Free at last: Black America signs up for school choice

Policy Review, Nov/Dec 1996 by Shokraii, Nina

A powerful grass-roots movement is slowly gathering force that may transform the politics of American education. Its human face is not white but black; its resources few but its determination strong. And its goal is freedom. Although most black political leaders still actively oppose vouchers and charter schools, their constituents are growing increasingly angry at the public schools' disastrous record of teaching black children. As a result, black parents, pastors, local officials, and civilrights leaders are beginning to embrace school vouchers, charter schools, and other reforms that offer alternatives to dismal public schools.

These African Americans believe that academic achievement is the key to their economic independence. They want schools that involve them in their children's education while imposing high standards and strict discipline, and they reject the notion that poverty somehow renders parents less interested in their children's academic well-being. As their numbers swell, teachers unions will find it increasingly difficult to hold back reforms that offer black children a better chance.

This new movement is already spreading throughout the country. In Cleveland, African Americans like councilwoman Fannie Lewis, school principals Lydia Harris and Sister Hasina Renee, and school-board member Genevieve

Mitchell led the fight for a new state law that provides vouchers this fall for 2,000 low-income children. Lewis, Harris, Renee, and Mitchell vigorously supported Republican governor George Voinovich as he moved his voucher proposal through the state legislature. Lewis recruited 300 citizens in her neighborhood of Hough, the site of race riots in 1968, to travel to Columbus to lobby for the scholarship program. Last fall, when the governor's staff organized a press conference to announce the signing of the bill,jubilant black students and their parents packed the hallways and aisles.

In fact, support for vouchers in Cleveland was so strong that nearly 6,300 students, almost all of them black, applied for only 2,000 slots, which were filled by lottery. By mid-September of this year, 1,410 of the students had enrolled in a religious school. Councilwoman Lewis, a mother and 46-year Cleveland resident, attributes this flight to public schools' dismal educational record and indifference to parents. "The quality of public schools in Hough is poor," she says. "The roofs leak and the schools sometimes lack books, chairs, and other materials. Of the more than $7,000 spent on each child in the Cleveland public schools, only a fraction goes to classroom education." Thanks to vouchers, this fall Lewis was able to open her own community school, the Hough-Brooks Academy for Higher Learning-a nonsectarian school run by a community board with a curriculum emphasizing the arts and cultural awareness. Lewis hopes this will "force school officials to pay more attention to parents' concerns and to provide safer and better schools."

In Milwaukee, as Dan McGroarty has shown in his new book, Break These Chains, blacks have been the principal supporters of two Wisconsin voucher programs. "The battle for Parental Choice," McGroarty writes, "began in the church basements and meeting halls of Milwaukee's Near North Side," a poor neighborhood where only 48 percent of adults hold ajob. "From the start, the Milwaukee proponents' language was appropriated from the civil-rights movement. Their rhetoric was more redolent of Martin Luther King Jr. than the free-market pronouncements favored by conservative voucher proponents."

The engineer of Milwaukee's first voucher plan, which was limited to nonsectarian schools, was Annette "Polly" Williams, a black Democratic state representative from the Near North Side. Having fought the school system a dozen years earlier for busing her daughter to a bad public school, Williams was familiar with the Milwaukee education establishment's indifference to the needs of low-income black families. "The system is the system. It doesn't care. It doesn't feel," Williams told McGroarty. "The way I saw it, [it] is preparing our children for slavery. Look at the situation: Drop out by lOth grade, get into the street life. When you should be walking across the stage getting a diploma, you're standing in front of a judge wearing chains."

Committed to breaking up the system for the sake of the young black children in her community, Williams gradually mobilized her army of mothers and grandmothers, most of whom were on welfare, and all of whom were determined to "do right by their children." Aware of her army's powerful impact on lawmakers, she convinced the chairman of the state assembly's urban-education committee to hold a public hearing on her school-choice plan on the morning of February 23, 1990. The three-hour-long hearing, which attracted 200 low-income minority parents and children, prompted the committee to approve her proposal. Soon thereafter, it passed the assembly and the senate and was signed into law by Republican governor Tommy Thompson.