How the ‘School Choice’ Movement Has its Roots in Racism
“We have experimented educationally on children who are poor, who are of color, who go to underfunded schools. We come up with ways of teaching them that are experiments and have absolutely no kind of basis in research.”
Charter schools and the “school choice” movement have become a major part of the fabric of the American education system in recent years, but what are the origins of these institutions and this educational ideology?
In America, there are about 3 million students attending more than 7,000 charter schools around the country, and with the current prevailing political and economic tendencies in the United States, it seems highly likely that this number is only going to continue to grow.
Education and the Trump Administration
During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that if elected, he would be the “nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice,” and has already made many bold moves on this front, including appointing school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as his Secretary of Education. In May 2017, DeVos was quoted as saying that the goal of Trump’s administration is to enact “the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation’s history.”
DeVos has been one of the most vocal champions of the “school choice” movement, pushing all sorts of legislation on the topic, including most recently a federal tax credit that would provide 5 billion dollars in federal money to fund private school scholarships. The plan has faced opposition from both conservatives and liberals who see it as a voucher program by a different name and a way to siphon public funds away from struggling public schools.
Growth of Charter Schools
Many cities around the country have begun to favor charter schools over traditional public schools, and most of the cities with high rates of enrollment in charter schools are financially strapped areas that are dealing with economic turmoil and a fractured public education system.
According to the Key Facts About Charter Schools publication, in Flint, 55 percent of students in the district attend charter schools, and in Detroit, 53 percent of students are educated at charter CONTINUE READING: How the 'School Choice' Movement Has its Roots in Racism - Citizen Truth
