Dora Taylor: Why ‘School Choice’ is Rooted in White Supremacy - Progressive.org

Why ‘School Choice’ is Rooted in White Supremacy - Progressive.org

Why ‘School Choice’ is Rooted in White Supremacy
A new book highlights how the movement to privatize education started with the effort to keep schools

In Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement, Steve Suitts provides much needed context for the current debate raging over “school choice,” charter schools, school vouchers, and other forms of privately operated schools that compete for public money. At 128 pages, the book is a fairly quick read but full of important content, through documentation and an impressive number of photos.

Suitts, a founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, makes an impressive and convincing case that the phrase “school choice”—a term influenced by libertarian economist Milton Friedman—is the latest foray in the long effort to resegregate public schools.

Overturning Brown begins with the origin of school vouchers in the Southern states, where they emerged as an attempt to keep schools segregated after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that schools were to be desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education. After a decade-long battle, it was declared by the Supreme Court that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

We are now hearing the term “school choice” again. 

Mitt Romney, while on the presidential campaign trail in 2012, touted a proposal to overhaul public schools by providing vouchers to low-income students—even though he knew most students in that category would receive CONTINUE READING: Why ‘School Choice’ is Rooted in White Supremacy - Progressive.org