The Civil Rights Heritage of Public Charter Schools

Rosa Parks, Bill Clinton, the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, Governor Rudy Perpich and Howard Fuller – all strong civil rights advocates and public charter school supporters – would reject the false history of charters now being distributed by Diane Ravitch and other opponents.   Support from Parks, Clinton, et. al. for chartered public schools came out of a belief in the importance of empowering low-income families and giving educators the chance to create more effective schools. Parental choice didn’t originate in forced segregation academies of the 1950’s or in the work of Milton Friedman, as Ravitch suggests.  Knowing our history is vital as we plan our future…a future that should include more highly effective charter public schools.

Throughout U.S. history, wealthy families and academic elite students have had school choice.  The only question is whether the government will insure that all families, including those with low incomes, have public school options.

Parks spent part of the last decade of her life trying to establish charters in Detroit.  Clinton, with whom I worked for more than a year, and who asked me to testify at the Arkansas Legislature, worked skillfully to help promote charters.

That’s what motivated liberal Democrat Rudy Perpich (D-Minn.) who pushed for public school choice programs that led to chartering.   In confirmation hearings for former U.S. Secretary of Education and South Carolina Governor Richard Riley, liberal U.S. Senator Wellstone urged the Clinton administration to expand the number of charter public schools. Clinton’s Presidential Library cites that expansion as a major achievement of his administration.

Part of the rationale for chartering public schools comes from a remarkable 1968 Harvard Education Review article, “Alternative Public School Systems,” by African American psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose work was cited by the US Supreme Court in “Brown v. Board of Education.”  Clark described “obstacles…to effective education” including “such fetishes as the inviolability of the neighborhood school concept…..” (The same neighborhood school concept that Ravitch relentlessly promotes).

Instead, Clark urged “Alternative Public School Systems… financed by states, operated outside traditional districts, that are created by colleges, universities, labor unions, business, industry….” Sound familiar?

Bill Wilson, the first African American City Council president in St. Paul, and founder of a successful St Paul charter, recently testified at the Minnesota legislature.  He differentiated between schools like his and the segregated public school he was forced to attend in Indiana.  “We had no choice,” he recalled. “I was forced to attend an inferior school, farther from home than nearby, better-funded ‘whites-only’ schools.  Higher Ground is open to all. No one is forced to attend. Quite a difference.” Wilson agreed that all charters are not effective, and strongly endorsed the principle, well practiced in Minnesota, that ineffective charters should be closed.

Ravitch also ignores the long history of choice offered for the academic elite – whether it’s Boston Latin (started in 1635) or Bronx High School of Science (started in 1938).  These so-called public schools, and thousands of other magnet schools, use admissions criteria based on test scores and in some cases grades or auditions.  The charter movement was founded on the principle that there should be NO admissions tests – that these schools should be open to all.

There’s a well-funded effort to distort and deny the history and principles of chartering public schools.  We need to be open to critics, and work hard to improve charters.  But we should be clear where we came from, and what we stand for.

References:

Abdullah, Halimah, “Rights Hero Seeks to Open School in Detroit: Rosa Parks joins the growing charter school movement,” The New York Times, June 30, 1997, p. A12.

Clark, Kenneth B. 1968. “Alternative public school systems.” Harvard Educational Review 32, no. 1 (Winter): 100–113.

Nathan, Joe, Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity in American Education, San Francisco, Jossey Bass, 1997.

Ravitch, Diane, Death and Life of the Great American School System, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

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