…Their strategy of employing a divide and conquer strategy by funding Black mascots to take up their reformist cause to damage public education in communities of color for corporate interests
While once the charter and school choice sector were a bastion of primarily white conservatives clinging to their dogmas of limited government, preservation of
historic school segregation, and protection of religious freedom through vouchers, today’s proponents of school choice have diversified far beyond their narrow sect of cheerleaders of a generation ago. Today, advocates of school choice come in every hue and ethnicity and span the political spectrum from liberal to conservative. What is noteworthy, however, is the growth the movement has experienced among “leaders” within our black community. In every urban area across the country where corporate charters exist, one will reliably find a cohort of black “leaders” ardently supporting their existence and championing their expansion. Beyond specific local urban black communities, the presence of black school “choice” supporters has grown
nationally. From one-time Black Panther and Marquette University professor Dr. Howard L. Fuller, to self-titled “America’s Most Trusted Educator” and frequent cable network contributor Dr. Steve Perry, to influential political commentator and host of his own digital news show Roland Martin; federal politicians like Senator and 2020 Presidential-hopeful Cory Booker (NJ) and US Representative Hakeem Jefferies (NY), and even including prominent members of the original Black Lives Matter collective DeRay McKesson and Brittany Packnett. Indeed, the footprint and growing influence of the black school choice establishment has snowballed over the past 15 years.
At the same time, however, increasing criticism of the same corporate charter schools,
and “choice” approach is also growing from urban black grassroots activists who live in the communities where such schools were established. Organizations like Journey for Justice (J4J) under the leadership of Jitu Brown out of Chicago, Parents Unified for Local School Education (PULSE) directed by Sharon Smith and Johnnie Lattner in Newark, the Alliance to Reclaim our Schools (AROS), as well as vocal academic activists like Dr. Julian Vasquez-Heilig, Dr. David Stovall and Dr. Adrienne Dixon, who, like the educator from Philadelphia referenced above, similarly identify the imperative for quality schools, the historical deficiencies in public education serving urban communities and the lack of cultural representation in both classroom leadership and in curriculum. Further, these black activists standing against the corporate
“choice” approach to urban education employ much of the same language and rhetoric that initiated in the Civil Rights Era, which has subsequently been used to justify the need for the present and broader implementation of charter options with one central distinction: they are calling for the improvement and greater investment into urban public schools, not their replacement with corporate charters.
With such contrary perspectives with both “sides” of black “leadership” taking up their
respective positions claiming to recognize the importance of their community’s children having access to quality education, a few questions emerge. How can either camp claim to be representatives of the best educational interests of the black community and yet have completely opposing views on the school choice issue? What are the differences, and/or blind spots in each segment of black “leadership’s” analysis and conclusion on “choice” in urban education? Is there a middle-ground to be claimed that balances the approach that satisfies such divergent views? And lastly, how do we identify the real activists, from the fake?
I acknowledge the documented shortcomings of public education both in
the past and today, specifically in low-income urban communities of color. I, too, view our public schools as inefficient extensions of our democracy with the full understanding, however, that democracy is inherently inefficient. I am aware and concede most of the criticisms the education reform community make about our urban public-school system are correct but lack mature examination. There is a separate and unequal delivery of diversified 21st-century curriculum and resource allocation between our public schools and theirs. There is a pervasive narrowing of curriculum leaving our students of color underexposed to the arts and technology. Our school buildings are aging, and some are crumbling. Our test scores, when compared to suburban whiter and more affluent schools, are lower. Our graduation rates, college acceptance, and college completion rates are lower. That established, I still believe our urban public schools are, nevertheless, far better for our urban minority communities than the corporate charters for which the contemporary black education “leadership” structure has been shilling for over a decade. I will elaborate further…
I, like many other activists working on behalf of protecting urban public education,
recognize and acknowledge all of its shortcomings and imperfections and commit to working to improve the system serving our children and communities. We make our demands known unequivocally: that our public schools be better and set out to use whatever tools at our disposal to further our mission whether that be protesting, voting, lobbying lawmakers, organizing within our community, writing opinion pieces – all to fight for better education for our community. It is a long, tiring fight that never ends – and victories are few and far between. Such activism leaves folks frustrated and angry; sometimes lonely and alienated. The work is unglamorous and often thankless. It certainly does not come with a large national platform, corporate backing, or a healthy bank account. Indeed, true advocacy on behalf of the black community, our people, America’s Wretched of the Earth, never has and never will.
The validity of today’s critiques on the shortcomings in urban public schools notwithstanding, what its proponents like me see within our urban public schools is a
continuation of an education system we built. Following the Civil War during Reconstruction, the first institutions black communities and enclaves established, outside of churches, were public schools open to every black child sustained through the organization of regular community collections. The central concept of educating every child has been at the cornerstone of growing the black community in America since the first days we were legally free, and legally allowed to educate ourselves. Public Education is an extension of our Black History in America, and public-school advocates know about its historical significance to our community.
Further, we also understand the cultural significance urban public schools have in the
lives and fabric of our neighborhoods and its residents. It is quite common for Black people who reside in America’s inner-cities to be descendants of several generations who lived within the same city and even community. As such, it is customary to have children graduating from the same school their parents and even their grandparents graduated from. Not only have many of our familial forbears attended and graduated from our urban public schools, they played in the band there, worked on the school newspaper, were on the cheerleading team, participated in JROTC, contributed on the football fields and basketball courts, and in sum, earned both the school its surrounding community positive recognition for their contribution as students. The urban public school grew along with the community and became part of the community. Indeed,
many neighborhoods are still identified by the situatedness of their schools.
Communities grow as extensions of the school community. Our family members worked as educators, paraprofessionals, security officers, administrators, and guidance counselors in our urban public schools where in the not too distant past, as urban areas began hemorrhaging industrial and manufacturing jobs, the largest provider of employment was often found in the urban school system. Thus, not only did the urban school grow along with our neighborhoods in fostering a unique community culture, they were the means by which many of our elders sustained a quality living from which many of us benefitted. Far beyond the delivery of the three Rs, urban public schools have proven their worth to their respective Black communities. And as
a sharp “back to the city” movement continues to sweep across the nation with cities openly courting both white and black middle-income earners to take up residence, it is our public schools inhabited by primarily low-income black and Latino children that are keeping our urban neighborhoods affordable and keeping the middle-class out thereby slowing gentrification and displacement.
Sadly, among the so-called black education “leadership” establishment, it’s become envogue to look our urban public schools through a deficit lens – what they lack rather than the value they serve. Comparing our urban public schools that have been deliberately starved adequate economic resources, whose children often come from economically tenuous backgrounds and deal with many other factors that are byproducts of sustained economic and political injustice, to whiter suburban schools is not only intellectually dishonest, but deliberately disregards the systemic and persistent inequities that our white supremacist government has kept in place since Emancipation. Fact is, our urban public schools do amazing work given the circumstances they are working in. Kids achieving, graduating, going to college, graduating, and moving on with their lives and giving back to the next generation is not abnormal, but quite usual. Many black urban parents and urban educators know all too well the successes of our schools, even as the finger-wagging of both white and black politicians, policymakers, hedge fund investors, and the black education “leadership” class increases in both frequency and ferocity.
This shouldn’t be surprising, however. As neoliberal ideology that has dominated
American economics and governance continues growing in prominence, the shift of
responsibility of maintaining urban public schools has increasingly shifted away from the public at all levels of government, and more toward the Individual (the individual household, the individual student, the individual teacher, the individual school, the individual district). The result within urban public education is the manufactured market opportunity to capitalize on a contrived failure narrative of our urban public schools, and indeed facilitate an environment where their success is mitigated, to again, further a failing narrative creating opportunities for people with the capital (economic and political) to monetize off their created crisis. This, more than anything, explains the explosion of the presence of corporate charter networks nationwide,
all of whom receive substantial corporate investment and are operated by near-exclusively white capitalists. What this doesn’t explain though, is the willful tag-teaming and shilling by the black educational “leadership” establishment and their direct ideological and practical conflict with localized black activists who want better education for their community. Simply put, I’m asserting, the black education “leadership” class as referenced above are frauds, wolves in sheep’s clothing, corporatists disguised as activists, and not at all are not who they claim to be.
Typically, in efforts to see the virtues of “both” sides, audiences adopt a passive stance in settling on a position where they conclude, “maybe this is simply a matter of differences in approach to solving a similar problem.” This approach is commonly applied to the divergent approaches of Washington and Dubois as to the best methods for the Negro to advance in civic and economic standing in a post-Civil War and Jim Crow era. While critique of Washington’s affinity for industrial and technical education as opposed to Dubois’ demand for the same classic liberal education that northern whites received, few take up the argument that either Washington or Dubois intended, within their respective approaches to capitalize off of, or ignore, black suffering. It is near-universally accepted that both men put forward their ideas with the central goal of improving the lives of black people, despite whatever valid critique and shortcomings were attached to their respective philosophies.
Similar framing of debates are often attached to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as they are often pitted as rivals, or combatants. While MLK’s strategy of non-violent resistance stood in stark contrast to Malcolm X’s rhetoric of responding to violence with violence and that Black Americans should protect our human-ness by any means necessary, by time both were slain, both men’s legacy as leaders for Black progress was unquestioned. Even today, most would recognize that both men wanted the same things for Black people in America, full rights and freedom to self-determine their futures, but viewed the paths to the same destination as different – even complimentary.
In the portrayal of claiming to want the best for Black children and the Black community in matters of education, there is similarly no middle ground. The “leaders” in the black education reform establishment, those allied with Teach for America, the Broad Institute, the now defunct Blacks Alliance for Educational Options, Education Leaders of Color, 50 Can, the Walton Foundation, the Sarah and John Arnold Foundation, and a slew of other education “reform” outfits cannot continue to ignore the criticisms of what corporate charters have wrought on urban communities without first asserting your allegiance to them.
The black “leaders” cannot both to advocate for a packaging of education that stresses discipline, compliance, and testing on black student bodies that white suburbanites, whose schools you compare urban public schools to in order to cast as deficient, would never send their children to while continuing to pretend to be advocates for quality education for black people. These “leaders” cannot both tout the virtues of school “choice,” where corporate charters only exist in communities of color where residents’ democratic rights have been taken away from them; where residents cannot vote for their local boards of education, and whose public schools are closed against their will to be given away to the same corporate interests the black “leadership” establishment represent. Black “leaders” in education cannot be both on the side of our communities if they take up the causes funded by hedge fund owners, and foundations whose
principals actively work to suppress black wages and rob black families of needed economic and health benefits. Black “leaders” in education cannot be consider themselves representatives of the best interests of black communities and simultaneously ignore the plainly identifiable correlation between the gentrification, resident displacement and the rise of corporate charters in urban America. The black educational “leadership” establishment cannot be who they claim to be if they are silent in connecting the dots between the rise in corporate charters and Teach for
America, and the resulting decline of black educators.
Somehow, those in the black educational “leadership” establishment are committed to
sitting silently, willfully oblivious, and complicit in the face of the aforementioned, welldocumented educational malpractice impacting exclusively black communities. Yet because of their willingness to point out the perceived (and created) deficiencies of urban public schools, they claim both the role and platform of “leader” or “authority” while simply being a mouthpiece for wealthy whites who have shown little about black people. Those of the black education reform clique all are a traitorous lot, lacking a true purpose in representing the educational interests of our community, but committed to the steadfast slurping of corporate charter schools forced on Black and Latinx communities. In return, these black “leaders” received what they truly wanted, not educational excellence and liberation for our communities but a gifted platform, name recognition, and loads of funding for continuing their cheerleading, willful ignorance, and silence. These black mascots for corporate charters are not “leaders,” but
charlatans profiting off the monetized starvation and exploitation of urban schools, in Black communities attended by Black kids.
We aren’t the same, and we don’t want the same things, but simply going about it in
different ways. The black personalities of the school “choice” establishment aren’t “leaders” nor are they true to the cause they claim to represent. They are overtly harming our Black communities, neighborhood, and schools. There are, however, real black leaders out here working to improve education for our next generation while upholding their commitment to our history and protecting our communities. But likely, most folks will never know their names because they’re too busy working, and not given a corporate-subsidized platform, and too strapped for cash to host anything.
