30 Issues: School Integration vs. School Choice

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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now another installment in our election series, 30 issues in 30 days. We're in a run of eight consecutive days on racial justice issues facing Trump and Biden. Now issue 19 out of 30, School choice and school integration.

President Trump: There's nothing that the African American community wants more than school choice. Mothers and fathers are going to be very happy to see him be defeated just on that alone, end school choice. Joe Biden wants to end school choice.

Brian: That was President Trump back in July, claiming that Biden wants to end school choice. Is it true? Well, it depends on the kind of school choice you're talking about. There are generally two models of school choice. There's vouchers usable for private schools, ones that would be universally available and would be targeted for low-income families, and then there's the creation of charter schools, schools of choice that are funded by public money but operate autonomously outside the traditional system of public schooling. Biden mostly wants to do away with voucher programs and keep some charter schools. Here he is answering a question on whether he would do away with school choice last month.

Joe Biden: The public schools are first and foremost means by which we are going to guarantee the education of everyone. Charter schools that are specialized, like charter schools for music, charter schools for mathematics, charter schools-- Though, as long as they meet the same conditions that public schools have to do in terms of the transparency and they're not for profit, then I have no problem with that. I do have problem with choice, if you mean paying for private education, that isn't responsible to the same standards that is required at public school.

Brian: Joe Biden last month. Now, for decades where people stand on school choice has broken down often along liberal and conservative lines, along union and anti-union lines. It also divides white Democrats and Democrats of color to some degree. Here with me now to talk about this all is Anya Kamenetz, education correspondent at NPR and Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center and co-host of the podcast School Colors, about a documentary series that he's been on the show to discuss, about how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools with an emphasis on current segregation in Brooklyn. Mark and Anya, welcome back to WNYC.

Anya Kamenetz: Hey Brian, it's good to be here again.

Mark Winston Griffith: Good to be here.

Brian: I want to start by talking about how the pandemic is shaping this conversation right now. Here's another clip. It's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a radio interview in August talking about how the pandemic might be a good thing for school choice.

Betsy DeVos: I think the last six months have really revealed the fact that the system that most students have been a part of has been a very static one-size-fits-all system, that is unable in way too many cases to pivot, to be nimble and flexible and to adjust to new and different circumstances. I think this is a good thing because I think it's going to really force changes that should have happened many years ago. Most of that's going to happen when families themselves are empowered to make those choices and those changes and those decisions.

Brian: Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos. Anya, has the pandemic breathe new life into the school choice, specifically the private school voucher debate?

Anya: I feel like that's a really perverse way that the secretary has framed the question because we know that she's been a huge advocate of every alternative to public schools from for-profit charters to private schools and homeschooling, and we've had very minimal federal aid to assist our public schools in the huge task of reopening, both virtual and hybrid. Of that money, the secretary has been engaged in court battles over her desire to funnel a disproportionate amount of it to her preferred private schools.

To say that public schools haven't been nimble in response to this incredible challenge is really amazing to hear when you think that school leaders are telling us that they need upwards of $200 billion in aid in order to operate safely and respond to students' needs right now and they've received less than 13 billion in effect from the federal government, the administration that the secretary is a part of

Brian: The Trump administration is already making moves to advance their voucher programs and school choice agenda. The latest Senate relief bill included a new $5 billion federal tax credit to support scholarships that help students attend private schools or other educational alternatives. Now that was not passed as any latest relief bill has yet to be passed, but has the voucher program grown under DeVos and Trump. Anya, I'll stay with you on this. How many Americans currently use a voucher and what's the demographic breakdown if you have it?

Anya: Vouchers haven't significantly grown under Trump because they are basically state-level programs and a federal voucher program has not been expanded to any significant extent. There's been these proposals here and there, but really this has been left up to the states. To my knowledge the growth and the utilization of vouchers has not left up during the Trump years. It's tracked where it's been in years past. We have about 10% of Americans who attend private schools and they do tend to be on the higher income level.

One thing that's happened over the last few decades with the closing down of many parochial schools, in fact, the people who go to private schools tend to be even more high-income and white than the general population. What happens now is really interesting. I just did a story on the drop in enrollment in public schools in many districts around the country. I don't believe New York City has released these numbers yet, but we may see that because of many schools not being able to return in person. There's a lot of parents who seem to be keeping their kids out of kindergarten, and there are some private schools as well as homeschooling that may be growing as a result of that because of the pandemic.

Brian: Listeners, we'll open up the phones on this. Since this is part of our series on racial justice issues facing Biden and Trump, I want to invite primarily Black listeners in on this, because Trump is pitching this as part of the heart of his appeal to Black voters. He's more for school choice than Joe Biden is. If you're a Black parent, Black teacher, just anybody who's concerned about this issue as a racial justice issue, concerned about education in general as a racial justice issue, does school choice land with you as something that's attractive? Unattractive?

What is this to you if you've given it some thought, or if you have any experience with it as parent, teacher, student, whatever, (646)-435-7280? If anybody has a comment or a question for our guests on Anya Kamenetz and Mark Winston Griffith, (646)-435-7280. Mark, Trump says there's nothing the African American community wants more in education than school choice. You've talked about what you see as the racist origins of the school choice movement. Would you describe that a little bit?

Mark: Sure. Obviously, you have to take what he says with a healthy dose of skepticism, but historians who have looked at the choice movement trace a lot of it back to Southern States and the way they used choice to evade the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision. Southern States adopted freedom of choice plans which purportedly gave choice to Black and white families, but really was an attempt to keep Black and white students in the same segregated schools they were before Brown. It also tried to provide financial support to white students that allowed them to attend private segregated school.

A choice has always been a way to keep certain inequities entrenched or to evade, again, this idea of integration, but it's true for many Black families, choice is, what they feel at least, is their only way to escape the inequities of the public school system. A lot of conservatives talk about trying to dismantle the department of education and talk about teachers' unions, but for many Black families, it really just comes down to, what is the avenue I have in my life and for my family, that's going to allow me to have some kind of access to a quality education in a public school system that they feel has failed them from beginning to end.

In many ways, it's more an act of desperation to be quite honest with you. You will see some of the most progressive voices in the Black community actually advocating for school choice in one way or another.

Brian: In the context of your podcast series, School Colors, which looks at segregation and other education issues primarily in Brooklyn, school choice was part of the bedrock of the education reforms that Mayor Bloomberg tried to bring to New York in his 12 years, what was called citywide school choice, that a student from anywhere in the city could apply to any school in the city, at least in theory. If they were accepted based on whatever criteria and they could manage the transportation, it would get people unstuck in their local, sometimes failing schools, without having to resort to private school vouchers. Have you reported on this and how successful or not that was?

Mark: We did report on that in School Colors, the first season, we talked about how Bloomberg's approach really in many ways disrupted the entire educational system as we know it. It ended though our way of seeing schools as places of community, of neighborhood, of serving the common good and really began to see it as a function of the marketplace and where people see themselves as consumers and really atomized the constituency of students in New York City.

That had a profound effect on the way people see their educational choices, their options. It began to see a school choice as an exit ramp and a way of, again, avoiding a system that has failed them before for such a long time. Ultimately, it's a system that creates winners and losers. At the end of the day, many low-income Black and brown students, they remain the losers. The system is still structured against them and choice might be an escape for a few. At the end of the day, the public education system is there to meet the needs of everybody and neither the public school system or the choice system are able to do that.

Brian: Now, this is not a new issue in presidential campaigns, folks. Here's an archive clip of Ronald Reagan. This wasn't during the campaign. This was when he was in office from his 1983 State of the Union Address.

Ronald Reagan: We will continue our firm commitment to support the education efforts of State and local governments, but the focus of our agenda is, as it must be, to restore parental choice and influence and to increase competition between schools. We've sent to the Congress a tuition tax credit plan and proposed a voucher system to help low- and middle-income families afford the schools of their choice.

Brian: Here's a clip of Hillary Clinton from when she was first considering running for president way back in 2006. This is a distillation of what Democrats say they're afraid of when it comes to voucher programs.

Hillary Clinton: Suppose you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent who comes, says, "I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School." You say, "Great, wonderful school. Here's your voucher." Next parent who comes, says, "I want to send my child to the Jewish day school." "Great. Here's your voucher." Next parent who comes, says, "I want to send my child to the private school that I've always dreamed of sending my child to." "Fine. Here's your voucher."

Next parent who comes, says,"I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist." You say, "Wait a minute, we're not giving you a voucher for that." The parent says, "Well, the way I read Genesis, Cain was marked. Therefore, I believe in white supremacy. Therefore you gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, you gave it to a secular private school parent, under the constitution you can't discriminate against me."

The next parent comes and says, "I want to send my child to the school of the Jihad." "Wait a minute. We're not going to send a child with taxpayer dollars to the school of the Jihad." "Well, you gave it to the Catholics, you gave it to the Jews, you gave it to the private secular people, you're going to tell me I can't? I'm a taxpayer. Under the constitution--" Now tell me how we're going to make those choices.

Brian: Hillary Clinton, back in 2006, sounds like she would have made an interesting presidential candidate. Anya, can you put those Reagan and Hillary Clinton clips in a little bit of historical context for us? Obviously, this is not a new issue. It touches on separation of church and state and squeamishness over funding white supremacists or religious extremism.

Anya: Yes. Our public common schools all the way back to the common grammar schools of colonial times have been trying to square a very difficult circle, which is schools are the place where people become citizens. That was actually the reason that they were originally publicly funded, was to equip children with the ability to participate as full citizens. In order to do that, they had to be inculcated with democratic principles in a way that was kept clear from other ideologies, including even religious ideologies, even back then when this was seen as being a very Christian country.

The notion of not using public money to fund schools that promulgate very narrow ideologies compared to the broad ideology of civic togetherness and democracy is really salient today because you have schools that are patronized and funded for example, by Betsy DeVos, by Amy Coney Barrett, and some of the members of her church that discriminated against LGBTQ people, against hiring teachers who are LGBTQ and against students in ways that run afoul of our current understanding of constitutional protections.

This is continuing to be a very live issue. Schools are always going to be at the cross-section of every culture war that we have and that's why there are so many people that believe in the importance of having a public school as a place where we come together on fair and even ground in a democracy on the constitutional principles that people agree on and not on specific ideologies that people may come from.

Brian: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in our election series 30 issues in 30 days, and we're in a run of eight consecutive days on racial justice issues facing Trump and Biden today at School choice and school integration with Anya Kamenetz, who was just speaking, NPR education reporter, and Mark Winston Griffith from the Brooklyn Movement Center, also co-host of the education equity-oriented podcast series, School Colors, and Lynn in New Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hi, Lynn, thank you for calling in.

Lynn: Hi, how are you?

Brian: Good. How are you?

Lynn: Thank you for taking my call.

Brian: What you got for us?

Lynn: I guess from my perspective I have two views on this. One from the perspective of a non-formal educator. I did a lot of exterior supplemental programming in a particular town in New Jersey School System. One of the schools that I worked with had the charter school in the public school, and it was really sad. It had been incredibly demoralizing for the kids of the public school to walk into the same building with the kids in the charter school and see who's the have and who's the have not. It was very, very sad and very, very evident the minute you walked in.

I don't think that charter schools in and of themselves, I don't think that they should get money from federal dollars or public dollars. That money should be rolled back in to improve the public schools that currently exist. The other perspective I've had is as a parent. I'm a single parent of two African American boys and I felt like I had to get out of living in this particular city to be able to afford my kids a good education.

Even when I moved into the "suburbs" of New Jersey, I still found that unfortunately, sending my youngest son to the charter school was the better choice because it had more resources and more advanced opportunities than what the public school has and there's a problem. My tax dollars goes to the public school. They should be getting that same experience in the public setting, not in this charter or private setting.

Brian: Based on those two conflicting observations and experiences, is there some way that you would generalize from your personal experience as a mom to what might be a systemic solution? Like would you prefer to see more widespread school choice, so there aren't the disparities that you were describing in the first part of your observation between the charter school and the public school under the same roof or something else.

Lynn: I honestly think that if there's public dollars, 90% of it or 80% of it should go back into the public system and then there should be some comprehensive plan or strategy to beef up, improve and make contemporary a public school system that actually is fair, appropriate, worthy, progressive. That's what I personally think.

I don't think a charter school is a way of-- There's, another charter school in my area that's been around for a couple of years. Man, I mean some of the teachers there, I'll just say they call them guides, not teachers, they didn't even know what a duck was. These are adults that are teaching the kids that go to the school. There's a problem.

Brian: Lynn, thank you very much for charming. Ayanna, in Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hello, Ayanna.

Ayanna: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I want to talk about their just from the perspective of being a single parent, this is a previous caller, but I'm in a pretty good district, but I moved my son from the public school to Catholic school because I started to see that literate why I didn't think that he was where he should be and I'm really happy with it now.

As a speech therapist one of the things that happens, and we see this with particularly Black students, many Black students are by the time they reach kindergarten are subpar in terms of their vocabulary. You see this in their reading level by third grade and it's consistently low. I believe that this contributes to the dropout weight, particularly of Black males, and the difficulty that they have in school.

I think that absolutely there needs to be school choice. The public school system should be funded as well, but to me, they are not doing a job and I think that the documentary Waiting on Superman still holds valid today in which you see that across the board nationally, the public schools are not doing a job. I really wanted to say that it's very important. Particularly single Black families, really mainly headed by Black females. This is a particular issue that affects schooling a Black children.

Brian: Is that to say, Ayanna, that for you, you think the path to equity, to closing the racial disparities in educational outcomes runs more through choice than it does through desegregation?

Ayanna: Yes. I think it runs more through choice. The reason why is when you see the contribution of Blacks who grew up in a segregated house, who went to school in small houses that, and were taught by other Blacks who were discriminated against in the fifties. You see the contribution of those Blacks to the nation and what they did in science and all of this, even with segregation, I'm not saying that I want segregation.

However, there is a difference in terms of, I think the big equalizer is in a child becoming literate, becoming competent, able to contribute, and able to for job mobility. That is what is more important to me, even in terms of segregation, maybe that will bring about more integration once everyone has more of a chance to becoming literate.

Brian: Thank you very much for your call. Mark Winston Griffith, what are you thinking?

Mark: Well, I'm thinking a lot of different things from both of the callers. I think that it demonstrates the complexity of this issue and I think we have to even question the framing right here. I think that a lot of families do not see this as choice versus integration. I don't think people necessarily see the two as being incompatible, but you've got different things happening. You've got politics and philosophy that's happening at the national state, city policy level that is trying to do some engineering about how we live and trying to deal with some very big questions through education.

Then you see parents and individuals struggling with their own issues and having to make, yes I'll use the word, they have to make a choice and are feeling that yes through all this conversation that at the end of the day, there's politics working on one level, but no one is really thinking about their children and their situation. I'm just going to opt out altogether because if people don't have this stuff together, I'm going to do what I need to do for my own family.

Unfortunately, that individualized way that grabbed for your own private interests, I think ultimately has a destructive impact on the public school and the ideals of the public school as we know it.

Brian: Let me end, and we have about two minutes left, with this one clip that if there's one thing from Kamala Harris's presidential campaign, before it became a vice presidential campaign, it was probably this exchange between her and Joe Biden during the first primary debate that ended like this.

Kamala Harris: There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

Brian: Mark, and then Anya, very briefly. They're not campaigning on busing, that's for sure. How much do you think desegregation is or in your opinion should be at the heart of the push for educational equity versus school choice, which you're obviously a skeptic of versus just adequate funding, equal funding for every school in its place, or however else you want to frame it.

Mark: Anya, you want to go?

Anya: Well, the cornerstone of Joe Biden's plan in 2020 is funding and it's tripling title one funding, it's funding for teacher training, it's funding for community schools and wraparound services. It reflects something that we have recognized in technicolor in this pandemic, which is that schools are more than institutions for education.

They are vital parts of communities, and if you don't fund them adequately, children suffer and they suffer disproportionately according to the fault lines in our society. The solution for that, at least according to the Democrat running for president is to try to lift all boats and give schools the funds that they need to provide good services to everyone.

Brian: Mark, 30 seconds. Last word.

Mark: Sure. I'm not sure if people see it in terms of integration versus segregation or choice, I think at the end of the day, people just want a quality education. I think we can all agree that there needs to be equity and how we get to it is a big question. I think that needs to happen on a policy level, not just on an individual choice level.

Brian: Mark Winston Griffith runs the Brooklyn Movement Center and co-hosts the podcast School Colors. Anya Kamenetz is an NPR education reporter. That's our 30 issues in 30 days segment for today. Thank you both so much.

Anya: Thank you.

 

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