The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  Benson and LaRaviere pushed the field and their respective cities to at least momentarily consider genuinely progressive arguments. They demonstrated how education and school reform could—and should—become a central topic in local elections. Promoting elected school boards (as opposed to ones appointed by the mayor), “wraparound services” (including medical, psychological, and social services for students), and more and better-paid teachers, they placed education on the agenda in ways other candidates did not.

  Defense of public education led to decisive shifts in the New York state legislature in 2016. Voters elected Todd Kaminsky to office, a Democrat, over Republican Christopher McGrath. School choice became an important and divisive issue. A business-oriented, pro-charter advocacy group, New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, which was funded by groups like StudentsFirstNY—an offshoot of Teach for America—ran attack ads against Kaminsky, who earned the support of teachers’ unions as an advocate for traditional public schools. “Teachers for Todd,” an independent group supported by the teachers’ union, backed Kaminsky. The election not only flipped the seat but also tipped the state senate to a Democratic majority. For Marla Kilfoyle, who worked on the campaign to elect Kaminsky and is involved with NPE, “When we get people to run who understand privatization and we really put boots on the ground, [we can defeat candidates financed by Broad and Gates].”52

  With grassroots mobilization and the right candidate, results can be achieved. Moreover, with education increasingly viewed as a critical issue, Kaminsky illustrates the extent to which debate on education can shape integral elections.

  By 2018, the context had shifted. More seemed to be listening to the concerns of our teachers. That year, when education emerged as a significant issue in the midterm elections, over 1,800 educators ran for office. At least 177 educators ran for state legislator seats, and 43 current teachers won election. Teachers in states with an active Red for Ed movement forced education funding to be addressed in several critical races. It was part of the largest teacher movement since the unionization of northern teachers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “In the wake of historic walkouts and school actions,” NEA president Lily Eskelsen García noted, “we have a chance to leave our mark and elect to office public education champions who will raise their voices and fight for our students and public education.”53

  Oklahoma, with one of the most visible strikes of the Red For Ed movement, advanced a bevy of educators in the state primaries, challenging incumbent Republicans who had spoken out against teachers and voted against measures that supported the strikes. The Oklahoma Education Association advocated a group it called the “education caucus,” a bipartisan legislative coalition with direct ties to the field of education. Sixteen out of nearly fifty teacher candidates won, increasing the legislative caucus to twenty-five members. Though that number was small, the Oklahoma Education Association claimed in a press release, “There are now more educators in the state legislature than ever before. No matter how you look at it, public education won.”54 One of those sixteen elected, John Waldron, a social studies teacher in Tulsa who won a seat in the state house of representatives, said, “Once you look at what’s going on, you can’t just return to your classroom and pretend it’s all right. You get up, and you fight for it.”55

  In the 2018 Wisconsin gubernatorial race, educators proved decisive. Tony Evers began his career as a science teacher in high school in Tomah, a small town in the western part of the state. After teaching and then serving as a principal, school district superintendent, and finally state superintendent in 2009, today he serves as governor. In 2018 he defeated Republican incumbent Scott Walker, who had dismantled teachers’ unions. Evers, with a PhD in educational administration from the state’s flagship university, billed himself as the education candidate and made education a central issue, proposing pre-kindergarten programs and increasing annual special education funding by $600 million. The majority of Wisconsin voters supported increasing spending over reducing property taxes—a direct rejection of the conservative, budget-cutting austerity and privatization measures enacted by Walker that had led to teacher pay cuts and loss of benefits.56 Evers had a track record of consistently siding with the interests of educators, having participated in the massive teacher walkouts that shook the state in 2011. As he noted in an interview with the New Yorker when he was still the Wisconsin superintendent of education: “I realized that if I really wanted to make a difference for these kids in the state, I couldn’t rely on this position to do it. The governor is the one who sets the tone.”57 That same year, in California’s gubernatorial race, Democratic candidate Gavin Newsom defeated Republican nominee John Cox. Newsom gained the support of more unions than any other candidate in the state, including the California Teachers Association (CTA) and the California Federation of Teachers. In the midst of the Red for Ed movement and the school board scandal in Los Angeles involving Ref Rodriquez, Newsom’s campaign offered strong support for teachers, but it faced stiff opposition from charter and privatization backers. In a statement released after Newsom’s victory, the president of the CTA noted, “As educators who care deeply for our students, we stood in unity with Gavin. His election sends a clear message that in California we care about free public education for all students.”58

  School choice can also be resisted through legal channels where precedent has already been established. The moment the first voucher programs surfaced in Wisconsin and Ohio in the mid-1990s, lawsuits were filed to question their constitutionality.59 Spirited legal resistance continues today that challenges the essence of school choice, including the role of charters in perpetuating segregation. A lawsuit in Minnesota, unresolved as of the publication of this book, challenges the segregation of schools there—the first state in the country to create a charter school. Civil rights lawyers and NAACP lawyers filed suit in North Carolina to challenge legislation that permits the creation of separate, tax-supported charter schools in Mecklenburg County—the site of the once-successful busing program where schools have resegregated.60

  The litigation tactic of resistance has sometimes been successful. Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) is a national campaign to ensure that public funds are used for the maintenance of public schools rather than going to charter schools. The organization uses litigation, advocacy, and research toward this aim. Targeting private school vouchers—including traditional private, tax credit, and education savings account vouchers—PFPS works with partners such as the National Education Association and state teacher associations across the country to file amicus curiae briefs—legal documents submitted to inform (and persuade) the judges hearing cases—and mount direct legal challenges to vouchers. They have filed briefs in Montana, Michigan, and US district courts.61

  Successful cases include Cain v. Horne (2009) in Arizona, where voucher programs were found to violate an aid clause prohibiting the use of public funds to support private or sectarian schools. The 2016 Schwartz v. Lopez decision in Nevada terminated the operation of an educational savings account plan, finding such funds to be unconstitutional as they used public monies intended to pay for K–12 education. In Louisiana, the courts struck down a voucher program in 2013 because it violated the state constitution by using public funds for private schools.62 The Education Law Center, a legal advocacy group in New Jersey, filed a suit in 2016 that challenges the state commissioner of education’s decision to expand enrollment in charter schools.63 School districts in Indiana filed suit in 2019 challenging the constitutionality of state laws governing the sale of public school buildings. The law allows charter schools first claim to occupy closed school buildings while also allowing charters to purchase the property for $1, clearly benefiting the person or corporation that buys it and then governs the school. For real estate valued in the millions, charter management organizations would stand to gain millions at the expense of taxpayers.64

  There may be a right to choose that is protected by the courts, but arguably the public and those el
ected to work in their interest cannot facilitate that choice at the expense of traditional public schools. State constitutions outline and promise the right to a public education. This constitutional guarantee places limitations on school choice when magnets, charters, and other choice schools receive priority over traditional public schools. When choice schools violate a state’s constitutional commitment to public education, limitation or regulation should be applied.65

  Advocates have been involved in other ways. Save Our Schools Arizona collected over one hundred thousand signatures to challenge a statewide voucher proposal. The petition drive placed the issue on the ballot as Proposition 305 in 2018. As the voucher proposal was widely framed and seen as pulling the plug on public schools and giving advantages to the rich, voters soundly defeated the plan.66 Indeed, as PFPS has cited, voters across the country since 1966 have defeated thirty state referendum proposals, by wide margins, that would have diverted public education funds to private schools.67

  Using the courts draws on a long history of efforts to build the public school system and improve it. Since the Civil War, public education advocates have litigated to provide, improve, and ultimately desegregate public schools.68 The judicial system remains a critical institution in this fight.

  It is of the utmost importance to listen to and prioritize the recommendations of people of color who advocate for school choice from a civil rights perspective. As Dave Dennis, civil rights activist and director of the Southern Initiative of the Algebra Project, has said, charters and school choice advocates are here to stay. Working with them is a new reality. When listening to those most proximate to public education and those advocating for choice in ways that empower Black and Brown communities, common solutions become more apparent. In 1990, Polly Williams—the Black Wisconsin state representative and school choice advocate from Milwaukee—worked with Howard Fuller to put forth guidelines in a house bill that, when combined with the principles of the NAACP charter moratorium, provided for an ethical, empowering compromise. As she wrote, conditions for equitable parental choice include “the restriction of private school choice options” to local students, “the encouragement of parents to participate fully in the governance structure of the schools they select for their children . . . autonomy in the development of curricula, extracurricular activities, and rules of conduct . . . the provision of transportation to students in need of it. . . . the annual comparison of the academic achievement; daily attendance; dropout, suspension, and expulsion percentages . . . and parental involvement of participating private schools’ students with their Milwaukee public school counterparts.” For Williams, such guidelines would ensure that school choice “not produce any wrenching and devastating impact on public education” and, moreover, include “only those participating private schools with a history of effectiveness in educating poor, multiracial populations.”69

  Understanding the rationale of earlier choice advocates grounded in the civil rights movement tradition—and Al Shanker’s original vision for charter schools as a tool of the teachers’ unions—presents a compromise. It allows and learns from more ethical charters. It resonates with Terrenda White, who suggested that activists must challenge any charter reform effort that is “gripped by competitive rationales of schooling” while they “simultaneously recover less dominant visions of charter schools.” The alternative conceptions of Black-led choice proposals since the 1990s push us to re-envision what achievement means and how we measure it, while reconceptualizing just how schools relate to the state and the very raison d’être of public education.70

  The actions we take at the individual level are critically important. Beyond joining the call to publicize the inherent danger posed by school choice, there are values around which to organize—integration, for one.

  The arguments made by those who downplay desegregation do not speak for everyone. Research demonstrates that the overall attempt to desegregate schools has been beneficial. Black students have made significant gains in math and reading since National Assessment of Educational Progress began compiling test scores in 1969—the same time that federal courts ratcheted up plans to enforce widescale desegregation. Some studies estimate that the “achievement gap” has decreased by nearly one-half during the period of concentrated desegregation from the early 1970s through 1990. UC Berkeley economist Rucker C. Johnson found in 2019 that exposure to an integrated environment through all twelve years of school was effective enough to eliminate the achievement gap altogether. Academic gains occurred alongside other benefits, including increased high school graduation rates, increased college attendance and graduation rates, and a reduction in incarceration rates. Other studies point toward less tangible gains such as problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Quite notably, research also proves that desegregated education leads to social values that support integration, collaboration, and empathy.71 When seen in historic context—recalling that schools were legally segregated by race until 1954 and widescale desegregation did not occur until the early 1970s—these achievements are remarkable.72 In the words of education researcher Richard Rothstein, the gains made after desegregation “in a single generation represents an improvement rate rarely encountered in any area of human performance.”73

  Johnson tracked children in schools during the Brown decision through a longitudinal study across multiple generations. Though what he reported was not directly attributable to school desegregation alone, Johnson found an increase in the likelihood of living in excellent or very good health, and lower incidents of conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. He noted that when desegregation was enacted beginning in the late 1960s, which marked a period of concentrated attempts to desegregate schools and invest in public education, the country “witnessed the greatest racial convergence of achievement gaps, educational attainment, earnings and health status.”74 Not only did desegregation raise test scores, it elevated the standard of living for children by improving access to health care and the labor market.

  Johnson also points out that the gains for students of color did not come at the expense of Whites. The fact that Whites did not experience adverse consequences due to desegregation and, in fact, have continued to experience academic growth “flies in the face of the fears that many whites held about integration as they predicted it would have negative effects for white children,” Johnson writes. “Those negative effects simply never occurred.”75 In the present, when many White parents and teachers still say that some students (i.e., White students), will suffer if schools are integrated, it is a crucial point to make. Schools may have been desegregated to a degree, but racism has never been eliminated.

  Beyond integration, we know what works, and there are public school administrators and teachers who know how to do it. Troy LaRaviere took notes from his successful instruction and leadership at James Weldon Johnson Elementary, an all-Black school on Chicago’s economically depressed West Side. When he later began as principal at Blaine Elementary, he candidly remarked, “The same shit that worked for Black kids—guess what, it works for White kids too. It wasn’t a big change—culture, climate, instruction, curriculum, building a culture of staff collaboration, and focused professional development. I mean, we just did what the research said to do.”76 In order to attract parents to public schools, the merits of an educational environment open to all students—in an environment with diverse classrooms, public oversight, opportunities for engagement and influence over the curriculum, and access to college and future employment—must be communicated.

  Simply sending children to public schools is one of the clearest solutions to stemming the scourge of choice. It is the most difficult choice, but one that has pricked our national consciousness. When Nikole Hannah-Jones published her piece in the New York Times Magazine about enrolling her daughter, she outlined the turmoil all parents feel when signing their children up for public school.77 She also posed the most serious challenge to all families.

  Enrolli
ng in public schools is a difficult choice. But choosing traditional public schools and following, uplifting, and empowering the work of BIPOC parents and students who prioritize Black students and students of color improves education for all. Far from perfect, public schools need radical change too. But supporting change agents such as Ronsha Dickerson, Troy LaRaviere, and others who have already identified solutions will improve the education of all students. By following their lead, and organizing to improve the quality of teaching, curricula, and discipline policies, the overall educational experience will improve. Through our investment in these solutions, the scope of conversation would change toward improving traditional public schools, not providing a way out.

  Investment in traditional public education must also mean empowering parents, teachers, and local school improvement committees. Rather than coming in with “new” choice-based solutions, it is critically important to invest in BIPOC advocates in our schools and neighborhoods and support those already invested in improving education. There is a historic commitment and constitutional obligation to public education. To abandon it now only facilitates its demise.