Proponents of school choice typically hail from two groups: free marketers and civil rights advocates. Marquette University professor Howard Fuller hails from the latter persuasion.
“I just think it just borders on criminality what we have allowed to happen to poor children in this country and to me to sit around tables discussing whether or not they ought to have this option or that option, in the light of their reality, is to me insane,” he argued at a recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) lecture, saying that for him school choice has “always been about social justice.” With particular gusto, he criticized hypocritical behavior of rich policy makers. He said,
“I think the second [thing] that I really learned is the hypocrisy around choice, and that is to say that I sit in rooms constantly with people whose own children are taken care of, because they have the financial capacity to take care of them, and then I hear all of these arguments about why we’ve got to be very careful about giving poor people options, but they would never accept those limitations for themselves because the reality of it is no matter what kind of government studies, no matter how many percentages the test scores, or whatever, they’re gonna take care of their children and they have the money to do so, and so to me just the grinding hypocrisy around this issue.”
Barack Obama chose enroll his daughters Malia and Sasha at Sidwell Friends School, a private school costing near $30,000 annually.
CNN’s Jonathan Mann wrote, “In Chicago, the Obama girls have been going to a private school. But now their father is preparing to be president. All around the country, the media are reporting on the story and taking sides too. Some of them have already noted that the president-elect who opposes school choice for the poor has been able to afford it for his own children.”
Their choice sparked a series of critical responses, including one commentary at the Wall Street Journal. “The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington’s public schools are among the worst in America,” states the WSJ column. “Most D.C. parents would also love to be able to choose a better school for their child, but they lack the financial means to do so.”
Dr. Fuller is the Chair of the Board of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and a member of the Charter School Review Committee for the City of Milwaukee. He commented on the lack of progress African-Americans seem to have made since the civil rights movement. “To me it’s an amazing thing in America [that] on February 1, 1960 four students sat down at a lunch counter and demanded to be served and that action helped change the world and now here we are almost in 2009,” he said.
“We could go to that same restaurant and have our kids sit down and people are willing to serve them, but they can’t read the menu.”
A series of standardized tests show significant achievement gaps between minorities and whites in core curricular areas, with the differences often felt most harshly by African-Americans. For example, in 2008 the College Board found that while the District of Columbia has an 83.7% African-American student population, only 24.3% of test-takers who received passing grades on their Advanced Placement exams came from the African-American community.
In the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, African-Americans lagged behind in science skills by 112 points, and were more likely to score two whole proficiency levels behind whites (one proficiency level behind Hispanics).
Those looking to determine what the next administration’s attitude toward vouchers and charter schools will be should look to Obama’s record during the campaign season.
In February 2008, Elizabeth Green of the New York Sun reported that Obama had indicated a surprising willingness to use vouchers “if research shows they work.” “If there was any argument for vouchers it was, all right, let’s see if this experiment works, and then if it does, whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids,” she quotes Obama.
(The NY Sun has since closed its doors due to financial troubles).
“I don’t think anyone can call him a voucher supporter out of this, but it is an intriguing response…It is a different kind of answer than most of us are used to hearing from politicians,” she quoted Joseph Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform as saying.
Williams said more recently at AEI that he thought the unanimous support of presidential candidates towards charter schools “is one of those signs that things have moved very far in terms of accepting one of the forms of choice which people sort have come to consider as a kinder, gentler form of choice.”
After Green’s column was published the Obama campaign quickly issued a press release asserting that his comments were taken out of context and “Senator Obama has always been a critic of vouchers, and expressed his longstanding skepticism in that interview.”
The future administration’s position on charter schools was more recently clarified on www.change.gov, which states
“Barack Obama and Joe Biden will double funding for the Federal Charter School Program to support the creation of more successful charter schools. The Obama-Biden administration will provide this expanded charter school funding only to states that improve accountability for charter schools, allow for interventions in struggling charter schools and have a clear process for closing down chronically underperforming charter schools. Obama and Biden will also prioritize supporting states that help the most successful charter schools to expand to serve more students.”
But Dr. Fuller encouraged caution that “in all of our euphoria about how we’re all being accepted and all of this we better not forget that there’s a sizable number of people out here who not only have not accepted this, but are waiting for their opportunity to turn this around and to push us back in a different way…”
“The fact that you can go to a charter school is an instrument that allows you to fight,” he said, continuing, “and so I’m always trying to make sure I stay committed to the fight, to the purpose of the fight, and not the particular instrument at a moment in history that allows you to engage in that fight.”
Whether the future administration’s plan for charter schools expands or contracts their presence on the education scene may very well depend on the next administration’s definition of “successful.”
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
