Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations and current defender of President Donald Trump, says the future of America can be found in school choice.
She made this claim during her speech at the Republican National Convention, in which she also said that it is “now fashionable” among a majority of Democrats to proclaim that the United States is a racist country.
A recent report from the Milwaukee area, where a school voucher program has been in place for years, found that Black students are the “most hypersegregated in the nation”—a fact clearly at odds with the goals of Brown v. Board of Education.
Using her own history as an Indian American woman who has achieved notable success, Haley flatly denied that this country is riddled with racism. She asserted that “of course every Black life matters,” including those of Black cops shot in the line of duty and Black kids “gunned down on the playground.”
In Haley’s view, it isn’t “Joe Biden and the socialist left” that will change things for Black people and their fellow Americans, but rather it’s the surfeit of freedom promised by the GOP—including the freedom to pull themselves up by their entrepreneurial bootstraps.
In the Republican-spun fantasy of America, to which Haley’s entire speech belongs, school choice is the ultimate expression of this freedom. After she declared America to be a decidedly non-racist place, Haley offered this pablum:
“We are striving to reach a brighter future,” she insisted, “where every child goes to a world-class school, chosen by their parents.”
The premise here is that world-class schools exist for every child, no matter their zip code, as the saying goes. The only missing ingredient is parental choice. It is up to parents to line their child up with the right world-class school, as if choosing a new sofa from a glossy catalog of options.
Haley’s vision of a brighter future driven by school choice was echoed throughout the RNC. Speaker after speaker, from state representatives to Trump himself, fervently promoted the idea that what parents—and particularly parents of color—want and need more than anything else is an ever-expanding buffet of school options.
While Haley was relentlessly cheerful about America and its supposed slew of world-class school options, most other RNC speakers, including California public school teacher and anti-union activist Rebecca Friedrichs, portrayed existing public schools as little more than scary holding cells for children stuck in a never-ending chapter of Oliver Twist.
Democrats, of course, have peddled this same story. The Obama-Biden Administration enacted a Hunger Games-like approach to school reform by requiring states to compete with one another for desperately needed federal education funds.
States deemed friendly to the expansion of charter schools were more likely to be declared winners in the administration’s Race to the Top program, according to Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s position on this is unclear so far. Charter schools were indeed favored by most high-profile Democrats during his tenure as Vice President, when school choice was portrayed—as it had been by President George W. Bush—as the “civil rights issue of our time.”
President Trump has glibly parroted this line as well. Biden, however, appears willing to at least pay lip service to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, where school choice is rightly criticized for issues of fraud, disruption, and an overall failure to invest in marginalized communities.
But rather than offer a full-throated defense of public education, Biden has offered a mild condemnation of for-profit charters, even though these often scam-ridden schools make up a very small percentage of all charter options in the United States.
This remains a potent issue in the Midwest. Here are a few examples to consider.
A recent report from the Milwaukee area, where a school voucher program has been in place for years, found that Black students are the “most hypersegregated in the nation”—a fact clearly at odds with the goals of Brown v. Board of Education.
Michigan also serves as an unfortunate poster child for the damage brought by unregulated, politically motivated school choice schemes. Before becoming Trump’s secretary of education, Michigan native Betsy DeVos used her fortune to push the state’s K-12 schools into a “race to the bottom,” through a proliferation of unaccountable charter schools.
In Minneapolis, a local advocacy group known as the Minnesota Parent Union held a press conference outside the city’s public school headquarters on September 2, just days before the start of the new school year.
The group, which is funded in part by a wealthy, pro-school choice foundation, took aim at the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, saying its 3,000-plus members were using the pandemic to “take the year off,” in an apparent reference to the school district’s distance-learning plan.
The Minnesota Parent Union has ties to the National Parent Union, which receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The foundation has poured billions into the school choice movement through wealth generated by Walmart.
It makes sense, then, that the press conference convened in front of Minneapolis Public Schools headquarters called for an immediate boycott of the district, with the promise that parents would receive help in their search for a new school—public, private, or charter.
This event sparked a thorny discussion on a local Facebook page set up for parents with children in the Minneapolis Public Schools. While some people acknowledged the difficulty that parents of color have in navigating the school system (and this should not be underestimated), many questioned the wisdom of promoting a boycott right before the start of a new, pandemic-influenced school year.
That’s because every family that leaves the district takes their child’s per-pupil funds with them, making it even harder for the public schools to meet the needs of those left behind. Students with the fewest resources typically end up fighting over crumbs, rather than walking into the sunset or into a “world-class” school of their parents’ choosing.
School choice is a fashionable campaign issue for the Republicans. Now, we need Democrats to step up and vocally support the full funding of public education in the United States.