A baffling criticism of school choice from national AFT boss

IT takes a special kind of audacity to suggest that those working to provide a better education to minority children are racist. But then no one ever mistook American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten for someone whose policy views are tethered to reality.

A recent speech by Weingarten included some statements kindly described as baffling.

Of particular note was her claim that school choice programs are “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” Weingarten based the comparison, in part, on an example from the early 1960s in a county in Virginia in which local officials tried to evade desegregation by closing all public schools and then offering vouchers to local residents. (Local private schools at the time were whites-only.)

If that example, from more than a half-century ago, were normative today, Weingarten might have a point. But it’s not. Instead, most school choice programs have been designed to aid children in the worst public schools. And those children are disproportionately poor minorities.

One of the nation’s most famous voucher programs exists in the District of Columbia, which awarded 4,900 scholarships from 2004 to 2012, according to The New York Times. “Nearly 90 percent of students were black and from single-parent, low-income households,” the Times reported.

That means Weingarten apparently believes lowincome black parents who want better schools for their children are the moral equivalent of segregationists who sought to deny black children an education.

In Oklahoma and elsewhere, legislation has been filed to create education savings accounts, which provide parents a share of a child’s per-pupil allotment for public education. That money may then be used to pay for private school.

Some ESA proposals have involved statewide programs. By definition, if all children of all races qualify for an ESA, there’s no racism. As for more narrowly tailored proposals, a disproportionate share of beneficiaries of those programs would have been minority students.

This year Sen. Rob Standridge, R-Norman, proposed giving ESAs to low-income students in Oklahoma, Cleveland and Tulsa counties, primarily the Oklahoma City and Tulsa public school systems. Children poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunches would have received 90 percent of their per-pupil allotment, while not-quite-as-poor children would have received 60 percent.

In Oklahoma City, 54 percent of black students attend a school that received an F on state report cards, as do 42 percent of Hispanic students. The numbers are similar in Tulsa. Those students would have been the primary beneficiaries of Standridge’s bill.

In contrast, the status-quo system Weingarten defends is rife with separate and unequal school segregation.

“If vouchers are the polite cousins of segregation, then most urban school districts are segregation’s direct descendants,” said Kevin P. Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children. “The vast majority of our urban public school districts are segregated because of white flight and neighborhood neglect.”

Weingarten is correct that some officials would condemn minority children to a second-class education. But it’s Weingarten and her allies, not school choice advocates, who are tacitly promoting that deplorable cause.