Inside the School Choice Crusade

School choice advocates who want students to be able to attend private schools at public expense have won several major victories in the past couple of years—including the expansion of the nation's first school voucher program in Milwaukee, a new statewide voucher program in Ohio, a voucher program in Washington, D.C., and the expansion of a tuition tax credit program in Pennsylvania.

Intensive lobbying and grassroots advocacy campaigns played a big part in the victories, and the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a small Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit membership organization has been at the center of the successful campaigns.

The organization's 15-member staff combines grassroots organizing with large-scale advocacy campaigns to promote the expansion of school choice and to encourage inner city African-American parents to take advantage of new educational opportunities. BAEO has organizers and volunteers in 14 states and is supported by foundations, membership dues, and a $2.5-million U.S. Department of Education grant to promote school choice among African American parents.

The organization was founded in 2000 by Howard Fuller, Virginia Walden-Ford and other prominent African-American educators and civil rights activists with start-up funding from John Walton, the late heir to the Wal-Mart® family fortune who bankrolled many school-choice organizations and initiatives.

Today, BAEO is headed by Lawrence Patrick III, a 31-year-oldFlorida A&M University journalism graduate who worked at the Detroit Free Press and for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain before taking up the cause of school choice.

Patrick, whose father served as a reform-minded member of theDetroit school board in the early 1990s, recently announced that he will step down as BAEO's president and CEO at the end of the year. He spoke with Education Sector Co-Director Thomas Toch about BAEO's work and state of the school-choice movement.

Education Sector: Why are you fighting the school-choice fight?

Lawrence Patrick III: The ultimate goal is for black children inAmerica to have significantly improved life chances. That's ultimately what it's about, black kids having access to quality education, which by and large they don't have today.

ES: School choice is a means to that end?

LP: We're fighting for parents to be able to have the power to decide where their kids go to school. We think it's a fundamental right that every parent ought to have. We have children going to schools that their parents don't want them to go to, and the only reason is that the parents can't afford to move, they can't afford to pay private tuition. That's absolutely unacceptable.

We're also fighting for quality options from which to choose. If you have a Burger King® and a McDonald's® in your neighborhood, you have choice, but you've only got a couple of low quality options, it's not meaningful choice. We want blacks to have high-quality choices.

ES: How do you get beyond McDonald's?

LP: When you are talking about parental choice you are effectively talking about altering the power arrangements in education in America. What we want is fundamental change in how money flows. We don't want a superintendent and a union boss in a room making decisions about how everybody's money gets spent. We want individual parents to have some power in that conversation. If you move to a system where parents, especially low-income parents, have control of the [funding] for their children, you're never going back to the old way of doing business in public education.

We already have a system that provides funding based on the needs of individual children—we have funding for gifted and talented, special ed, pots of money that apply to individual children.

ES: But that money mostly stays within the public system. You are proposing that parents take public monies to private schools, aren't you?

LP: Yes. You can't get into a situation where you're arbitrary about deciding which schools parents can send their kids to. This is America. Parents do what they want to do if they have money. The question is: Should poor people in America be able to send their kids to a public school, private school or religious school? From our vantage point, poor people should have access to all those different kinds of schools, too.

The Tubman Model

ES: If you give kids public money to attend private schools some students will be able to go to private schools. But won't most be excluded because there are only a small number of private-school seats?

LP: We use the Harriet Tubman model. Tubman was a great American hero who brought many enslaved Africans to freedom in Canada, most of the way on foot. Her approach was this: I understand there's an abolitionist movement, and I obviously support the abolishment of slavery. Slavery's bad; it should go away. We should be out there speaking out for an emancipation proclamation to free everybody. But in the meantime, these 12 people here, I'm gonna take personal responsibility for getting them to Canada to freedom. Then I'm gonna come back and get 12 more, and I'm going to keep making those trips until I can't make those trips anymore.

So rather than view [vouchers for private school tuition] as a triage situation, we view it as more of a by-any-means-necessary kind of approach to obtaining freedom [from bad public schools]. While you fight on the one hand for large scale policy change, in the meantime you work on what you might call interim policies, you try to help as many kids as possible.

ES: Don't you run the risk in helping 12 kids get to the promised land of private education of making it much more difficult to help the millions who aren't lucky enough to travel across the border to Canada? Private school vouchers are highly controversial. Don't you risk, in your support of the concept, encouraging opposition to other less incendiary forms of school choice that may help large numbers of students?

LP: I think people probably made that same criticism of Harriet Tubman. At the time, she was literally stealing property, smuggling it out of the country. I'm sure, in a political environment where people were having some very intense discussions about what America's policy ought to be with regard to the slave trade, that some were arguing that what Tubman was doing was making it much harder to argue for the abolishment of slavery. So I will acknowledge that on a tactical level you are right, any kind of policy that is short of the emancipation proclamation can hurt you in the eyes of some folks.

But the bottom line is that Harriet Tubman was right, and I think we're right. You've got to deal with the moral side of it. You can't make it a completely tactical decision. You also look at it from a moral standpoint. Is it OK for a child to remain trapped in a school that's not working? We believe that it's not OK, not for one day. The building's on fire and we're going to rescue as many as we can carry. It's not a question of whether you can save them all if you go into the building.

ES: How does BAEO act on this philosophy?

LP: It's not the kind of thing you can snap your fingers and do. You have to create a fertile policy environment for new high-quality schools. You also have to talk about the quality of new choice schools. If we don't, at the end of the day you will have changed the power arrangement, and you may have parents with a lot more choices, and there may be lots of new schools [as a consequence of parents being able to spend public monies for tuition at schools of their choosing], but we won't have made any progress if all the new schools are terrible.

LP: BAEO conducts what we call mobilizations—grassroots organizing efforts. It's wrong to assume that every parent understands what's broken in the education system just because they have kids. So one of the first things we have to do is educate parents about the problem.

ES: How do you do that?

LP: We have street teams canvassing door to door. We meet with groups of 20-25 in church basements, community centers. We go where the parents are—beauty salons, flea markets. We go up to schools armed with flyers. We know some parents are low literacy, so we design materials that will work for them. We have some ninja volunteers who are masters at organizing, who train teams of parent-leaders to reach out to other parents.

ES: What's their message?

LP: The basic message is that parents ought to have more choice in education, that they should be able to send their kids to better schools. But the message is only a hook. You have to be able to say to parents, Here are some options you don't know about, here's what you have to do to take advantage of them. Here's the deadline. Here's the form you have to fill out. I know the guy, let me call him for you. You have to understand the education terrain of a city to be effective at organizing parents.

In Ohio, we're doing a mobilization around the EdChoice Scholarship Program, which was created to give students in schools in need of improvement [under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)] scholarships to attend private schools.

ES: That's a new much larger program than the Clevelandvoucher program, right?

LP: I think it's up to 14,000 seats. It passed in the last legislative session and we are working on the implementation side. BAEO's role is to make sure parents understand what options they have. You've got this new program, but guess what, nobody knows about it. Our role is to make parents with kids in eligible schools aware that they can get a scholarship and send their child to another school if they want.

We've been on the ground, doing direct engagement stuff—going to flea markets, going to churches, going to the school when parents are dropping off and picking up kids, armed with flyers. Canvassing, doing all those kinds of things, to get the word out to parents. We have also used billboards, newspaper ads, radio spots, ads on the sides of buses. We've set up local hotlines, and local offices in Columbus and Dayton. We're focused on those two cities. We've also been working with School Choice Ohio [a nonprofit school choice advocacy group], PACE [Parents Advancing Choice in Education, a Dayton-based charter advocacy group], and other organizations.

ES: Do you also advocate for school choice?

LP: We're a 501(c)3 [a nonprofit organization], so our primary mission is making people understand the problem, who to be mad at.

Where there's a legislative effort to expand parental choice, or even an effort to protect an existing program, BAEO's roll is to educate elected officials on the benefits of parental choice for low-income black families.

ES: BAEO has worked on behalf of vouchers and tax credits inMilwaukee, Newark, Camden and Washington, D.C., and statewide in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Tell me about your work in one city. Who did you want people to be mad at inMilwaukee in early 2006?

LP: Governor Jim Doyle. He was standing in the way of the parental-choice program there [a state-funded voucher program that pays $7,500 a year in private- or parochial-school tuition to qualified low-income students in Milwaukee]. Participation in the program was capped at 15 percent of Milwaukee's enrollment [about 16,000 students]. Enrollment had reached the cap, and the Wisconsin state department of education had come up with a plan to ration seats [in private schools accepting vouchers]. It was a back door way to destroy the program because a number of [private and parochial schools participating in the program] would have lost revenue, and because it would have led a lot of students to abandon the program by creating an environment of uncertainly about their [voucher] scholarships. And the governor was supporting the plan.

ES: So what did BAEO do?

LP: There was a coalition of groups—School Choice Wisconsin [a nonprofit advocacy organization], BAEO, the local chamber of commerce—that came together to protect the program. BAEO's role was essentially to put [our views] on the governor's radar screen.

ES: How did you get the governor's attention?

LP: There was a huge rally at the capital [in Madison]. There were sit-ins, silent protests at the governor's state-of-the-state address, parents went to his fundraisers with signs and they would sit across the street with big signs that said, "Governor Doyle, lift the caps." It wasn't just one demonstration, it was a series of mobilizations of parents getting together and showing up wherever he was. We helped organize students to let the governor know that they would lose their vouchers if the department's plan was approved. There were television ads, newspaper ads signed by all CEOs in the local business community.

We also had a lot of BAEO members from other organizations inside a lot of different rooms [during the Wisconsin campaign]. There were BAEO members interwoven throughout all of the activity. I think the governor got the message. He changed his position and ultimately negotiated an increase in the cap.

In D.C., we had to get a law through Congress to get a [voucher] program. And you've got the statehood issue there. So having a mayor who's willing to be in television commercials saying, "Congress, give us this scholarship program [public funding for private- and parochial-school tuition], we need it," that was extremely significant. Having the chair of the education committee of the city council, Kevin Chavous, come out and be supportive, that was extremely significant.

ES: What role did BAEO play on the political front?

LP: A lot of those discussions were convened as a result of the actions of BAEO members. Because of confidentiality I can't say who, but I can say that there were certain key discussions that happened to get the mayor on board, to get other key individuals on board, that were convened by BAEO members.

The Walton Legacy

ES: John Walton, the heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, funded the launch of BAEO and many other school choice advocacy organizations. What impact has his death in a plane crash last year had on the choice movement?

LP: The loss of John Walton was a major blow. John was the most passionate donor—the most soft-spoken but powerful warrior in this movement. He was a humble guy who just liked to be behind the scenes helping make stuff happen. He made financial contributions that enabled organizations like BAEO to get started and lots of others, and he was a just a tremendous supporter financially. But the thing a lot of people don't realize about John, is that John would actually give his time and energy to this work, he was not just I'll just write the check. He would come and listen and not be the first to speak, and that kind of time commitment, that kind of energy commitment, is really unprecedented. From talking to his wife Christy and just by virtue of how many times I worked with him and talked to him, he spent a significant amount of time on this issue.

ES: Could the school choice movement have evolved to where it is without him?

LP: No.

ES: How is the movement different without him?

LP: Let's just be real about it. John had access to certain rooms that other people in the movement do not have access to.

ES: In state capitals? Corporate suites?

LP: All of the above. John's phone calls would get returned by everybody, and John could meet with just about anybody.

ES: What's an example of where he made a phone call that made a difference to what you're doing?

LP: I don't really feel comfortable giving details of those kinds of situations. It is the way of the world, but at the same time I don't want to get into naming names—he called these people and they did X. The bottom line is that someone of John's stature had a level of commitment to this issue. It's not just that somebody has juice, has power, it's what they are able to do with that juice. John was willing to use his.

Here's a dream scenario: We've now got [Bill] Gates and [billionaire investor Warren] Buffet combined in the philanthropic world [Buffet announced this summer that he would give an estimated $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]. If John were still here he would be the one person that I believe would be able to get Bill Gates to change his position [on school choice, to actively support the concept]. If we were able to get that, it would be earth shattering [for the choice movement].

ES: You and other African-Americans are pushing vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter schools as a way to get black kids out of traditional urban public school systems. But African-Americans run many of those school systems today, and many of them are mad at you. They want to know: Why are organizations like BAEO trying to take our kids out of our schools? Why don't they help us instead of attacking us? Do you see any irony in BAEO's work?

LP: You have professional superintendents. They protect the status quo because they're worried about looking good enough to get to a bigger school district, or to get to a school district that will pay more and have better perks. We're just trying to disrupt the status quo. These people are part of it.

The Future of the Movement

ES: Where's the choice movement headed?

LP: The good news is that some of the people who used to be willing to wait and see if some of the urban school district reform efforts would bear fruit [before they embraced charter schools and private school vouchers] are no longer willing to wait and see. We have no big city that's jamming [on school reform]. We have no big city we can point to where we're all excited [about student performance]. If you look at Detroit schools today, they're as bad or worse as when I was there. For my generation, it completely hardens us about any sort of school improvement plan, any let's-fix-the-district solution that's thrown up. If you are from Detroit and of my generation, you buy none of that. Enough time has passed; we have to be prepared to take more radical steps.

The other thing that's good is people are starting to pay attention to how bad the problem is in urban public schools. Until recently, there was a perception that the big inner city schools were bad, but people didn't have a sense of how bad. Now, with all the discussion on graduation rates, and No Child Left Behind kicking in, and people looking at data that's disaggregated by different groups, an average person in America, I think, has a better sense of how bad the problem is than they did say 10 years or even five years ago. That's in our favor in terms of getting people closer to being prepared to take action [on school choice].

What's bad is that the people who are protecting the status quo—the NEA [National Education Association], the AFT [American Federation of Teachers], the People for American Way—they've not budged one inch. If anything, they have gotten more powerful, because they have had more time to build their war chests and get a headstart. They have become more savvy about messaging. And so, the downside is that our enemies are even more entrenched and even more sophisticated today than they were 10 years ago.

The other bad thing is that there's still a big disconnect between what people view as a problem and who they believe is causing the problem. If you believe the problem is the status quo but you disconnect that from the people who are protecting the status quo, then you are still at square one.

So, average people on the street don't think of the NEA, AFT, People for the American Way as bad guys. They don't think of them as the people who are protecting the status quo, who are keeping their kids locked in the schools they don't want them to be in. "Oh, teachers," they say, "teachers are great. We love teachers. We're not against teachers, we're for teachers." But if you look at it from a purely political standpoint, teachers have a vested interest in maintaining and protecting the status quo. So if you don't like the status quo you need to understand that they've got to give up some power in order for individual low-income parents to gain some power.

Charter schools are starting to lose ground. There are a lot of charter schools that are not making AYP [adequate yearly progress, the percent of students required to meet state reading and math standards under NCLB]. Before, people who don't want charter schools to succeed didn't have anything to say about them because not enough time had really passed for them to make strong arguments [against charters], there wasn't a large enough set of schools to talk about.

ES: So the same NCLB statistics that are helping you by making it clear for the average person the extent of the problems in some urban public schools, are also making things tougher for you because they are exposing the weaknesses in some charter schools.

LP: Right. And so people say, "Oh, I thought charter schools were supposed to be so great. I thought they were supposed to be better. It looks like they are not. People who hate charter schools are going to hit us over the head and say these schools are not good and should be shut down. It's exactly what's happening in D.C. Superintendent Janey is saying we ought to have a moratorium [on charter-school expansion] because these schools are not performing, even though many of them are. I think the average person either thinks a charter school is a private school or will tell you that charter schools are not necessarily better [than traditional public schools].

We actually want people to understand that being a charter school does not automatically make the school a good school. The thing that's good about a charter school is that it's a school of choice—every child who goes there, their parents decided to send them there, the teachers that teach there chose to teach there, principals chose to be principals there. That's what gives the charter school the ability to be a great school, and so that's what we like. Charter schools are not inherently good or inherently bad.

ES: Your critics point out that a lot of parents choose to keep their kids in lousy schools.

LP: The premise of the question implies that there's a difference in the way people make choices based on income level or class or race. There isn't. Guess what, corporate executives make dumb choices, too. When they move to a city they don't look at test data, they ask their CFO, "Where do you send your kids to school?" They ask the friend they went to college with. They don't do a detailed analysis of schools' test data to determine the best schools for their kids. Do people make dumb choices? Yes, of course, I'd be a fool to pretend that people don't make bad choices.

But the idea that somehow we've got to protect these vulnerable low-income black people who aren't educated, who can't figure out how to make a good choice for themselves, falls into the paternalistic, white liberal way about thinking about black people. We want the ability to make choices for ourselves. We don't want you to decide if we made a good choice or a bad choice.

Now, would I like some tools to help figure out school quality? Yeah, that would be great. Would I like some outreach and information that's targeted to let me know what my options are so I can navigate the school universe? Yeah. But it's not right to isolate the bad choices that are made by one group versus another group. Everybody makes dumb choices. And, ultimately, it comes down to what you have access to. If you only have Burger King and McDonald's in your neighborhood, how the hell can you eat healthy? You gotta have a Whole Foods.® You gotta have another option there that's quality to make quality choices.

ES: What about your campaign for school vouchers?

LP: The perception that vouchers are something bad is very high. But I think that creates an opportunity for us to some extent. The unions have done such a good job at marketing vouchers negatively that they've actually increased awareness [of what vouchers are]. I can go to a state that's never had a voucher bill introduced and go, "Hey, do you support vouchers?" And people go, "No, I don't." Well, the fact that people know about vouchers gives us an opening to create some heated debate.

Some of my marketing buddies argue with me vigorously on this. They say we should not be debating on these terms. that we should be creating our own message. But the reality is that people like conflict. People want to understand that there are two sides to an issue, and they want to understand who is on each side and why. People are intrigued when they find out that there are groups of people who actually like vouchers and are actually fighting for tax credit programs and voucher programs that would empower low-income families. The controversy creates some opportunity. I think the voucher movement has gained a lot of momentum. The [2006] legislative session was the most productive ever for vouchers and tax credits. More bills introduced, more passed. But it doesn't change the fact that we're still under fire. Our enemies have not gone away. The NEA, AFT; they are savvy. They have tremendous resources.

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