Education as the Practice of Freedom

By Matt Nelson, May 27, 2007

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Opinion: The recent 53rd anniversary Brown v. Board of Education decision offers young people an opportunity to once again shape the future of the US educational system. Here's a communique from a Milwaukee activist on the danger of school privatization and Bush's No Child Left Behind Act.

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Issue: The legacy of the Brown v. Board decision.
Why? No Child Left Behind Act threatens the landmark equality case.
Action: Students and others speak out against NCLB.

According to Snoop Dogg, "Pimpin' ain't easy," but somehow powerful people have made exploiting our public schools and hustlin' our children's future seem simple. So, reflecting on the 53rd anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, let's renew our resolve to reclaim public education for the public.

In Milwaukee, a controversial corporate pimping strategy for public school privatization was initiated in the early 1990s to take control of our public schools for the purpose of stripping them down to build a voucher school system. Currently, Milwaukee is home to the largest voucher program in the country at an annual cost of around $110 million, allowing students in the program to attend private schools at state expense.

School vouchers, originally proposed in 1955 (a year after the Brown decision), by the conservative economist Milton Friedman as a way for whites to use their economic power to avoid desegregation in the South by providing a publicly funded private-school alternative to being forced by the federal government into public schools that would now allow black children to enroll. At that time, it was clear that the Civil Rights movement was gaining steam and Milt's proposal did not get much play until it caught the eye of the heavily funded and heavily right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which holds the title and the purse for the voucher movement.

Using the language of the Civil Rights movement and equating opportunity to school choice, the Bradley Foundation sought to have the voucher school system become part of the free market system, thus creating an institution that prioritizes and values individualism and anti-unionism over the ideals of citizenship and social uplift through education.

Remember, with over $700 million in assets, the Bradley Foundation is the wealthiest right-wing foundation in the world and is responsible for funding programs that demonstrate the following: (1) You can profit from racism, (2) you can profit from privatization, and (3) if you develop programs that are deeply racist and profoundly privatized, you will profit the most. The Bradley Foundation funded Charles Murray's book "The Bell Curve," which states that blacks and Latinos are by nature inferior and therefore will, in Murray's words, "congregate to the lower-classes of society." According to this mentality, blacks and Latinos are meant to work in low-wage jobs and attend inferior public schools.

The Bradley Foundation has also funded the privatization of welfare and many right-wing organizations, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Association of Scholars. "Charles Murray, in my opinion, is one of the foremost social thinkers in this country," said Michael Joyce, former president of the Bradley Foundation.

By using the very institution (MPS) that has proven to be invaluable to the poor as a vehicle for upward mobility, the voucher/privatization movement presses for an invisible ideology that threatens to replace democracy with education that serves the needs of the free market economy -- namely, low-wage work and a booming prison and military industrial complex. In order for this to work, youth voices must be suppressed through standardized testing and one-dimensional assessment, public schools must be neglected and dismantled, and our individual liberty and national freedom compromised. In essence, it becomes a system where market experiments are practiced over an unsuspecting (mostly young) population to create conditions that benefit the corporate elite at the expense of students, parents and working families.

Fifty-three years after Brown, Ella Baker's words seem necessary to remind us that public education is a right and essential for our democracy, and has the power to bend our communities and society toward justice:

"In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed ... I am saying as you must say, too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been."

The demands and gains of a significant score of the Civil Rights movement (1954-1974) restored prospects for a just society, specifically in the areas of public education. Starting with the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decided on May 17, 1954, that black children who were denied the education in a nonsegregated school would be denied equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Brown v. Board of Education was about improving the conditions of public schools so that all children would be guaranteed basic, equitable and dignified public education. The court found that even if all material aspects of segregated schools were equal, black children would still suffer psychological damage from a separate education. In Brown, the court explicitly overturned the doctrine of "separate but equal" as established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

Legally, Brown applied the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, subsequently making K-12 education a right, no longer subject to individual states' rights, and this standard would be enforced by the federal government. This is significant because many states mandated Jim Crow type schools or refused to education nonwhite or poor children at all. For the nation, the Brown decision made clear the direct link between education and social opportunities, which holds true today.

Quoting the decision, "In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."

Education is a legitimate civil rights issue and the federal government has a duty to provide equal education to all. However, the Bush administration came to power in 2000 with a different vision for the federal government's role in public education -- namely, to privatize it.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) carries on the Reagan revolution and continues to make education and the young people who attend public education a commodity, something to profit from. NCLB has created an opportunity to expand privatization, while conditions in U.S. public schools continue to deteriorate and segregate.

The mechanism of privatization used by NCLB is pretty simple and crudely mirrors the practice of the World Bank. First, the Bush feds underfund schools to the point of disaster. Then, NCLB deems schools failing and demands that certain parts of the education become under control of private entities, while remaining publicly subsidized. NCLB's safe-harbor provision, akin to the World Bank's structural adjustment program, requires schools or districts who would like relief from the sanctions to submit a plan to the secretary of education Margaret Spelling and show what educational responsibilities will be turned over to private interests. Once privatized, it is no longer a part of a democratic process, although the public will still pay for it. This year NCLB is up for reauthorization, and it is an opportunity to reverse some of the damage that it has created for the American dream of "free and universal" public education.

To fully understand the crisis of education in the United States, look no further than the prison system. There has never been such a direct pipeline from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse, and young people of color who are failed by public schools are likely to end up in prison. When I think of the over 2.2 million in prison in the United States, I think of young people of color who never were able to see the dream that the Brown decision wanted for them.

How long are young people going to take it? How long are old people going to take? How long?

Matt D. Nelson is a co-founder of the Milwaukee Police Accountability Coalition and the Freedom Now! Collaborative based in Milwaukee, Wis.