The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  As federal desegregation initiatives would not be enforced, school desegregation stalled in the North, and though public schools desegregated in the South, the nation as a whole effectively abandoned the ideals of racial integration. This precipitated a color-blind ideology in education policy that it was wrong to “see” race. Desegregation was great in principle, but “forced busing” was un-American. Additionally, parents who identified with the “silent majority” wanted the means to escape what they saw as a failing public education system. By the time Nixon tendered his resignation in 1974—twenty years after the Brown decision—the ideology of school choice was on the rise as a platform for disaffected northerners and southerners alike.

  Gerald Ford maintained Nixon’s policies. Ford’s one-term successor, President Jimmy Carter, made some progressive gains in education, most notably creating the Department of Education in 1979 and garnering the support of the teachers’ unions. His successor Ronald Reagan, in many ways completing the Republican revolution of the 1960s, indelibly shaped the field for choice. Reagan advanced the narrative of failed public schools and effectively kept desegregation efforts at bay, both critical to fomenting choice. Reagan would also break new ground by advocating for states’ rights in the realm of education policy and privatization from the highest office in the land. By 1980, just one-third of Americans expressed confidence in US public education, down from 59 percent in 1966.20 Public opinion emboldened more drastic measures. Nixon had sought to play the middle of the road, forestalling any meaningful desegregation efforts or reinvestment in public education. But Reagan was unabashedly reactionary, seeking to roll back any and all federal presence in education and to demand privatization. In 1980, he was the ideal presidential candidate to carry out more fully his conservative predecessors’ vision. Reagan was already experienced in national politics, having served as a spokesperson for Barry Goldwater in his 1964 campaign, and he maintained commitment to Milton Friedman’s economic vision.

  Reagan continued to reject desegregation and the means to achieve it, seeing it, like Nixon, as unnecessary and harmful while expressing personal disdain for racial separation and exclusion. “While racial segregation simply has no place in American public schools,” Reagan noted, “neither has forced busing. It has wrought too much damage already.” Public school districts should not bus for the purposes of desegregation, Reagan believed, and the federal government should have no role in educational policy making at the local level. “States’ rights” ought to be the cornerstone of education policy. On the campaign trail in 1980, Reagan emphasized that if elected he would order federal agencies—in particular the Department of Education that Jimmy Carter had signed into law—”to get off the back of state and local school systems, to leave the setting of policies and the administration of school affairs to local boards of education.21 In 1980 in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been murdered sixteen years before, Reagan outlined the premise of his political agenda. With no mention of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, he declared to a crowd of over fifteen thousand Mississippians at the Neshoba County Fair, “I believe in states’ rights.” Writes Joseph Crespino, in In Search of Another Country, “Reagan pledged that, if he were elected, he would ‘restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.’“22 States’ rights did not correlate to school choice directly, but it threw up a larger defense to protect the individual’s right to choose as opposed to “forcing” parents to send their children to “government schools.”

  Elected president, Reagan was true to his word. His administration did not file any desegregation suits, and, like Nixon, he supported school districts that were sued for de jure segregation. Within his first year in office, Congress rescinded the Emergency School Aid Act, terminating the largest program committed to even a watered-down version of school desegregation. Reagan also slashed desegregation assistance centers, which were authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to assist desegregation attempts at the local level.23 He proposed that parents embrace voluntary choice programs such as highly marketable “magnet schools”—though these were selective and few in number—to integrate schools in racially segregated neighborhoods. Such schools were effective but miniscule in scale when compared to widespread mandates to integrate entire districts. Voluntary choice programs like magnets also co-opted choice with an intent to desegregate, expanding choice beyond a simple tool to preserve segregation. The Justice Department actively worked to dismantle large-scale desegregation initiatives, with varying degrees of success, in Nashville, Tennessee, and Norfolk, Virginia. For Reagan’s administration, such plans were unfair to the individual and the local school district. Reagan also elevated Justice William Rehnquist—the Supreme Court’s leading opponent of desegregation—to chief justice after Warren Burger’s retirement in 1986.24

  Reagan did not stop with cutting or terminating federal funding for desegregation. While calling to restore prayer in schools, Reagan also supported tax credits and breaks for families enrolling in private schools. Republicans in their 1980 party platform reaffirmed their “support for a system of educational assistance based on tax credits” to help cover the costs of private tuition. Reagan also vowed to strengthen the tax-exempt status of private institutions after the courts began to deny such breaks to private schools that discriminated based on race. Reagan sought to restore tax exemption in order to “compensate parents for their financial sacrifices in paying tuition at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary level.” Reagan also proposed throughout his administration federal vouchers for education for the first time since Brown.25 For Republicans, it was a matter of “fairness” and improving poor families’ access to choice and private schools. Claiming that the government had overstepped its bounds by denying tax exemptions, Reagan sought to restore tax exempt status to Bob Jones University, one of dozens of schools explicitly committed to segregation. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Bob Jones University and the Reagan administration, but it was clear that the president sided with privatization and stood firmly against any move toward integrating public schools.26

  One of Reagan’s foremost commitments in education was to overturn a crowning legislative accomplishment of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who had created a new Department of Education out of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Strongly endorsed by the National Education Association, the largest teacher union in the country, the legislation had passed by four votes and became a divisive, partisan issue. It was an affront to small-government Republicans, especially Reagan, who referred to it as a “bureaucratic boondoggle.” Seeking to “not tie them up in red tape,” the GOP was committed to abolishing the department and restoring decision-making to local officials.27

  Reagan appointed Terrell Bell, former teacher and the commissioner of higher education in Utah, as secretary of the Department of Education. Following the party platform, Reagan pressured Bell to abolish the department. Dismantling it was supposed to begin in 1981, when Reagan created the National Commission on Excellence in Education to study the state of education in the country.28 Bell and the commission, however, triggered an unintended consequence when they released their findings in a report called A Nation at Risk in 1983. The report had unfathomable impact. Focusing on a decline in test scores, lax academic standards, and misguided educational aims, no other federal report offered such a decisive, singlehanded blow to the reputation of public education. It fed the bleak outlook on the education system and the low achievement of American students. “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity,” the report concluded, “that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” It suggested, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”29 The report argued that the economy, productivity and, therefo
re, quality of life were all in peril because of an inadequate, ineffective system of education.30 Militant in its rhetoric and strident in its tone, the report issued a compelling call to action that galvanized a nation and ironically strengthened the role of the federal government in education. It also framed a state of panic and anxiety in public education that further lowered the perception of schooling in the United States.

  As a publication, A Nation at Risk was wildly popular. More than five hundred thousand copies were distributed to administrators, teachers, policymakers, school districts, and the press. Over seven hundred articles in forty-five newspapers referenced the report.31 A Nation at Risk only confirmed the fears and suspicions Americans held about public education. The ominous tone crystallized an already popular viewpoint that public education in the United States was a failing endeavor.

  Advancing the aims of Reagan and the Republican agenda, the report also established a front from which to attack teachers and teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions had been on the rise since the early 1960s, particularly in the urban North. In the aftermath of strikes in New York in 1968, for instance, when the city agreed to meet with union representatives, the city observed that union participation among teachers had grown during the 1960s from 5 to 97 percent. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Philadelphia followed suit, and membership in the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers grew dramatically. Even as numbers declined in private-sector unions and trade unions, public school teachers were on their way to becoming one of the most unionized sectors in the nation, second only to the postal workers. Unionized teachers constituted a threat to the privatization of education and, as such, stood in the way of the GOP brand of education reform.

  Though Reagan’s wish of abolishing the Department of Education was not realized, the impact of A Nation at Risk inspired a new “accountability” movement—one that held schools and especially teachers to a tougher standard. It is not surprising, then, that teachers were blamed for the mediocrity of public education. With teachers’ unions already scorned by an administration supportive of big business, those in the classroom were easy to blame. As the country retreated from desegregation and the ideals of integration—integration that had tangible positive gains for all students—teachers became an even easier target. The report found that the teaching profession failed to attract “academically able” people. Teacher education programs were dismal and inadequate for the task. In short, the report concluded that “the professional working life of teachers is on the whole unacceptable.”32 The report recommended fairer compensation for all teachers, but reformers asserted that “salary, promotion, tenure, and retention decisions should be tied to an effective evaluation system.”33 Policymakers suggested merit-based compensation. As education researcher Dana Goldstein noted, “Stricter revaluation systems, merit pay, the weakening of teacher tenure, and the creation of alternative pathways into the classroom . . . [are] often talked about as a sort of next step in school reform, because integration failed.”34 Teachers were a popular scapegoat, and national animosity toward teachers and their unions only grew over time.

  Framed in stark economic terms and with teachers’ unions on the defensive, A Nation at Risk invited the business community to act, and Reagan’s amiable relationship with business forged a new business-education partnership. As a new global economy emerged in the 1980s and the United States sought a lucrative position in it, businesses took a keen interest in education reform. As the Committee for Economic Development, an organization of two hundred educators and corporate leaders, wrote in 1985, the business community’s participation in school reform was of paramount importance to the economic success of the nation. Acknowledging the role of educating responsible citizens, they were also aware of “increasing evidence that education has a direct impact on employment, productivity, and growth, and on the nation’s ability to compete in the world economy.”35

  Though it was not without its critics, A Nation at Risk perpetuated a narrative of failure throughout the 1980s as Americans increasingly supported their governors and representatives in Congress who called for dramatic reform.36 Not for the sake of desegregation, of course.

  In response to the acidity of A Nation at Risk, school choice was used as a primary mechanism to improve what was increasingly viewed as a failed public school system. The National Governors Association released a report in 1985 that highlighted school choice as a state-level solution. The Republican governor of Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, was an advocate of choice and connected it to the larger accountability movement. Alexander called for some “good old-fashioned horse-trading. We’ll regulate less, if schools and school districts will produce better results.”37 These “results,” to be sure, would not include integration or any other civil rights objectives. They did include choice. “It will mean giving parents more choice of the public schools their children attend as one way of assuring higher quality without heavy-handed state control.”38 For Alexander and others interested in choice, the new emphasis on reform under Reagan meant they were in control and desegregation was off the table.

  In spite of the report’s sweeping recommendations for greater investment in schools, Congress made massive budget cuts—overall funding for the Department of Education was curtailed by 11 percent, and staff was also reduced. They eliminated or converted categorical grants, which regulated how funds could be spent, into more flexible block grants. Taken together with a perennial resistance to higher taxes for education, federal cuts to education exacted a heavy toll on already cash-starved public schools.

  Reagan opened the floodgates for corporate and private reform. With teachers demonized, public opinion embraced privatization as people abandoned public education. Subsequent administrations—including both Bushes and Clinton—would build on this discontent and institutionalize the first school choice policies since the 1960s, presenting an opportunity for the South to rise again.

  With federal support for privatization, corporate reform, and education policy unencumbered by desegregation, a new cohort of southern governors embraced education reform in ways unseen during the decades-long struggle of the civil rights movement.39 Typically the stalwarts of segregation, southern governors under Reagan and George H. W. Bush—including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Richard Riley of South Carolina, William Winter of Mississippi, and, by 1995, George W. Bush of Texas—adopted a new “accountability” movement that called for new, high academic standards and developing new modes of measurement to assess progress. With integration efforts all but abandoned and de facto segregation protected by law, these southern governors were safe from the civil rights “extremists” who demanded racial equity. As the American public and policymakers increasingly connected the nation’s schools with the economy, reformers proffered “objective” and often color-blind policies. To shape reform around race—as with affirmative action—was undesirable for most Americans. During the 1980s and 1990s, these southern governors enacted education reform that was race-neutral, ignoring the very issues of segregation and other civil rights–based solutions such as community control. They also grounded the disciplinary measures behind Nixon’s “law and order” mandate in education policy. All of this facilitated the ideology and fostered political conditions conducive to widescale school choice.

  Southern governors pushed the nation toward choice after the Charlottesville Education Summit in 1989. Convened by President George H. W. Bush and at a site near Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, the nation’s governors felt the charge to reinvigorate education so that it matched Jefferson’s historic vision: schools that were a pillar of strength for the Republic. It was also an appropriate location to advocate a plan that was based on the strength of states and states’ rights—a symbolic move away from the seat of federal government in Washington, DC, but still grounded in the South. In the single largest meeting of US state leaders to discuss education reform, the governors at the summit
reaffirmed a connection between education and the economy. As Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas put it, “This is the first time in the history of this country that we ever thought enough of education and ever understood its significance to our economic future.”40

  After the Charlottesville summit, governors adopted six national goals that focused on early childhood education, student achievement, math and science, dropout rates, functional literacy in a global economy, and safe, drug-free schools.41 Dubbed “America 2000,” the six goals were part of a legislative agenda and a voluntary program embraced by the states, to be achieved by the turn of the millennium.42 It was an ambitious, optimistic effort. Little education legislation was passed under the first Bush administration, but a national framework for identifying goals and mandating testing to assess academic progress was established.

  Building on the momentum generated by A Nation at Risk and the Charlottesville summit, Bush also identified school choice at the federal level as a key area of reform to help schools that needed it the most. Linking his initiative to his predecessor Reagan, he noted, “We must hold all concerned accountable. In education, we cannot tolerate mediocrity.”43 In ground that had been mostly fallow for the three decades, Bush planted the seeds for a new era of accountability for educational “excellence,” of which school choice was a critical part. In one address, Bush outlined: “We can encourage educational excellence by encouraging parental choice. The concept of choice draws its fundamental strength from the principle at the very heart of the democratic idea. . . . It’s time parents were free to choose the schools that their children attend. This approach will create the competitive climate that stimulates excellence in our private and parochial schools as well.”44