White House photo by Pete Souza
Former President Barack Obama caused a stir on Twitter recently after he retweeted an article written by charter school advocate Nick Hanauer, commenting, “the article is a reminder that education reform isn’t a cure all.”
In his article, Hanauer laments that after years of organizing and giving money to Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and Alice Walton to open more charter schools—because he believed that such investment in education could heal America’s ills—he has realized he was wrong. “Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income,” he writes.
On Twitter, response to the late-arrival perspective from the former president questioning the agenda of education reformers was both “better-late-than-never” as well as a certain amount of frustration. “You know, those if [sic] us actually working in education tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to tell you,” tweeted Pennsylvania teacher, blogger and Public School Shakedown fellow Peter Greene.
Education reformers have maintained that if you pour money into charter schools, bring in new teachers and develop innovative curricula for poor students—poor black children in particular—it will fix inequality in America. President Obama was a supporter of this approach, and his administration gave grant money to assist public schools converting to charters, which included laying off a large percentage of its workforce. This is what has happened where I’m from, in Camden, New Jersey. There is little to no evidence that such school improvement grants significantly improved student outcomes.
The Obama Administration also gave states grant money through its Race to the Top initiative to create teacher evaluations based on student achievement. According to a recent study, those evaluations unfairly rated teachers of color, and ignored the benefits to all students provided by a diverse education staff. It wasn’t until the end of President Obama’s term that education secretary John King spoke of the invisible tax on teachers of color—which alluded to the racism teachers of color confront in the profession. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration contributed to this tax with what they believed would aid the education of black and brown students.
The news on education reform, particularly charter school performance, has been less than stellar. But while Hanauer acknowledges that reformers like himself failed to see links between economics and education, he’s only getting at half the truth.
Charter schools are designated as an “alternative” for poor black children. In New Jersey, there are ninety-two charter schools, seventy-three of them located in municipalities with poverty rates above the national rate. Seventy-four percent of all charter students receive free or reduced lunch; 61 percent of them are black and only 9 percent are white. Of the 23,795 black students enrolled in New Jersey charter schools, 93 percent attend charter schools in municipalities whose poverty rate is above the national average—compared to only 52 percent for white students.
Education reformers use the rhetoric of civil rights to sell their ideas, but anti-racist action is not a part of their platform. In fact, racism is embedded in their reform model. Referring to children as “at risk,” preaching grit and hard work as the keys to academic and life success and believing in the notion of a “culture” of poverty are all ideas that put the onus on African-American and Latinx students for their academic underperformance, while taking credit for their testing gains and calling it progress.
A conversation about income inequality doesn’t address this.
Poverty is a function of America’s brand of capitalism, and white supremacy has done its very best to make it nearly impossible for a black person to build wealth equivalent to a white one. A lack of investment in education doesn’t explain that. (Neither does racial pseudoscience suggesting inherently irredeemable qualities that prevent black people from achieving success in life. Yet even President Obama chided black students for exhibiting such qualities as a root cause for their lack of academic success.)
Response to the late-arrival perspective from the former president questioning the agenda of education reformers was both “better-late-than-never” as well as a certain amount of frustration.
However, racism does explain the black experience in America. Racism is a system of laws and social practices, organized around oppressing people of African descent, to establish and maintain political, social, and economic power in the possession of white people. The nascent grappling by white people with the impacts of racism on the black experience was the reason for the recent House Panel Hearing on reparations for the African descendants of slaves, where Ta-Nehisi Coates, Danny Glover and Dr. Julianne Malveaux gave testimony.
Segregation, convict leasing, redlining, vagrancy laws, debt peonage, gerrymandering, the destruction of all black towns, and the exclusion from the New Deal and G.I. Bill are just some of the examples of how, Dr. Ibram Kendi notes, racist policies extracted wealth from people because of their blackness, well after slavery was abolished.
Disparities in sentencing laws have helped to fuel the rise in the nation’s prison population, especially that of black people, many of whom are in prison for the illegal sale of marijuana while white men profit off of its sale legally. In schools, we disproportionately discipline black children as early as pre-school; introducing them to law enforcement more than other students and fueling the pipeline to prisons.
It is true, as Hanauer mentions, that from 1979 to 2017, as the average real annual wages of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 156 percent, the purchasing power of the average American’s paycheck did not increase. However, it must also be said that from 1983 to 2013, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent as the wealth of the median white household increased 14 percent. Yes, in our capitalist system, income injustice is fostered. But racism is at the foundation of America’s economic system.
Hanauer said people who see education as a cure-all have largely ignored household income as the metric most predictive of a child’s educational success. I say to Hanauer that failing to account for racism in conversations of income inequality fundamentally ignores why economic injustice exists. By 2020, black people are projected to lose an additional 18 percent of wealth, and white households will own eighty-six times as much wealth as their black counterparts.
It’s not about income inequality in isolation—it’s racism. To quote the poet Shawn Carter, “if you can’t respect that then your whole perspective is wack.”