Black parents play a pivotal role in progressing a conservative market-based education agenda through a strategic alliance with the Right. School choice detractors on the Left proclaim negative impacts of privatized education on low-income Black families, yet have not looked closely at how conservative approaches to education reform has provided space for Black parents to have greater control over their children’s education. However, the same abilities that garner relative success in other parts of the country, are stifled in Ohio.

For many Black families, school integration has never been the only determining factor for education success. Instead, communities organized to address the failure of public school serving Black students after Brown vs Board of Education. Aspiring to control institutions that targeted Black communities, private school alternatives such as Council of Independent Black Institutions ( CIBI) were formed in the 1960s and 70s. CIBIs taught social-justice oriented curriculum emphasizing a connection between African identity, self-determination, and academic success. Education professor Lisa Stulberg, writes that “ By 1973, CIBI had 21 small, private, largely tuition-driven small member schools that were often part of larger community centers that housed independent bookstores, restaurants, grocery stores, and arts spaces.” Stulberg argues alternatives like CIBIs gave Black parents access to quality education. Some hoped charter schools could be another alternative education option.

Charter schools developed out of alternative approaches to education in the 1970s and 80s. They are independent taxed-funded schools offered as an option outside of a neighborhood public school. Charters operate with considerable fiscal and curricular autonomy, governed by independent boards, and aren’t required to hire unionized teachers. Black families began to determine how to utilize school choice to fit their needs, but challenges continued. Post-Brown, Black families across the country experienced negative impacts of (often white) teachers working with Black students from racial and socioeconomic deficit assumptions about Black families’ intelligence.

Ineffective teacher-student relationships, crowded classes, and low academic outcomes painted a bleak picture of public schools. This depiction set the stage for market-based education reform promising efficiency to Black parents as ideal consumers. For many poor and working-class Black families, free-market education allowed them to form conditional, fragile and opportunistic alliances with conservative education reformers beholden to privatized education promising academic success and profitability.

The Right is able to grow its constituency by appealing to the hopes and assuage the fears of Black families through a liberal-leaning rhetoric of freedom of choice. In the same way US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, erroneously aligned the mission of Historically Black Colleges and Universities with school choice, many conservatives articulate charter schools as an extension of social justice efforts. In 2014, Reince Priebus, current White House chief of staff wrote for CNN, “Fighting for school choice is one of the ways to take action. For most students today, their neighborhood or zip code determines their school. That means some kids, by no fault of their own, are forced into a failing school. They don’t have a choice.”

In the National Review, Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock compared charter school opponent Bill de Blasio to racist Governor George Wallace: “Just as Alabama’s segregationist Democratic governor notoriously stood in the school door to deny quality education to disadvantaged Black children in 1963, New York’s far-left Democrat mayor stands in the charter-school door to deny quality education to disadvantaged Black children in 2014.” Linking racial justice to market-defined school choice falsely situates actions of the Right as altruistic gestures towards low-income Black families and simultaneously shields the economic gains of profit-focused organizations given administrative latitude by the state.

In 2015, the Washington Post wrote “No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” The Akron Beacon reported “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by [Ohio] charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”

Ohio’s largest charter, ECOT, was paid over $100 million by the state although questions about consistent student enrollment and effective learning loom. In 2016, The Columbus Dispatch reported that Ohio’s charters were faring worse than large urban districts with more than 80 percent of charter high schools with an F rating.

To compound the challenge, the investment in charter schooling is not producing better outcomes for Black students. In 2014, according to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) Columbus charter and traditional public schools produced no significant difference in learning for either math or reading for Black students.

With low graduation rates and few accessible choices for quality education, Black parents are making strategic choices. Education scholar Thomas Pedroni argues that Black families navigating school choice is “a testament to the strength of their potential political agency, rather than…an indication of naıve submission to a conservative agenda.” Black parents pushed toward Rightist social movements by an unresponsive state has shaped an alliance with many ideological contradictions and compromises.

As a parent, I sit at the center of this conundrum. My son’s neighborhood school is failing and the charter school next door is also failing. He will be starting a new charter school next year. He loves science and math and consistently tests above his grade level in reading. Neither of his previous schools had programs that allowed him to move to the next grade level within a subject area, but the new school does. In addition, most of the administration are Black, they attend our church, and work with my son in Sunday School. The hope is that this mix of teachers who look like my son, know him outside of school, and shape a culture that supports his academic interests will prove to be the right fit. I don’t know how successful it will be, but I’m glad I have the option to try. However, I wish this opportunity was available in our neighborhood school around the corner instead of on the other side of town.

Originally published in The Columbus African American Journal https://issuu.com/columbusafricanamerican/docs/june_2017_edition