Stunningly ignorant of school choice’s nonwhite roots
Randi Weingarten got a lot of media attention when the longtime teachers union chief gave a speech last week that slurred anyone who supports alternatives to the traditional public school system as racists.
The Washington Post reprinted Weingarten’s full speech, while inexplicably refusing to even link Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s speech the same day, which said taxpayer money should be invested in individual students and not a system “created in the 1800s.” (You can read it here on her “Speeches” webpage.)
It’s obvious that mainstream media outlets weren’t interested in fact-checking the American Federation of Teachers honcho’s alternative facts, so it was up to conservative and libertarian publications to provide the objective facts about the origins and beneficiaries of school choice.
Weingarten “is paid not to tell the truth about school choice. She deserves a raise,” Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, wrote more charitably than I would have in a New York Post column.
She cited segregationists in Virginia shutting down the public school system rather than integrate, Lowry says, but “Weingarten must know that no one in the school-choice movement looks for inspiration to Prince Edward County.”
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Though the seed was planted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, the school-choice movement was watered by Minnesota’s progressive governor and Legislature and a Black Panther-turned-assemblywoman in Milwaukee (name-checked in DeVos’s speech), who shepherded Wisconsin’s pioneering voucher law.
Choice is overwhelmingly used by racial minorities, including the 10,000 families on the waiting list for the 14,000-student Success Academy Charter Schools in New York (founded by another Democrat), which overwhelmingly serves nonwhite children, says Lowry:
Today, black kids aren’t legally excluded from the best schools but legally bound to failing ones. In her speech, Weingarten bizarrely compared defenders of the status quo — amply funded by union dues, and embedded in entrenched bureaucracies — to David and the reformers fighting for every inch to Goliath.
Los Angeles-based Scott Shackford gives an even deeper history in Reason, pointing out that ethnically diverse Angelenos “put school choice supporters in charge” of the school board this spring, and that 2014 figures measured national charter enrollment at 27 percent black and 31 percent Hispanic.
Weingarten is living in an “upside-down world” by arguing minority children and their families “need to be protected from choice,” which was how they got out of racist, segregated public schools in the first place, Shackford writes: They started their own colleges when the government failed them.
MORE: Minority teachers have ‘distinctly higher quit rates’
And Weingarten’s vaunted antiquated educational system, created by and for whites like her, is still failing them:
If anything, public schools are becoming more and more segregated, according to a Government Accountability Office study last year. And with school choice options, more poor and minority students are opting to leave, rendering them even less diverse.
Let’s not mince words: School choice is a boon for poor and minority students, giving them more possibilities that wealthy whites take for granted. It also represents a threat to the interests of Weingarten and the AFT, who have a significant financial stake in protecting their monopoly. …
The AFT is fighting a losing battle, and they know it. Parents, the actual customers of the education system, are desperately looking to take their money and business elsewhere.
Someone is trafficking in racism here, and she’s on a stage defending “a system that benefits government employees over the needs of the parents and students,” Shackford says:
Don’t try to convince the public that you care about the fate of poor and minority public school students when teachers’ union contracts keep schools in those very communities from getting rid of bad educators.
It’s time we popularize a hashtag to tell Randi Weingarten our personal stories about how school choice saves children, particularly poor and nonwhite, who would otherwise be trapped in the prisons of mediocrity run by her beloved “system.”
#DearRandi: Join us on the right side of history.
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