In December 1998, I attended a rally inside the Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Milwaukee’s north side. It was sponsored by the activist group People for the American Way and it was billed as a sort of “call to arms” against private school choice. Just a few months earlier, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had ruled that it was kosher to allow low-income students to use vouchers in private and religious schools. Attacking Milwaukee’s groundbreaking choice program became a top priority for the National Education Association (which was helping to bankroll PFAW’s work.)
The guest speaker who was flown in for the rally was a young Congressman named Jesse Jackson Jr. (More on what he said that night in a minute.) He also happened to be a guest speaker at DFER’s Washington, DC launch event a couple of nights ago. (More on what he said there, as well as a link to video footage of his remarks, after the jump.)
I remember thinking how odd the whole thing was during the Milwaukee event. The Baptist Church they chose for their rally was about 100 yards away from my front door, and because I had kids of my own, I knew a lot about just how crappy the public offerings were in my neighborhood. (We lived in a crack house that we were restoring in a distressed but rapidly gentrifying part of the inner city.) Because my son was white, we were able to get him into one of the city’s public magnet schools (about a mile away) with a focus on the arts. In order to preserve “racial balance,” white kids got the first crack at the seats in that school; black kids had to contend with a waiting list.
So anyway, the neighborhood school serving our neighborhood (and the Baptist church hosting the rally) was a school called Palmer Elementary School. It was not only THE WORST school in Milwaukee, it was arguably one of the worst elementary schools in America. The test scores were not only shockingly low, an audit by the Milwaukee Public Schools back then showed there was actually some score tampering. I can’t emphasize enough just HOW BAD the school was. As proud/arrogant white liberals, we agonized about abandoning our neighborhood school – but we ended up doing what all the other proud/arrogant white liberals did: we sent him to another public school that was filled with proud/arrogant white liberal families. (It was really a great school, and we emphatically patted ourselves on the back for supporting public education.)
Now there was another school about three blocks from the Baptist church which also made the PFAW’s rally location seem bizarre to me at the time. It was (and still is) a Lutheran school called St. Marcus. Unlike Palmer (the crappiest school ever), St. Marcus was into educational ass-kicking. At a time when not every Lutheran school in Milwaukee even WANTED to be part of the voucher program (some feared letting government in would mess up their schools) St. Marcus was one of those schools where the people there seemed to believe in their heart of hearts that they were put on this planet to educate inner city school kids.
My wife and I (for complicated reasons ranging from the fact that we’re Catholic to the fact that we do instinctively believe in the value of public schools, and a host of other considerations) chose not to send our kids to St. Marcus. But for many families who were opting to attend St. Marcus, it was a crucial lifeline to a decent education for their kids. If the choice was between St. Marcus and Palmer, every single person reading this blog would end up making the same choice. (Did I mention that Palmer was the worst school ever?)
So we go to this big PFAW rally with all these people from Washington and Jesse Jackson Jr. and all and we are ranting against a program that allows poor people to choose St. Marcus over Palmer for their kids. Brilliant positioning.
To make it even more bizarre, on the same night as the out-of-towner/PFAW/Jesse Jackson Jr. rally, former Milwaukee Superintendent Howard Fuller led a dueling rally a few miles away which was packed by low-income parents who wanted desperately not to be trapped in the Palmer Elementary Schools of the world. It was all rather awkward. (I covered both rallies for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where I was a reporter at the time.)
To be fair, Jackson Jr. himself looked a little uncomfortable with it all. But he came through with some good lines for the PFAW’s cause. He said that vouchers would keep white kids separated from black kids. He said school choice was about white people trying to avoid desegregation, that we are turning our back on the promise of public education, blah, blah. All the stuff we’re supposed to say as liberals, but stuff that’s a lot easier to swallow when you aren’t in a church within a stone’s throw of both Palmer and St. Marcus.
“The same forces that wanted to close the public schools (after courts ordered school desegregation) now have changed the name, but the game is still the game,” Jackson Jr. said.
Note: The people at the Howard Fuller rally a few miles away didn’t look anything like Newt Gingrich.
“The crowd who lost the Civil War is now running the federal government,” Jackson said, “the government that they want to downsize, privatize and shrink.”
But the times seem to have changed a bit. At Monday’s night’s DFER DC launch at the Hotel Washington, Jackson seemed to be embracing what I like to call the Anti-Crappy Schools Doctrine. Forget whether a school is a traditional public school, or a charter school, or private school – how do we make sure every kid in America is able to attend a GOOD school?
Nearly a decade after the Milwaukee rally, Jackson Jr. was talking about “alarming dropout rates” the dangers of a “monopoly” filled with failing schools, etc. He was suggesting that every American child be entitled to a good public education “or charter education or whatever kind of education we can to produce the kind of Americans that we’ll all be proud of in the future.”
With the Washington Monument to his left, Jackson Jr. was highlighting the fact that his own parents sought the best for him by sending him to the elite St. Albans Episcopal School in DC as a kid. He talked about “pushing the envelope to make the majority party in this country” approach education with a more open mind.
“We must explore options,” Jackson Jr. said. “Every option for every American child so that every child might have the high-quality education they deserve in their lifetime.”
“We need more competition in the system.”
“Charter schools do work.”
“Charter schools should be given a chance from sea to shining sea…”
The world is changing, put on your seatbelt.
Click here to watch video from Jesse Jackson Jr.’s speech to DFER.