The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  Reform in Tennessee had all the hallmarks of the new era of choice ushered in under President Obama. As part of the Race to the Top initiative, the state created an “Achievement School District” comprising the bottom 5 percent of failing schools in the state, the majority of which were in Memphis. The goal was to take those schools and raise them to the top 25 percent in just five years. Thirty-one schools comprised the Achievement School District, serving over eleven thousand students, over 90 percent of whom were Black, or just over 10 percent of the city’s student population.65 The Achievement School District drew on the competitive logic of school choice. The state could take over failing schools and hand them over to charter school operators who, in turn, promised to turn the schools around.

  The state was open to choice advocates, charter school operators, and philanthropists. Everyone was welcome. According to Stephine Love, a school board member in Memphis, it was the “Wild, Wild West.”66 The state hired Chris Barbic of Houston to serve as superintendent of the Achievement School District. Barbic was the founder of Yes Prep Public Schools, a charter conglomerate across the Houston metro area that served over four thousand students. A former Teach for America educator, Barbic received $1 million from Oprah Winfrey in 2010 as part of her philanthropic efforts in education. Charter management companies from across the nation submitted applications to run schools in Memphis.67 Other options were on the table as well, including the faith-based Cornerstone Preparatory School at Christ United Methodist Church in Memphis. The executive director of Cornerstone, Drew Sippel, had learned about school administration by attending a six-week crash course on the topic in Boston. Though Cornerstone was openly religious, it operated as a public school.68

  Charter school and public school officials alike called for grassroots support. Barbic noted to a roomful of parents, organizers, and activists, “I see what we are doing as community transformation work. . . . We see this as a collaboration, not a takeover.”69 Kriner Cash, the superintendent of Memphis City Schools, had publicly opined in 2010 that the times were “like the civil rights movement of the 1960s.” “Communities across our state must step up,” Cash had added. “We need grassroots advocates from the classroom to the board room.”70

  Once the new district was in operation, education reformers embraced the rhetoric, names, and ideals of the civil rights movement. One school in the district was named after civil rights leader Maxine Smith. The Soulsville Foundation, dedicated to promoting the legacy of the city’s famous Stax Records, organized the Soulsville Charter School as a college preparatory school featuring an “academically rich, music-rich environment.”71 Other charter schools in the district included the Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School and Freedom Preparatory Academy.72 Connections to the civil rights movement were made through curricula as well. One district-sponsored event took a handful of Memphis students to Birmingham, Alabama, to study the role of young activists in the historic struggles there.73

  Beneath the thin veneer of civil rights rhetoric and nomenclature, Memphis has a rich history of resistance to slavery and segregation. It has been home to critical junctures of the Underground Railroad, the activist journalism of Ida B. Wells, and sit-ins and Black Power struggles of the civil rights movement. And the city was the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.74

  The grassroots organization behind charter schools was compelling to parents who had experienced or at least bought into the narrative of public school failure. The process of restructuring schools through a choice model created possibilities for people in Memphis to work for the children of the city, through “single-site,” mom-and-pop charter schools. As opposed to charters organized by corporations, these schools were organized and governed by local activists and advocates. Unlike the big charter networks like KIPP, the Memphis model allowed the community to organize schools tailored specifically to the needs of their children and in turn generate buy-in from the community. Stax Records, as noted, built on its legacy to offer a unique charter school specific to the historic city.75 Black Memphian Dr. Bobby White, a proud alumnus of Memphis public schools, founded Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School in 2014. He was different from the first school reformers like Chris Barbic who had entered the scene after the Race to the Top grant was announced. White was from the city—he’d graduated with pride from Frayser High School and the city’s historically Black college, LeMoyne-Owen. After working in the Tennessee Charter School Resource Center—a support center for charters in the state—he later founded Frayser Community Schools, a three-school charter school network that includes MLK Prep. White took great pains to speak with the community as he planned the school.76 The single-site charters in Memphis are part of a larger national network. The National Charter Collaborative, a nonprofit with a mission to support and connect charter school leaders of color, has identified more than five hundred single-site schools around the country in which people of color lead the school’s administration and make up at least 30 percent of the board. Representing nearly one-quarter of all charter schools, these schools serve over 335,000 students.77

  Working for the Shelby County School District in Memphis, LaTricea Adams gained perspective overseeing charters through community organization. Looking at schools like Granville T. Woods Academy, Memphis Business Academy, and Freedom Preparatory Academy, Adams emphasized, “It’s empowering to see grassroots organization in action and inspirational to see them.”78 In some respects, these Memphians were carrying forth the work of Howard Fuller and realizing some promises for quality education that the longer civil rights movement had yet to fulfill. Local Black advocates were in control of schools in their community—at least in some instances.

  Single-site charters have also opened other avenues of empowerment. Cardill Orrin, the Memphis-based executive director of Stand for Children in Tennessee—a choice advocacy group—spoke about the economic empowerment that can come through school choice. Some schools in Memphis—such as Freedom Preparatory Academy, MLK Preparatory, and Granville T. Woods—were founded and managed by people of color, and some have annual budgets of $20 million or more.79 As Orrin noted, charter networks can stipulate the contracting of Black-owned businesses—from information technology to landscaping—to serve schools governed by Black communities. Memphis charter school founder Roblin Webb noted that charters can help “lift and change” Black business to compete for bids and to provide business.80 The economic opportunity is enticing. Few other fields, even in majority-minority cities like Memphis, so effectively support Black-owned businesses or Black wealth.

  Still, school choice is fiercely contested in the broader Black community nationwide. As in the past, the NAACP remains a central part of the debate. The organization again stirred controversy when it issued a call for a moratorium on charters at its 107th national convention in 2016. The call followed the organization’s historic resistance to charters. Nearly twenty years earlier, in 1998, the NAACP had opposed charter schools that were “not subject to the same accountability and standardization of qualifications/certification of teachers as public schools and divert already-limited funds from public schools.” In 2014, the NAACP issued a report, School Privatization: Threat to Public Education, that staunchly opposed the privatization of public education and the use of public funds to subsidize charter schools.81 Derrick Johnson, then president of the NAACP, situated the moratorium along with ten thousand lawsuits initiated by the association in the interests of improving the quality of public education.82 As noted in the moratorium statement, “It is a concern that charter schools have had a larger influence on the national conversation about how to improve education in communities of color than these other well-researched educational investments.”83

  The statement was met with swift protest, and Memphis became a focal point for the ensuing melee. Protests organized there by charter supporters shaped the national debate. Members of Memphis Lift, a pro–charter school organization, drove to
Cincinnati to disrupt an NAACP meeting there after the NAACP announced the moratorium. Police responded and threatened to arrest the group.84 Sarah Carpenter, a Black founding member of Memphis Lift, mother of three, and grandmother of thirteen, stated, “We are not against public schools. We want good schools of any type. Where was the NAACP when so many public schools were failing our children?”85 Rev. Keith Norman, president of the Memphis branch of the NAACP, praised the group.86

  The following year, the NAACP softened its language around charters but did not retract the call for a moratorium. Its narrowed opposition focused only on for-profit charter schools. National NAACP leaders demanded more stringent requirements for charter school authorizers, whom they wanted to limit to local school districts. They also demanded that districts impose on charters the same accountability measures in place for public schools.87

  Memphis Lift was founded during the rapid growth of charters in the city and it had the strong support of Chris Barbic during the Achievement School District’s first administration. The group gained distinction through the NAACP protest in Cincinnati, and it also sent representatives to lobby for choice at the state and federal levels in Nashville and Washington, DC. After the NAACP revised its moratorium, Carpenter noted, “I’m happy about it but I also think they should call for a moratorium on bad schools, period.”88 Even though connected to a pro-charter agenda, the group maintained a critical position on all schools. Moreover, it was a group that spoke to issues of self-determination. “We’re starting a movement to demand better,” Carpenter said. “We believe that the people from our community should lead this movement. This movement should be for parents, by parents.”89 Carpenter continues to push the group forward. During the buildup to the 2020 presidential election, she and Memphis Lift continued to protest anti–charter school stances taken by the Democratic candidates, notably disrupting a speech by Elizabeth Warren.90

  Likening herself to Harriet Tubman and a modern-day Rosa Parks, Carpenter continues to advocate for choice, work that she places on the same arc toward justice represented by the nation’s ongoing civil rights movement. The stance becomes complicated when her advocacy overlaps with the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Betsy Devos, who promote school choice and call it the civil rights issue of our time. On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump regularly vowed to “fight to make sure every single African American child in this country is fully included in the American dream.” For Trump, school choice was “the new civil rights issue of our time.” Secretary of Education DeVos, the controversial advocate of religious school vouchers, supported choice by similarly invoking civil rights ideology. DeVos claimed that historically Black colleges and universities demonstrated how choice benefited African Americans. Trump and DeVos connected school choice to race again in commenting on the rebellion that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020.91

  School choice remains a rare issue that inspires bipartisan support. Democratic US senator Cory Booker recalled his work as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, saying, “[I] had a Republican governor, [and] I could write a dissertation on [our] disagreements, but he and I found common ground to help transform Newark schools, to actually create a contract that got our teachers union and [the] governor sitting around a table and agreeing to raise teachers’ salaries.”92

  Anchoring the public rhetoric that unites both sides of the aisle and traverses racial divides is the common belief in a fundamental right to choice in education. When Keith Norman expressed skepticism about how public funds were expended on charters, he conceded “that does not negate a parent’s right to choose.”93 Shelby County School Board member Stephanie Love, parent and graduate of the Memphis public school system, noted, “My position is that I’m advocating to provide the best education for our children, and I can’t tell a parent to not exercise their right to choice . . . what I can say is ‘make sure you know what that choice means.’“94 The claim that choice is a fundamental right is not uniquely Black, however. It’s the same rhetoric as conservative-branded education reformers such as Chester Finn, who claimed, “We all have the right to meddle here, to turn ourselves into informed, demanding, persnickety consumers” of education.95 As illustrated in numerous iterations since Milton Friedman’s first articulation of choice in the 1950s, all were equal in the marketplace of school reform. Finn believed that the “revolution” began with conceptualizing the system for the “benefit of consumers” and that such consumers must “have the right to choose how they will do this.”96 By ignoring deeper structural issues and the persistence of segregation, the rhetoric of choice is appealing to many indeed.97 The field remains open—and the debate often rancorous.

  The whirlwinds at the intersection of race and school continue to churn. After the flash of reform, the thunderclap that followed reverberated across the nation. This was most evident in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Prior to the 2005 storm, the public school system there was racially segregated. In a city that was 67 percent African American, over 90 percent of students enrolled in New Orleans public schools were Black, and 77 percent were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch.98 Conservative reformers viewed the disaster as an opportunity to rebuild and, in the process, implement changes that benefited them. In 2017, the US Congress created “Opportunity Zones” as part of tax code revision that contravened the Clean Air Act, increased oil drilling and production, and gave tax incentives to investors. Education was a part of it. Plans included enhancing school choice and encouraging “investment and entrepreneurs” and “private-sector creativity . . . in which capital gains tax on investments is eliminated and regulations eliminated or simplified.”99 When Congress created such zones, they enacted one of the greatest experiments on students of color initiated by a partnership between private industries and the federal government by opening the door to widespread charter schools and a new teaching force under the auspices of choice. It was a dream unrealized even by the bold Howard Fuller.

  Opportunity Zones decimated public schools in New Orleans. Local administrators and Louisiana legislators worked with the support of conservative think tanks and Congress to carry out the new policies with far-reaching and devasting impact. In 2005 state legislators passed Act 35, which transferred authority for all failing public schools to the state-run district, the Recovery School District, which legislators also expanded after the storm to manage all schools that they determined were “failing.” Expanding the criteria for failure, state legislators authorized themselves to take over 112 of 128 schools in the district. Elected representatives used federal funding to build charter schools and recruited teachers from outside the district using federal funding originally earmarked to pay teachers and staff who were out of work—a move that cut out the local union, the United Teachers of New Orleans. Louisiana legislators later passed a bill that fired all New Orleans public school teachers and staff without pay—approximately 7,500 in total, including approximately 4,300 teachers—claiming the district no longer had funds for schools after the state created the Recovery School District. Fourteen years after the storm, New Orleans became the first sizable city in the United States to turn its public schools entirely to charters, earning the moniker “Charter School City.”100

  Howard Fuller entered the fray as well, reminding the nation that school choice without empowerment mattered little. He noted that New Orleans was wholly unique in that school choice governed the entire district—an ideal scenario for launching a choice program—and that there was unprecedented investment in the city. Still, Fuller was concerned with what he saw as a prevailing notion among people of color that “reform was done to me and not with me.” As Fuller elaborated, “I want to imagine a world where parents are sought after to serve on charter school boards and other decision-making bodies; whose perspectives are valued enough to produce policy recommendations . . .; where they have the collective power to hold these districts accountable. These are the actions that will sustain education reform.”1
01 As part of his work empowering communities of color, he helped found Black Education for New Orleans, which assists families of color in choosing their best school options and staying informed about the decisions most affecting them.102

  The entire nation’s system of education was caught up in Katrina’s deadly wake. New Orleans was the new experimental site for all sides to study, examine, and stake claims. Charter School City demonstrated to the rest of the nation the potential—and risks—of school choice on a grand scale. As organizer and educator Raynard Sanders noted, “Black and Brown families and children have, once again, been left out in this new equation, and those in most severe need are least likely to receive quality education.”103

  Howard Fuller stands tall and jovial above his students in the single-site charter in Milwaukee that now bears his name, the Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy. “There are so many issues [when it comes to educating] poor Black children,” he sighed in an interview, yet another conversation for a battered veteran to clarify his stance—one that remains perplexing to White progressives. “I only have so much time, and I’m worried about my school, that these three-hundred-plus kids get the best education possible.”104 Fuller is forced to constantly fend off allegations of working with the worst of the worst. In one interview, exasperated, Fuller said, “[If you are] saying I’m trying to help Donald Trump, you’re insane. I’m not the person that you ought to be talking to.” Instead, he pushes the blame on those who take choice away: “Tell Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders or any of these other people, tell them to quit attacking us.”105 To Fuller, standing against choice—which many see as not only a solution to failing schools but also as the path to a long-promised opportunity at self-determination—is a violation of a fundamental right.