from NPE Board member Julian Vasquez Heilig’s blog – Cloaking Inequity
The wealthy have poured millions of dollars into “school choice” causes over the last decade. Under the mantra of civil rights, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers and the powerful corporate-funded lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are using venture philanthropy and the political process to press for top-down neoliberal school reforms focused on private control and privatization in the United States. Recently, the Koch brothers and others have targeted their millions on the Latino community via Libre.
Libre was founded in 2011 and claims to be a “non-partisan, non-profit grassroots organization that advances the principles and values of economic freedom to empower the U.S. Hispanic community.” Media Matters reported that Libre’s senior staff are almost all Republican Party campaign veterans and has been backed over $10 Million in Koch funding— suggesting that Libre is neither non-partisan nor grassroots.
In their op-eds placed in newspapers in states where the Latino population is substantial, Libre representatives make simplistic— yet convincing— claims about the benefits of school “choice” for underserved communities of color. The predominance of the peer-reviewed literature does not support the grandiose claims that Libre makes and instead demonstrates that school choice, on average, does not produce the equity, social justice or student success that proponents spin.
No one is claiming that there are not examples of high quality charter schools or traditional neighborhood schools. However, several decades of peer-reviewed charter school and voucher research have demonstrated that choice is not a panacea. In fact, school choice has in many ways enhanced the United States’ unfortunate and problematic separate and unequal system of schools for many vulnerable students by often failing to properly serve special needs students and intensifying segregation.
The choice mantra should be wrestled away from Libre and the billionaire funders of neoliberal education “reforms.” Instead of policies that promote choice via top-down private control and privatization, we must offer community-based democratically controlled approaches to education. We must hold legislators accountable to fund what national polling has demonstrated parents want to choose in their neighborhood public schools— more parental involvement, less testing, smaller class sizes, quality teachers, and less hunger. The elephant in the room in our country is the unfortunate and consistent choice made by policymakers to talk incessantly about school choice while purposefully failing to deliver the resources to provision parental choices in both rich and poor schools.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charter schools click here.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on vouchers click here.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education. He is currently a Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and the Director of the Doctorate in Educational Leadership at California State University Sacramento. He also serves as the California NAACP Education Chair. His current research includes quantitatively and qualitatively examining how high-stakes testing and accountability-based reforms and market reforms impact urban minority students. Julian’s research interests also include issues of access, diversity, and equity in higher education. Julian blogs at Cloaking Inequity, consistently rated one of the top 50 education websites in the world by Teach100.
