The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  Times have changed since the civil rights movement. Activists grew weary of trying to attain desegregation—a remnant of the movement that was increasingly seen as outdated. The efforts to enforce it have been mired, and a narrative of failure generally describes the experiences of children of color in the public system. The fact that many Black children and other children of color do not do well in school today is used as evidence that desegregation does not work. One could also point out that desegregation has never really been achieved.

  James Forman Jr.—a charter school cofounder and son of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer—noted that on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown, there were only 130 White students in the entire public middle school system in Washington, DC, out of nearly five thousand students. John Philip Sousa Middle School, which was part of the Brown decision in 1954, was fifty years later all-Black—with zero White students in attendance.30 Sousa is part of a larger pattern. In the Northeast, the percentage of students in schools that were between 90 and 100 percent Black or Brown in 2004 had actually increased to nearly 50 percent, up from 40 percent in 1960. The North, in fact, was more segregated than the South, where only 26 percent of students attended schools that were 90–100 percent Black, Latinx, and other students of color in 1990. In the North, the “de facto segregation” defense meant that school integration never materialized in genuine ways, particularly after unpopular busing plans were rejected.31 The Supreme Court facilitated resegregation in the 1990s by rolling back school desegregation mandates from the 1950s and 1960s. It effectively ended judicial oversight of nearly all desegregation efforts. In 1991, the Supreme Court returned desegregation mandates to local control in Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell. This meant that if local districts claimed that schools were desegregated and federal courts did not oppose them, a district could end desegregation mandates that had originated during the time of the civil rights movement. Any race-neutral or color-blind enrollment policy would be permissible, significantly restricting the ability of school districts to voluntarily redistrict or rezone to promote integration.32 The Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2007) struck down voluntary desegregation plans that intentionally incorporated race. Drawing on a notion of de facto segregation and the idea that such segregation was caused by individual and private choice, not policy, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”33 Not only did it become common practice to ignore racial diversity as a compelling interest, trying to legislate racial diversity could undermine the efforts to achieve it.34

  Charter schools reflect how school choice perpetuates larger patterns of segregation in the public school system. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA reported in 2014, sixty years after the Brown decision, that nationally 70 percent of African American students in charter schools are attending “intensely segregated” minority charter schools that are 90–100 percent students of color, double the rate found in traditional public schools.35 Another report from 2017 published federal data that revealed that 17 percent of charter schools were intensely segregated and had student populations that were 99 percent Black or Latinx. Only 4 percent of public schools reported such dramatic segregation. In cities that had charters, over 25 percent were intensely segregated, as compared to 10 percent of traditional public schools. As of the 2014–15 school year, more than one thousand of nearly sixty-five hundred charters across the nation were intensely segregated.36 A few schools were founded with the specific intent of fostering an integrated student population, but most charter schools did not seek to establish integrated enrollment.

  Let off by Supreme Court decisions and bolstered by a collective, national movement away from desegregation, U.S. schools remain segregated, and, by extension, so do charter schools. This is compounded by the fact that many people of color support school choice and charter schools. There is also the ideology of reform that fails to question segregation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow, points out, “The logic around the achievement gap, the entire logic of every conversation we have about education[,] . . . is a logic of how do we take all these separate schools in which by and large white children and black children go to separate schools, how do we make those separate schools equal?” In other words, the “separate but equal logic” or “the conceptual bedrock of segregation and Jim Crow” undergirds reform today.37

  To many charter school advocates of color, the documented segregation of charter schools does not matter and continues to remain a nonissue. In fact, the contemporary debate is nothing new to the Black community. As early as 1935, NAACP cofounder and civil rights warrior W. E. B. Du Bois publicly questioned the logic of desegregation, noting that “race prejudice in the United States today is such that most Negroes cannot receive proper education in white institutions.” He went on to note, “The plain fact faces us, that either he will have separate schools or he will not be educated.”38 Howard Fuller agreed, stating in the midst of the Milwaukee choice movement, “It’s a waste of time to talk about integration.” Instead, Fuller has advocated choice as an answer to a question that supersedes integration: “How do these kids get the best education possible?”39 Cardell Orrin, a member of the board that governs Freedom Preparatory Academy in Memphis, called into question the merits of the debate, arguing that criticisms of charter schools perpetuating segregation were unfair. Memphis had remained segregated after Brown. The outlying suburban districts had pulled away and seceded from the city, essentially creating a new district. Charters were simply trying to work with what was given to city students.40 Much of what Du Bois prophesized has remained true well into the twenty-first century.

  James Forman Jr. was right to note that desegregation attempts were all but over. With desegregation blocked by the courts and with waning support for desegregation plans across the country, there is no longer a compelling or critical interest to advocate for it. If all else has failed in the eyes of parents, charter schools and school choice present a logical means to regain control of their children’s education and future. But the connection between school choice and the civil rights movement was not ephemeral. It was led by Black organizers like Howard Fuller who facilitated the transformation of school choice into a civil right.

  Howard Fuller’s narrative is part of a larger national story of education activism that strove toward justice, liberation, and community control. In 1969, he put into practice the ethos of the civil rights movement, establishing “an independent Black university that would be controlled totally by us,” Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina.41 The same concept of community control was germane to the idea of school choice but for a radically different purpose. For Fuller, school choice meant turning around failing schools and steering them toward the best interests of the Black community.

  After Malcolm X University closed in 1973 due to fund-raising difficulty, Fuller also grew frustrated with union politics in his work in the Revolutionary Workers League, a Black Marxist group. He packed his bags and returned to Milwaukee in 1976.42 There he would transform the city’s school system and put forth the question—and puzzle—of Black school choice.

  Fuller began working for the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette University, and through this he became involved in the politics of his alma mater, North Division High School. North Division had become embroiled in school desegregation politics after Fuller left Wisconsin. In 1976, federal judge John Reynolds found the Milwaukee schools to be segregated and issued a ruling to integrate. Wishing to avoid “another Boston,” district officials in Milwaukee used busing but emphasized a “voluntary choice” program. As part of the city’s plan to voluntarily desegregate, the district implemented an open enrollment policy that eliminated traditional attendance zones and created a magnet school at North Division High as a way to attract White students to
the Black neighborhood. This meant local African American students had to apply to attend the school that had replaced their old one, and their applications were likely to be denied. Students walked out, and alumni, including Howard Fuller, supported them.43

  Fuller was an ideal organizer for the embattled, segregated school system in Milwaukee. In 1979, he led the “Coalition to Save North Division”—composed of alumni, students, families of students, and other advocates—to present an alternative to the school board’s magnet school catering to White families. The coalition proposed a neighborhood school that was majority-Black and offered a specialized curriculum including vocational training in medical, health, and science.44 The coalition drew support from and worked with the city’s established civil rights organizations, including the Urban League and the NAACP. Together they filed suit with the US Office for Civil Rights, and in 1980, after a year of legal wrangling and intense local dissension they pressured the district to reverse its decision to convert North Division into a magnet school. North Division would remain a neighborhood school.45

  The coalition and its allies were not against integration, but they sought desegregation (or, as historian Jack Dougherty put it, “fair integration”) that led to marked improvement for Black communities. Fair integration relied on community engagement in decision-making and increased local economic opportunity in the Black community.46 The coalition valued the ideals behind genuinely integrated schools but not at the expense of Black empowerment and self-determination. Black communities, they argued, should no longer shoulder the burden of desegregation. It was an idea that was germane to a growing sentiment in civil rights legal theory.

  In 1980, during the midst of desegregation battles, Milwaukee hosted a conference on the topic: “Desegregation: A New Form of Discrimination.” Derrick Bell, a leading civil rights scholar and lawyer, once a champion of school desegregation, provided a keynote address. By the time of the conference, he had grown weary of school reform after the Brown decision. Bell publicly criticized education reform plans that maintained rigid commitment to racial “balance,” which had the consequence of closing Black schools. Such plans were committed to abstract principles of “integration” over the tangible improvement of Black education. He also advocated for the effective education of students within all-Black schools, shifting focus from racial balance to improving learning. Desegregation was not producing the results desired by civil rights activists and the NAACP of the 1950s and 1960s, both of which Bell was personally and professionally acquainted with.47

  Bell’s ideas resonated with Fuller and families in Milwaukee who were ready for alternatives to subpar public schools. Fuller was proposing stronger community control of the schools—the same idea that shaped his influential work with Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina. In the context of fighting racist school board policy in Milwaukee, the idea remained radical.

  Legal scholar and parent of color Robin D. Barnes captured the sentiment behind initiatives that—like those proposed by Fuller and others by the 1990s—connected a desire for control to the very essence of charter schools. She asserted that “out of all the public choice initiatives, charters provide the only viable means of local control” and further that choice could be “an effective arm of communities in transition as Black America faces a twenty-first century that looks all too similar to the nineteenth.”48 Since the 1960s, after the first attempts at desegregation generally failed, local control by African American communities has remained an integral goal of the Black school choice movement as exemplified by Howard Fuller and the growing army of advocates who have joined him.

  The organizing in Milwaukee invigorated Fuller. As he noted, “The coalition victory brought back many good memories of my community organizing days in North Carolina, and reminded me of what can happen when people stand together to demand change and stick with it.”49 The coalition drew momentum from the student protest, building on a network of activism established during the city’s long civil rights struggle. By the late 1980s, though, Fuller was growing increasingly disillusioned with the pace and rhetoric of school reform. In 1987, he and Michael Smith, a professor and education advocate in Milwaukee, drafted the “Manifesto for New Directions in the Education of Black Children.” In it, they proposed a separate, nearly all-Black school district carved out from the public school district in Milwaukee. The modest-sized district of one high school, two middle schools, and seven elementary schools would serve nearly 6,500 students, and the district was to be controlled by Black community members and educators and geared toward students of color.50 Polly Williams, a Democrat representing an all-Black district in Milwaukee and an alum of North Division High, submitted the plan to the state legislature. It mirrored the local control politics practiced twenty years earlier during the freedom struggle in which Fuller had taken part. And the plan gained traction. Derrick Bell wrote about the movement in Milwaukee, lending his support for creating racially segregated schools to improve education for Black students. Bell also connected the legislative proposal to the longer struggle for Black education: “The Milwaukee manifesto is simply the next logical step in the continuing effort by Black people to obtain effective schooling for their children.”51 In many ways, it was a relief from desegregation, which had been a heavy load on the backs and shoulders of Black communities. Bell found in the bold proposal “a legislative remedy . . . that [might], after a long struggle, enable them to do what can be achieved independently by those of a higher economic status.”52 Bell argued that such legislation could facilitate the placement and support of African Americans in positions of power over the schools and districts their children attended.53

  The proposal immediately sparked controversy that exposed deep schisms. The Milwaukee branch of the NAACP condemned the plan, castigating it as “urban apartheid,” unconstitutional, and a “giant step backward for Black people.” One of the highest-ranking Black representatives in the Wisconsin legislature, state senator Gary George, opposed the plan, joining ranks with Black state representative Marcia Coggs. Walter Farrell, a popular Black professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and president of the Milwaukee Afro-American Council, also spoke out against the plan. Farrell called it “ridiculous” and claimed it ran contrary to the essence of the Brown decision. Milwaukee city attorney Grant Langley issued an opinion that challenged the constitutionality of the proposal. Liberal Whites who supported the desegregation plans already in place also joined the chorus of opposition.54

  To the charge that the plan perpetuated segregation, Fuller replied cynically: “There is no way that things could be worse.”55 Bell argued that the plan did not abandon the ideals of integration—it simply empowered people of color long wronged by the system “by first putting administrators and faculty in place who are both accountable to the community and dedicated to improving the quality of schools now serving Black children.”56 All could admit—and plainly see—that current administrators and faculty had largely failed to serve these children, as had teachers and administrators ever since the Brown decision.

  Advocates for the plan included not just Polly Williams but also Black state representative G. Spencer Coggs, three Black Milwaukee aldermen, and one of the city’s Black newspapers.57 To the astonishment of many, the bill for a separate district passed the state assembly with a commanding majority, but it failed in the state senate.58

  Though it failed to pass, the proposal highlighted a new direction in education. It also called attention to new leadership distinct from the civil rights movement era. For those behind the initiative, it was a movement intended to empower the Black community to educate their children themselves. The advocates were Black, determined, and informed by the insights of history and experience of how best to educate their children. As Polly Williams noted, “We have a new movement of Black people emerging. . . . This is not the 1960s.”59 The controversy they inspired and the political agency of choice advocates empowered by Fuller’s grassroots org
anization set the stage for a national policy debate about publicly funded private voucher programs. The school voucher plan that emerged from Milwaukee would helped build momentum for the Zelman case.60

  The initial proposals for vouchers in Wisconsin—public money allotted for individuals to use for private schools—gained the support of Republican governor Tommy Thompson. After compromises that followed, Thompson signed the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program into law in 1990.61 Polly Williams supported Thompson’s new initiative, stating clearly and passionately: “The best educational program for children is the voucher program.”62 Howard Fuller signed off on it as well, noting that “choice can be the savior of public education.”63 Milwaukee showed how the Black freedom struggle shaped the very essence of privatization.

  After Milwaukee, Memphis became another battleground for school choice in a beleaguered Black public school system. Based on analysis of national educational statistics, the US Chamber of Commerce gave the state of Tennessee an F for its dismal school assessments and public education accountability system. The chamber’s 2010 “report card” found that 105 Memphis schools—nearly half the schools in the city—had failed to meet federal academic standards. Following such scathing reports, the state relied on authorizing charters to improve education and also catered to and relied on private philanthropic funding, including a $90 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve teaching. State legislators also passed a “First to the Top” law that granted the state authority to take over the lowest-performing schools in Tennessee to turn them around. Under the watchful eye of President Obama’s new education secretary, Arne Duncan, the state became a blank slate for new school reform through “turnaround districts.” In 2010, Tennessee became one of the first states to be awarded a “Race to the Top” federal grant of $500 million.64