On Friday, Natalie Hopkinson of Howard Uniersity wrote a piece for Huffington Post suggesting that school choice was – you guessed it – racist. Why, pray tell, is it racist to remove your children from failing public schools and attempt to place them in schools where they are likely to receive a better education? Because the real reason you want your kids out of those schools is to avoid black and brown people. Or something.
Now, Hopkinson acknowledges that her own daughter is applying to various private schools right now, and admits, “We have done all of this so we can avoid our struggling neighborhood school.” That’s good for Hopkinson. But it’s bad for everyone else.
According to Hopkinson:
Radical self-interest and self-preservation is the rotten, racist core of the whole ideology of school choice. There is no “we” in this: The entire point is to give individual kids an advantage. In putting his daughter above everyone else, Wilson used the school choice system precisely as it’s designed to operate. This vision must change, both from the top down and from the bottom up. Families and taxpayers have swallowed the line that a privatized school “marketplace” will deliver on its promise of upward mobility for all. It is a cynical game that has done nothing to build up communities like mine, despite all promises to the contrary.
But, of course, there is no “we” to educating my child. My job is not to sacrifice my child’s future for your child. My job is to ensure that my child has the best possible future, and it’s your job to ensure the same for your child. I’m more than happy to help provide opportunities for your children similar to those mine will receive – it’s why I give charity and raise money for private schools and support school vouchers. But I’m sure as hell not going to put my daughter and son in garbage public schools out of some misguided sense of Marxist fairness. That would make me a rotten parent.
But Hopkinson thinks I’m a rotten person if I pursue my child’s interests. Why? Because historically, rich people had private tutors:
There was a time when education was not a public matter at all. In the early 19th century, wealthy families ― the DeVoses of the day ― hired their own tutors. Churches set up some private schools. Philanthropists like Sears executive Julian Rosenwald sponsored schools for some black children. The rest of America’s poor children, of all races, mostly worked to support their families and did not go to school.
Now, it never occurs to Hopkinson that perhaps school choice would allow more people to experience the same sort of schooling upper-crust people do. When I went to private school, my parents received financial aid scholarships; we weren’t as well off as many of the other kids with whom I attended. And my parents weren’t the only ones. The vast majority of private schools strive to ensure that middle class and poor students can attend alongside rich ones.
But Hopkinson still sees school choice through the prism of race:
It was in the 1950s, when civil rights reformers used the legal system to attack the system of apartheid, that the notion of “choice” first came to public attention. White parents demanded the right to “choose” not to send their kids to school with black children. They set up private academies, and in some cases shut down entire public school districts. Here in Washington, D.C., white families fled en masse, pretty much overnight, from the city’s public school system, in pursuit of the best “choices” for their children.
There’s certainly truth to this. But it’s also somewhat more complex. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow meant that black students were disadvantaged for decades, in awful and evil fashion – and it also meant that re-integration of schools (not de-segregation — forced integration, as in school busing) came along with serious challenges, both in terms of curriculum and in terms of social engagement. That wasn’t the fault of black kids, of course. But it’s unfair to say that every white parent pulled their kids out of school because of fear of black skin. And it’s certainly unfair to say that parents are putting their kids in private school because of racism half a century after the end of segregation. In any case, the solution to the problem isn’t governmental compulsion, but more choice for black kids as well as white kids.
The question is how to achieve that goal. And Hopkinson offers no answers, other than to shut down options for parents. She rightly points out that DC schools underperform. That’s also true of the public schools where I went, in Los Angeles Unified School District. But the solution is for parents to be able to opt out of those schools, not to force parents to subsidize those schools with the educational future of their children. She wants less transparency, less openness, and fewer options for children of all races:
Instead of harnessing our energy into building up community institutions for the next generation of kids, we’re all splintered off and chasing opportunities everywhere except in our backyards….Parents and policymakers need to overcome the collective amnesia that has taken root in our society about the long, sordid story of school choice. So many of the choices that we make, personally and collectively, are about running away from this history. At some point, instead of fleeing and hunting for the next shiny scheme, we have to stay and conquer the inequities and disadvantages that have continued to accumulate in this country.
Those inequities and disadvantages will not disappear unless choice is restricted. People will simply move from districts with bad schools to districts with good schools – and those people will be those who can afford to do so. Unless Hopkinson is proposing a government crackdown on the ability to attend schools of our choice, where we can live, and how much we can spend on our children’s education, she’s offering no solution. And she’s ignoring the biggest problem of all: school failures today are less about spending shortages than about parents who can’t or won’t do the work necessary to ensure the best educational path forward for their children. Hopkinson’s child will do fine, because her parents spend inordinate amounts of time and money to ensure she does. The same doesn’t hold true for every parent. The least we can do is give parents the option to do the right thing by putting more money back in their pocket and opening more options to them, rather than jailing them in failing schools defined by location rather than quality.
CBS This Morning 
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