now,” Bethune wrote.

The same could be said for K-12 education today.

Somehow, though, Bethune managed to end her essay on an up note, with an appeal to common ground:

Florida faces a new day in education. Grim as the picture appears today, it is not nearly so bad as it was just a few years hence, and the aspect is rapidly changing for the better; a veritable miracle is transpiring before the eye. The day for which many warriors now aging in the service have longed, the day for which they have prayed and sweat drops of blood – that new day of the hoped-for better things is approaching. With the scent of victory in the nostril, may every agency redouble its zeal; with jealousies forgotten, with the spirit of competition thrust aside, may every organization and individual unite under the banner of One Common Cause, the grim battle against ignorance and vice, and carry the issue to a glorious victory.

 

August 3, 2019 0 comment
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A forgotten ‘freedom school’

Ron Matus July 4, 2019
Ron Matus

Students picketed public schools in Blythe, Calif., when tensions between the Hispanic community and the school district boiled over. The conflict led to the creation of a private school, Escuela de la Raza Unida, which remains in operation.

Editor’s note: On this Fourth of  July, redefinED is republishing a post that first appeared in May 2016 about a California school, birthed from years of dissatisfaction with the public school system, that struck a blow for education freedom.

If the American left had fully championed school choice decades ago, we may be celebrating what happened in 1972 in Blythe, Calif., as the spark of a movement.

That spring, the Mexican-American community’s frustration with the public school system boiled over, spurring creation of a scrappy “freedom school” that became Escuela de la Raza Unida, which still exists today.

This lost story from a remote desert town is steeped in the progressive politics of another era.

In Chicano Pride. In empowering the “poor.”

Even in Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

Carmela and Rigoberto Garnica have run Escuela de la Raza Unida for more than 40 years.

“We were ahead of the curve,” said Carmela Garnica, who has led the school with her husband, Rigoberto Garnica, since the beginning.

Hispanic support for school choice runs strong. But if there is anybody who has chronicled that history, even Hispanic school choice leaders are unaware. Perhaps the story of Escuela de la Raza Unida can inspire the deep dive that this subject deserves.

The school sprang from years of dissatisfaction. The fuse-lighter was an allegation that the principal of the public middle school in Blythe manhandled a female honor roll student, apparently for showing a politically provocative film to a Hispanic student group. But parents had complained about other issues for years. They wanted diversity in the nearly all-Anglo teaching corps. They wanted history lessons that acknowledged contributions of Native Americans and Mexican Americans.

Students picketed the public schools for weeks. In the meantime, the community rallied to create an on-the-fly school where everybody pitched in to teach, cook, clean – whatever they could do. Initially, they met at a local park, according to newspaper articles and “A Choice For Our Children,” a 1997 book by California school choice supporter Alan Bonsteel. At some point, the dissidents decided to rent space for classes, a tiny former post office that could hold 50 students.

They never left.

Escuela de la Raza Unida began as a K-12 private school, and Garnica says it would have preferred to stay that way. But California doesn’t have vouchers or tax credit scholarships, despite multiple attempts at the ballot, including this liberal-led campaign in the late 1970s. Over the years, the school had to shift its mission to best match community needs with available funding.

Now it focuses on early learning and after school care, with other services thrown in. It helps adults translate documents in English, advocates for special education services, offers Mariachi lessons for young musicians. It also established one of the country’s first Chicano-owned educational radio stations.

Garnica said supporters are considering whether to go the charter school route. It could then serve older students, and emphasize career and technical education.

The freedom of a private school would be preferable to the regulatory constraints of a charter, Garnica said. But until the left embraces full choice, including private options, the community of Blythe will have to make do.

“If you’re a wealthy person, you can pay for private education. But if you’re low-income you can’t,” she said. “But just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you … don’t have the right to a quality education and the right to select the best education for your children.”

Garnica is a Democrat, and a loyal enough one for Gov. Jerry Brown to twice appoint her to a council on developmental disabilities. Her father, Alfredo Figueroa, was a United Farm Workers organizer who worked closely with Cesar Chavez. As a teen, she translated labor contracts into Spanish, and criss-crossed fields of melons and tomatoes to hand out fliers for pickets.

Yet she and her father make no bones about vouchers. They’ve pushed for them, and waited for them, for decades.

“Our students are locked into the system because of their economic status, and they can’t get out without vouchers,” Garnica told USA Today in 1993.

Garnica shrugged at the common perception that school choice is a creature of the right.

“We lived it first hand, so we know it’s not true,” she said.

There is no doubt, Garnica said, that Chavez himself was on board with creation of Escuela de la Raza Unida and, by extension, the bid for educational freedom it represented.

In a videotaped interview with Garnica’s father, Chavez talks about the need for the school, and for many more like it. (The interview can be found in this rough-cut documentary of events that led to the school’s creation.)

“The schools and the people who run the institutions want everybody to think the same way, and it’s impossible. We have different likes and dislikes, and different ideals, different motivations,” Chavez said. “And so I’m convinced more and more that the whole question of public education is more and more not meeting the needs of people, particularly in the case of minority group people … “

“Gradually,” he continued, “we’re going to see an awful lot of alternative schools to public education.”

July 4, 2019 0 comment
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