HOW SCHOOL CHOICE TURNS “WE” INTO “ME”
John Rex Elementary Charter School is the newest school built in Oklahoma City Public Schools. Their collection area is narrowly defined in an a part of the city where there are few children. That makes room for downtown executives to enroll their children from all parts of the metro. Photo by Brett Dickerson
“School choice” turns the “we” of society into the “me” of taking care of my child at the expense of everyone else.
Segregation is a part of our social fabric
Acknowledging that the showcase public school systems in a suburban America had already started the process of turning “we” into “me” is the first step to recovery for public education.
Suburban developers and realtors have made billions since the early 1950s by luring white people to buy homes of marginal quality in exchange for their children moving to “good schools”, meaning schools that have no significant count of black students.
The overall message went something like this:
Here, choose this home and your child will have a better chance of success. Leave that old deep city neighborhood behind. Leave its schools and someone else’s children behind. There’s no sense in trying to reform or save them. Let it be someone else’s problem.
Choose the neighborhood and you choose the school. School choice.
So why not just another form of “school choice”? It’s a convincing argument that says that all people should be able to choose.
One more step isn’t that different, right?
So if we have been practicing de facto school choice, isn’t it just logical to go all the way and allow everyone school choice? That’s the argument, and it’s a convincing one.
It is much easier to just pick up and leave other people’s children behind than to become active, militant, and spend time reforming a school by interacting with people who aren’t necessarily like you.
And so this is a powerful argument to many people who might have been practicing “school choice” by swapping homes for years.
School choice starts with seeing someone else’s children as other. And it becomes even easier when the other-ness of a child is illustrated by the fact that they don’t look like your children or even start with the same language.
Alienation = urge to segregate
Chuck D is still my favorite rapper because he has resisted the lure of record companies’ big money to gangsterize his music instead of fighting for the powerless, which was the true beginning of rap.
In his post-Ferguson appearance on the Tavis Smiley show last year How School Choice Turns "We" Into "Me":
