The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  Federal investment in school choice accelerated after No Child Left Behind. As divisive as some issues were, such as health care and access to the ballot, school choice remained a rare unifying issue that both parties could agree upon. President Barack Obama, who had run on a platform for change the nation could believe in, was poised to enact sweeping education reform as NCLB earned the scorn of educators for its punitive provisions based on high-stakes standardized testing. Though he had campaigned on a contagious message of hope, Obama did relatively little to alter the momentum of No Child Left Behind. During his 2008 campaign, Senator Obama was unabashedly supportive of charters, claiming: “I’ve consistently said, we need to support charter schools. I think it is important to experiment, by looking at how we can reward excellence in the classroom.”67 After his election in 2008, the core principles of school choice enjoyed even greater support and cultivation under Obama’s administration. Yet education never moved beyond the backburner of his domestic agenda. In fact, Obama changed little except to greatly expand accessibility to choice and perpetuate our nation’s ideological commitment to it. Additional moves made by the Department of Education cemented what critics had feared: a continued reliance on school choice.

  Obama appointed as his secretary of education Arne Duncan, who served from 2009 until 2015. Duncan had known Obama in Chicago when Obama served as US senator for Illinois. Appointing Duncan was a powerful indicator that choice would remain a standard in education reform. As chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools system from 2001 to 2008, Duncan had earned experience in the trenches of education reform led by Chicago mayor Richard Daley. He had ushered in charter schools and used the rhetoric of choice to address the problem of failing public schools. He had supported public-private partnerships to improve schools too. He had developed a reputation as a renegade reformer, challenging teachers’ unions, expanding charters, and closing traditional neighborhood schools.68

  Duncan brought to the national level what he had learned on the ground in the Windy City. Duncan had been an integral part of Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan, which was announced in 2004 as an ambitious strategy to build one hundred new schools across the city that used “non-traditional” educational and management methods. This largely translated to building schools through charters and contracts granted to those who wanted to manage public schools, with or without credentials in education. Business and civic leaders pledged to raise $50 million to fund Daley’s initiative. Demonstrating how reform would work with corporations outside the public system vested in choice, city and school district leaders founded the nonprofit organization New Schools for Chicago to assist in the public-private venture. The organization’s language of reform reflected the larger choice movement, as the Chicago Tribune reported that it was seeking to hire “the most innovative, dedicated educators . . . to think, act and lead with creativity and autonomy” and issuing “performance contracts” that would provide the “freedom to innovate.”69

  Duncan shaped the platform for President Obama’s education policy. Since it was a low priority for the Obama administration, Duncan exerted strong influence. Congress did not reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (still known when Obama served as No Child Left Behind) during his first term in office, but the Obama administration then launched the Race to the Top Program. This was a competitive program that was part of a $5 billion education stimulus fund. Of the larger economic stimulus package created in 2009, $100 billion was committed to offsetting the cost to state and local budgets for teacher salaries, 5 percent of which was devoted to Race to the Top. One of the requirements for grants under Race to the Top was the use of charters as a mechanism to turn around underperforming schools. The program also awarded partnerships and collaboration with charter school management companies and charter association members.70 It was a program that harkened back to the Renaissance 2010 plan implemented in Chicago but on a national stage and with wider implications. As one of Duncan’s spokespersons said two years into President Obama’s administration, “Renaissance 2010 and Race to the Top both reflect a willingness to be bold, to hold yourself to higher standards and push for dramatic change, not incremental change.” The Renaissance 2010 program in Chicago produced dismal results, however, with the “Renaissance” schools faring no better than their traditional public school counterparts.71 The writing was on the wall that this reform would fail to live up to its promises of hope and change.

  Arne Duncan and Barack Obama were not immune to venture philanthropy in education either. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continued to invest in education reform. Duncan referred to one of the foundation’s publications, The Turnaround Challenge—a report that touted charters and hybrid forms of charters—as a “bible” for restructuring schools.72 And Duncan appointed Joanna Weiss as his chief of staff. Weiss had previously been the chief operating officer at the NewSchools Venture Fund—the multimillion-dollar investment in charters backed by top education philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, the Walton Foundation, and the Broad Foundation.73 Duncan brought to the Obama administration an entrepreneurial style of education reform that crystallized a connection between corporate-driven school reform and public school improvement.

  President Obama finally introduced education reform in the last year of his eight-year term and signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. The new act was the reauthorization of ESEA—and the renaming of No Child Left Behind—and it left choice and charter schools firmly entrenched. The law required states to submit specific plans for turning around the bottom 5 percent of school districts, granting greater authority and flexibility at the state and local level. Though the law would not be applied consistently across the United States, its gist was this: if a school failed to meet standards for four consecutive years, states had the option to take over a school, fire the principal, or convert the school into a charter. The law also created the federal Charter Schools Program, granting charters more authority and oversight by way of state grants and requiring individualized teacher recruitment and retention plans.74

  A public-private relationship had been established in the field of education policy. The major philanthropic nonprofits such as the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continued to spend hundreds of millions on education reform, from financing charters to instituting new merit pay assessments that tied teacher salaries to student test scores. Since starting their foundation in 1987, the Walton family had donated more than $1 billion in K–12 education reform through the Obama administration, over one-third going to charter school incubation.75 In concert with research organizations like EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice), private entrepreneurs have invested billions of private dollars toward enacting choice across the nation and to actively court choice advocates at the local level in school board and district positions.76 Business and private interests are fueling the choice agenda, successfully arguing that a corporate, privatized model will lead to better schools. Openly cultivating connections with businesses and wealthy benefactors, local and state governments—and the federal government—have increasingly embraced the movement and authorized private organizations to lead the way.

  The school choice movement reached a new high-water mark in 2017. After a tumultuous election, President Donald Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education. With the vice president breaking a tie vote in a Republican-majority Senate, DeVos’s appointment was one of the most contentious in congressional history. Her ideology and praxis were contrary to the values of public education. She was a billionaire who had never taught in or attended public school; her children had also never attended public school. She had invested millions in voucher programs, which were arguably more controversial than charter schools.77 In many ways, she represented the antithesis of public education. While critics decried her appointment, few highlighted the fact that her nomination signified a continuation of school choice policy r
ather than an abrupt shift. Secretary of Education DeVos was the culmination—not the origin—of the school choice movement.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The School Choice Menu

  WE CAN GET LOST in the school choices we have before us today. In fact, choice often necessitates that school districts commit resources simply to ensure we know our options. It is easy to forget that when the Brown decision was reached in 1954, American parents had only two options: the neighborhood public school or a private school if they so desired and could afford it. Today, parents face a multitude of options that resemble a menu. Particularly for those with the social and political capital to navigate a convoluted education landscape, choosing a school may be akin to dining out. Magnet schools, charter schools, voucher programs, homeschooling, online learning, and private options are all on the menu. As many choice advocates claim when discussing failing public schools, all options, or choices, are “on the table.” After decades of struggle and disinvestment, traditional public education is often the least desirable item—but the other options often leave much to be desired.

  Today’s choice menu was created by policymakers who were either indifferent or hostile to desegregation. The education system was rebuilt around the ideology of choice in ways that spanned the political spectrum. It also obfuscated racism and classism that have historically limited educational access. Choice, on the surface of things, is not outwardly exclusive or racist. The options on the menu are theoretically available to everyone. Several school districts around the country use a “controlled choice” plan, where all families must rank the schools they want to attend, and the district then assigns each family a school.1 In these cities—and in cities like New Orleans, converted to an all-charter school model—there is no choice but to choose.

  To be sure, the private segregation academies that emerged in the first decade after Brown still persist across the country. But such privatization did not define the core features of school choice or the educational landscape it shaped. In fact, by the mid-1970s the Supreme Court had begun upholding the denial of tax-exempt status to private schools that practiced racial segregation in a series of cases that began with Coit v. Green in 1971. This continued until the culminating Bob Jones University v. United States (1983) decision, in which the court denied tax-exempt status to private institutions that practiced racial segregation or discrimination, putting an end to a blatant practice that originated with the rise of private segregation academies in the 1960s.2 Such federal oversight struck a deep blow to intentional segregation in private schools. But while overt racial discrimination was largely stamped out, the mechanisms of privatization grew.

  The claims to certain rights in education have defined policy since the 1970s. Since Whites protested that the federal government was interfering with their right to choose an education, the courts have upheld their claims to freedom of choice. Essentially, one’s right to choose schools fell short of a new constitutional right, but local and state laws across the country have protected access to choice where it exists. The ideology of choice is now ingrained: Americans no longer demand choice; they assume it. A Democrats for Education Reform poll in 2018 revealed that about 65 percent of Americans think that access to charter and magnet schools—and other schools provided through a school choice model, regardless of zip code or income—is a top priority.3 One could argue today—as many have from Donald Trump to Martin Luther King III—that the lack of a right to choose has been the defining civil rights issue of our time.4

  The education market was open for business in the decades after Brown. Public education suffered during the full-scale desegregation efforts that began in the late 1960s as Whites moved out of cities and took with them the resources needed to sustain even an adequate public education system. Popular opinion about public education plummeted, further depleting the will to invest in it. Yet this disinvestment was accompanied by “innovation” in education reform. Reformers, Black and White, from across the political and economic spectrums imagined, developed, and offered enticing schooling options. Some of the reforms were explicitly antiracist or sought to directly address racial inequities.

  Community-controlled schools in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and other northern cities carried out some of the more radical ideas of the era of desegregation and the civil rights movement. They inspired White progressives too. After decrying the “death at an early age” of American schoolchildren, education professor and reformer Jonathan Kozol advocated for a “free school” movement in the early 1970s that emboldened concerned parents, teachers, and advocates to establish their own schools. With the help of legal professionals and foundation funding, Kozol envisioned the establishment of “free schools”: small neighborhood schools of less than one hundred students that were beyond the reach of the “public education apparatus” and outside the “White man’s counter-culture.” Kozol saw these situated primarily in American cities and catering to the needs of those historically underserved and victimized by traditional public education—namely poor Black and Brown communities.5 Many reforms began with teachers who also drew from the ideology and work of the civil rights movement. Deborah Meier, a progenitor of the “small schools movement” that focused on locally, democratically governed and decentralized schools with small class sizes and founding director of Central Park East, an alternative public school in New York, wrote, “The kinds of change required by today’s agenda can only be the work of thoughtful teachers . . . participants themselves in a climate of self-governance.”6 This type of ideology fueled an alternative school movement esprit de résistance among leftist educators that propagated the idea that something had to be done.7

  These reformers collectively saw that achieving high-quality schools required change by any means necessary—including boycotts, strikes, and working outside the parameters of the traditional system. This alternative school movement shared some of the same urgency, methods, and discontent with public education as segregationists after Brown. Everyone wanted choices. The movement for more choice therefore transcended any conservative or liberal label. Moreover, legislation from the local to the federal level supported alternatives to a broken system. There is much to order from the menu.

  Magnet schools emerged as the first legitimate option on the menu of school choice after privatization and freedom of choice plans developed in the South post-Brown. Magnet schools originated in the 1970s to facilitate integration and to improve the quality of urban education after White flight. When Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, it provided federal support for nonprofit, state-approved, local educational agencies committed to school improvement. This included federal and state grants where applicable for educational programming. The Emergency School Aid Act in 1972 expanded this, legislating various paths to school desegregation and alleviating racial unrest. The act included a federal competitive grants program to inspire efforts that would aid the desegregation process on less hostile terms than what the nation had seen in Little Rock. The program also sought to stymie the more subtle forms of resistance to integration, such as White flight. One such initiative was the Magnet School Assistance Program.8 The courts supported the use of magnet schools to stimulate school desegregation on a voluntary basis in a series of decisions in Houston, Milwaukee, and Buffalo in 1975 and 1976. After the busing controversy in Boston, magnets were a welcomed alternative. Under the Reagan administration, courts permitted school districts to replace older mandatory desegregation plans—which were becoming increasingly unpopular—with voluntary magnet school plans.9

  Magnet schools are public schools with highly specialized curricula, usually located in urban areas. They may focus on the sciences or the arts, administer academically rigorous programs such as the International Baccalaureate, or practice progressive pedagogies such as Montessori, which, as education scholar Mira Debs notes, “are a potentially ideal soil for creating intentionally diverse choice schools.”10 Magnets were designed to attract bot
h families of color and White families. Even some prestigious academies across the country, such as Boston Latin, converted to a magnet school status to gain funding and a more diverse student population.11 Through high-quality, desirable programs, magnet schools compelled some Whites to voluntarily desegregate schools. They are unique because they have desegregation as a specific goal. Moreover, coupled with “controlled choice” policies, they have demonstrated potential to disrupt both school and residential segregation patterns.12

  Magnet schools presented a compelling, attractive, and prized alternative to busing for the federal judges presiding over the desegregation cases of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Michigan, federal judge Stephen Roth actively pushed a magnet school alternative before reluctantly settling on the busing option that resulted in the Milliken ruling. For Roth, magnets provided the best alternative because they were based on voluntary choice, not his orders. Moreover, promising to deliver high-quality instruction, magnets were also selective. They offered districts a means to meet desegregation mandates while allowing parents to choose to participate—an integral element of expanding choice ideology.13 In this way magnets were the first attempts to co-opt choice with goals of integration, taking it out of the hands of diehard segregationists but leaving the structural system of racism intact.

  Historian Nicholas Kryczka traces how magnet schools were incorporated into the first voluntary desegregation initiatives in Chicago’s “Redmond Plan” in 1968, demonstrating how schools catered to and reinforced the privileges White and middle-class families enjoyed during desegregation. Magnets were part of a desegregation plan that created “educational parks,” or pleasant campuses to attract White students from across the city. They were flush with science laboratories and state-of-the-art equipment that bolstered a specialized, rigorous curriculum that would draw in a critical mass of Whites to ensure racial “balance.” Moreover, racial quotas promised a diverse student population with students of color that reflected proportional representation—but not to the extent where Whites were the minority. Such schools were also “anchors” and potential pillars of stability for White communities that could be used to prevent further White flight while projecting images of cosmopolitan, integrated spaces that upheld the values of the civil rights movement.14