The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  Studies like those from KIPP and charter school associations confirm the suspicions of many skeptics who charge that school choice does not provide equal access. Students who require specialized instruction—including bilingual instruction or differentiated instruction for emotional or behavioral needs—need more one-on-one time with qualified teachers, individualized education plans with a team of educators and social workers, and other resources, including alternative and more costly forms of assessment, among others, all of which are difficult to provide in any financially strapped school. By excluding and pushing out such students, selective schools can bolster their test scores.

  Any way one cuts the statistical cake, racism remains baked into our education system. As in the early era of the freedom of choice plans in the 1960s, the vast majority of disadvantaged students remain stranded in an inherently unequal system. But some parents, educators, and activists are resisting.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Resisting School Choice Through Counternarratives and Coalitions

  AS MUCH AS I LEARNED about the history and complexity of school choice in the board rooms, media centers, city auditoriums, and school cafeterias across Charleston, South Carolina, I also learned that there is resistance to the attack on what remains of public education. Though the choice movement has grown in scope and power, a national movement and a counternarrative have begun to emerge to challenge it, including an educational justice movement in Chicago, a city that was earlier critical to the advent and explosive growth of school choice. It is this conflict—from Charleston to Chicago—that comprises the struggle for educational equity and “civil rights” today.

  Charleston is a microcosm of the larger fight to prevent school choice from closing or converting the last remaining traditional public high schools, starving public schools of desperately needed funds, and empowering entrepreneurs instead of Black and Brown families. The struggle in Charleston communicates that resisting school choice is a much more difficult sell than choice itself and signifies how local context reigns supreme. The United States is the only wealthy nation on earth that does not mention education in its constitution, which means that education policy is largely relegated to and therefore fiercely debated at the state and local level. The parameters of these fights are not equal: federal funding supports charters, state governments allow vouchers, and philanthropist dollars back pro-school-choice politicians. The fight, then, must be proximate to the local centers of power—school district boardrooms and administrative offices, the schools our children attend, and the cafeterias or auditoriums where parent organizations meet. In education, thinking locally is a brutal reality. Without a firm grounding at the local level, organizers face nearly insurmountable challenges when trying to tackle problems at the state and federal levels.

  Ronsha Dickerson of Camden, New Jersey, a parent, public school advocate, and activist, demonstrates how the struggle to preserve education begins locally. Born and raised in Camden in a community in the central part of the city that, in her words, “took care of itself,” Dickerson was a proud graduate of Camden High School in 1995. As she looks back on what she feels was a strong education, Dickerson remembers that families and neighbors were involved in the schooling of their children. She was taught by Black teachers who lived in the neighborhood and knew her family. Nearly a statistical impossibility today, Dickerson did not have a White teacher until she was in the fifth grade, and this teacher understood the life of his students from Camden. Today, as a mother, Dickerson remains fully invested in the same school system, having chosen to send each of her six children to local public schools.1

  But after twenty years of enrolling her kids in public schools, Dickerson noticed that things had changed. New Jersey’s Urban Hope Act, signed into law in 2012, created “Renaissance schools” in the state’s worst-performing areas, which included Camden. Championed by Republican governor Chris Christie and following the blueprint established under Richard Daley and Arne Duncan in Chicago, the act opened the door for charter schools, with state per-student expenditures on charters nearly equaling spending on traditional public schools (95 percent). Then, in 2013, Christie took over the Camden school district, wresting control from the local district by appointing a school board and canceling the local elections that traditionally determined who occupied the seats.2 Christie appointed Paymon Rouhanifard as the new superintendent of Camden schools. A thirty-two-year-old “reformer” of the likes of Michelle Rhee, and someone who had spent more time on Wall Street than in the classroom, Rouhanifard ran the district according to the principles of school choice. He grew the number of charters, many of which included “hybrids” or co-located charters, where a charter coexisted in the same space as a traditional school. In many cases these coexisting schools were essentially segregated—with different entrances, different class periods, and different teachers. In many instances, these charters were then in a position to “take over” the school. In a brazen move, Rouhanifard proposed and oversaw the demolition of the city’s oldest public high school and replaced it with four smaller magnet schools run by a charter organizer. He fired over two hundred teachers, and other experienced and unionized teachers were pushed out, only to be replaced by an influx of teachers who were not unionized. Connected to Teach for America and embracing the prevailing corporate mindset for reform, newly hired teachers in Camden were largely White women who did not live in the community. By the end of Rouhanifard’s controversial tenure, 8,200 students, more than half of all students in the city, were in over two dozen charter or “hybrid” schools, compared to 6,800 remaining in traditional public schools. Keith Benson described it as demoralizing reform “forced” on the community. The result was a very different educational landscape than what Dickerson and Benson knew from childhood and their work in the community.3 It was much more of a “market,” and those running it did not check in with locals.

  For Dickerson, it was too much. At the same time of Rouhanifard’s reforms, in May 2013, students across the Delaware River in Philadelphia used social media and organized a series of walkouts. Striking less than one year after massive teacher strikes in Chicago, the Philadelphia students protested over $800 million in state budget cuts that had resulted in proposals to shut down over forty schools, with the concomitant loss of 1,600 teachers. The walkout took place on the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Brown decision, and thousands of students from twenty-seven schools marched and shut down traffic outside Philadelphia’s city hall and the school district office.4 In Camden the following year, students called “Momma Ronsha” (Dickerson) who came and marched in solidarity as hundreds protested massive budget cuts in New Jersey that reflected the trends in Philadelphia and across the country.5 As a fervor of resistance grew across New Jersey, Dickerson began organizing at the local level with greater intensity and frequency, forging a coalition with the local teachers’ union and others. In drawing the lines for a protracted struggle in this embattled city, Dickerson opened another local front in a much larger battle.

  Encountering misinformation at every turn, grassroots education organizations are forced to combat ignorance—willful or otherwise—with research and debate. Since school choice is often understood as a right, most parents are not aware of the negative implications of choice or the fact that choice is not an immutable policy. Parents and advocates locally must engage in conversations and raise awareness about school choice. Research and published statements critiquing school choice can be shared through social media, published in local print media, brought to school boards in public hearings, and discussed in social settings. Taking a page out of choice advocates’ playbook, defenders of public education must confront the spread of choice with research and education about the privatization of public education.

  Troy LaRaviere, an activist school administrator in Chicago, illustrates how resistance grows from sharing information about education with communities and families. Chicago also demonstrates how a city central to the development of cho
ice remains a critical site of resistance to it. In 2011, LaRaviere accepted a position as principal at Blaine Elementary School, one of the city’s best-performing traditional public schools, located on the predominantly White North Side. That same year, Rahm Emanuel became mayor of Chicago. Emanuel, having served as President Obama’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2010, brought a lot of fanfare—and criticism. With his appointment came the corporate, get-tough policies of his predecessors. It was a similar move to what unfolded in Camden and Memphis. Inheriting the school choice plans of Arne Duncan, who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools before his appointment as secretary of education under Obama, and former mayor Richard Daley, education became a thorn in Emanuel’s side.

  LaRaviere spoke out against charter schools and the Rahm administration, drawing attention to unjust budget cuts and misuse of education funding across the public school system. He spoke against the culture of fear, one that LaRaviere felt suppressed criticism of policy making that was detrimental to students. It was an environment that LaRaviere scathingly identified as “annoying micromanaging and finger-pointing without the slightest bit of intelligent conversation and support.” One principal referenced a “gag order” that prevented administrators and teachers from voicing concerns.6 LaRaviere’s criticism was published both locally and nationally and became a lightning rod for spirited debate.7

  The timing was critical for Chicago principals to speak up. With the city school board’s consent, Emanuel authorized the closure of fifty schools in 2013 as part of their solution to turning around failing schools.8 It inspired a costly campaign that ultimately contributed to Emanuel deciding not to seek reelection in 2018. LaRaviere and others drew attention to other serious problems in the district under the flawed leadership of Emanuel and Duncan. According to research LaRaviere conducted, charter schools and the “turnaround” schools—failing schools rebranded, reorganized, and put under new management—were not only failing but also overrepresented among schools with the poorest academic performance. Traditional public schools, meanwhile, had the highest growth of student enrollment. “I did research about the situation, and I got the Washington Post and Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, all the local places,” LaRaviere says. “I fed the data to them. I compelled principals into talking to reporters and got that issue on the front page.”9

  Ronsha Dickerson and Keith Benson likewise used the press in Camden to counter the narrative put forth by the harsh school choice policies implemented under Chris Christie and Paymon Rouhanifard. In the midst of rampant school closures, teacher layoffs, and what they identified as false narratives of progress, Benson and Dickerson proffered a scathing critique. In their commentary in the local Courier Post, they asserted that Rouhanifard lacked “the requisite education, practical experience and certification qualifying him” to lead the struggling district. Based on their research, their experience in the district as parents, educators, and organizers, they found that Rouhanifard’s disruptive reforms “under the falsehood of school choice” led to nothing but “an explosion of test-centric, equity-denying, ‘no-excuse’ charters that are forced into low-income minority communities exclusively, for low-income minority children specifically; understaffed and under-resourced public schools; and an expanded perception that Camden’s public schools are inherently inferior places to learn.”10

  The message was not well-received. New Jersey state representative Arthur Barclay and school board member Felisha Reyes Morton issued a blistering rebuttal, defending the work of the superintendent and the school choice policies he pushed and chastising what they saw as a “personal attack strategy.” They quoted former first lady Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”11

  Sharing our findings and criticism of school choice is critical to grassroots public education advocacy across the United States. Though these views are often unpopular, we can create counternarratives and document the institutional racism through the voices of those who experience it firsthand.12 As David Stovall wrote from the front lines in Chicago, where he observed resistance to the charter movement on the ground, “a combination of firsthand accounts—as more students, families, and former teachers share stories about their experiences with charters—and awareness of the realities of broad-based oppression have great potential for galvanizing resistance.”13 This was exactly what Ronsha Dickerson had in mind. Dickerson and other parents, educators, and advocates saw that the reforms around New Jersey’s Urban Hope Act and the privatization agenda it entailed were put forth as if “ordained that way,” as if there were no alternatives.14 For Dickerson, it was a matter of organizing and amplifying a counternarrative to demonstrate that choice was not the only or even the right solution. Counternarratives can lead to a revolution of sorts or sustained, critical community engagement and praxis, putting theory into practice on the ground. The “alternative account” of the impacts of charter schools, alongside the numbers published by critical educators in the movement, like Dickerson and LaRaviere, inspired resistance.

  Ronsha Dickerson grew up in the Gateway neighborhood of central Camden. She attended John Greenleaf Whittier School through eighth grade and graduated from Camden High School in 1995. Later, both her former elementary and high schools were closed, torn down, rebuilt, and reopened as a charter and a magnet school, etched out of the school choice theory supported across the city and state by Democrats and Republicans alike. As Dickerson enrolled her children in the public schools, she learned firsthand the impact of privatization.15 For Dickerson, it was critical for parents and community members to regain control at the local level. After observing the segregation perpetuated by choice, the dismissal of Black teachers who lived in the communities where they taught, and feeling the frustrations of students harmed by such policies, Dickerson decided to act. After organizing walkouts and convening with other organizers, they decided to gain back citizens’ vote for school board candidates.

  Teaming up with the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Education Association, and the Camden Education Association, Dickerson joined a coalition called Save Camden Public Schools—which included collaboration with the NAACP led by Keith Benson—to take back the vote through the courts. Eventually a state appellate court ruled in their favor, effectively placing the issue on the ballot of whether to maintain or overturn mayoral appointment of the school board of Camden. Then they organized locally to get the ballot initiative passed, with volunteers working twelve-hour days, canvassing the community door-to-door to convince voters to vote to restore elections. In a city often regarded as one of the poorest and most dangerous in the United States, BIPOC voters turned out in numbers unseen since the election of President Barack Obama. A majority of Camden voters let it be known that they wanted to elect their own school board.16 In Chicago, Troy LaRaviere—who grew up in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood and was educated in the Chicago Public School System—understood the city, his students, and the needs of his community too. After his own schooling he had joined the US Navy and ultimately enrolled at the state flagship university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.17 He was the quintessential advocate for traditional public education. As he noted:

  Those of us who know better must lift our voices to persuade the residents of Illinois to reject these backward ideas and to oust the politicians who peddle them. We must work together to build our own system-wide improvement effort. The future of public education is at stake. . . . We must lift our voices and be heard.18

  Like Dickerson, LaRaviere was formidable. He had begun his teaching career as a supporter of the school choice movement. He had submitted a proposal in 2004 for a Black charter school on the South Side, where he was from. It was part of the comprehensive choice program ushered in under Duncan and Daley’s ambitious “Renaissance 2010” school choice reform agenda. He served as an assistant principal at a “turnaround school” and also as a principal at a private school. “I’ve shown a willingness to experiment and to try things out,�
� LaRaviere says.19

  LaRaviere sampled from the menu of choice, taking part in the options it had to offer. “But at some point,” LaRaviere notes, “you have to start paying attention to results. At some point the experimentation tells you something and you have to sit back and look at what it tells you. And when I sat back, that was the beginning of it all, and charters aren’t doing the same as the public schools. That was the beginning of the questioning for me.”20 It was at this point that he began advocating for public education, protesting Emanuel’s policies and the false narratives and harm perpetuated by school choice.

  LaRaviere joined the chorus of critics challenging Emanuel, including Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis. LaRaviere amplified his critique through the media, at one point even appearing on a TV ad for Bernie Sanders in 2016 assailing the mayor: “We have endured a corrupt political system, and the chief politician standing in our way for us getting good schools is our mayor.”21

  As many teachers might have predicted, the city fired LaRaviere. In a letter that outlined the causes for his dismissal, the district noted, “As a principal of a Chicago Public School, you owe a duty of loyalty to the [school] board, the CEO and their designees.” The district found LaRaviere’s actions—speaking publicly against the mayor, engaging in public criticism of district policy, and refusing to follow the district’s standardized test protocol—to be “reckless, critical and insubordinate.”22 LaRaviere’s dismissal was a controversial move. David Moore, a Chicago alderman from the South Side, heavily criticized the decision on social media: “All I hear is, stay in your place . . . and don’t dare challenge the DICTATORIAL AUTHORITY designed to put corporate profits over effective public education.” Sanders called the termination a “politically motivated retaliation because he dared to stand up to the mayor of Chicago.”23