"We support higher standards and rigor in the classroom, but every day, concern among parents is growing over Common Core. The feds are taking over and rushing this. Let's face it: centralized planning didn't work in Russia, it's not working with our health care system and it won't work in education. Education is best left to local control," said Jindal through a written statement.
Bobby Jindal is speaking out about Common Core, and to the uninitiated, aside from the obvious red-baiting, there's a hidden dog-whistle in there.
To the Republican establishment, the reasons for the push for charter schools are obvious. But what about rank-and-file Republicans? There's a hidden meaning to the call for "local control" of schools that you might not understand unless you're familiar with the resistance to desegregation.
After Brown v. Board of Education was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1954, the Supreme Court said that the old doctrine of "separate but equal" (which was laughable, since separate was not at all equal) must be ended "with all deliberate speed." Of course, "deliberate speed" seemed to have a different meaning depending on where you were. Some school districts that had been segregated ended it with little fuss; frequently, these were school districts with relatively small numbers of black students where the cost of operating a school just for the few black children in the district was difficult to justify.
Others, though, took a bit longer. My father, for one, did not attend an integrated school until his junior year of high school... which was 1970. In some places, the desegregation efforts consisted of, basically, striking all references to race but otherwise doing little else to end desegregation. The "white" high school was no longer legally the white high school, but still had a nearly all-white student body, and the same went for the "black" high school. In these districts, the DOJ eventually had to sue the district in federal court and have a federal judge order the school district to comply with Brown -- in some cases, these lawsuits continued for decades. In districts that were sued to desegregate, so long as the lawsuit was still pending (meaning that a federal judge had not declared the school system to be unitary), even the smallest change to attendance boundaries would have to be approved by a federal judge before it could go into effect. And forget about opening a new school or closing a school -- those had to be approved as well. In some cases, judges even took the step of ordering changes to attendance boundaries or school closings -- frequently, the latter step would be taken to close the old black school and send the students to the old white school once it became clear that the resistance to desegregation among the white population was too strong to integrate the school district any other way. (When this happened, white flight was the usual result -- once federal courts overcame the resistance to desegregation, whites would frequently send their children to private schools or move to a nearby school district that had fewer black students in it.)
So, Republican calls for "local control" of schools hearken back to the massive white resistance to desegregation. Local control, in their parlance, meant freeing the school district from control by a federal judge. Now it's frequently used as an assault on federal mandates like Common Core and No Child Left Behind, but the history of the term makes it clear that, at least to some people, "local control" is a dog whistle in the same vein as "state's rights."
"School choice is the civil rights battle of this generation,” said Sen. Cruz. “Every child in America deserves the chance to get a quality education and work to achieve the American Dream. All across the nation, we're seeing the benefits of choice. The data demonstrates that competition improves public schools, and parents should be able to choose the schools that best meet the educational needs of their children – whether public, charter, private, faith-based, or home school. National School Choice Week reaffirms our shared commitment to giving all children, regardless of zip code, the opportunity to pursue the best education possible."
Of course no discussion of dog whistles would be complete without mention of
Ted Cruz, the guy who conservatives love because he feeds them nothing but dog whistles. On the surface, this quote from Cruz sounds like typical GOP free-market garbage, but again, if you're not familiar with the history of desegregation efforts, you're missing the dog whistle in there.
School choice -- doesn't sound like a dog whistle, does it? Only it is.
One of the main things that school districts attempted to get around desegregation orders were what were called "freedom of choice" plans. What that meant was, essentially, the school district would create attendance boundaries for the schools that were racially neutral, but would allow "school choice" -- meaning, regardless of what school zone you lived in, you could attend whatever school you wanted to. (Then what was the point of the attendance boundaries?) What ultimately happened in most cases, and why the federal government ultimately intervened, was that white parents took advantage of the "free choice" to send their children to the "white" schools; and, actually, much of the time black parents did the same. (I was not around during the 1960s, so I do not know if there was any sort of pressure on black families not to send their kids to the white schools; but, it must be pointed out that the old black schools were frequently a source of pride in the local black community. Even though they had been the result of de jure segregation, many blacks felt that their schools belonged to them and wanted their kids to go there -- they just, well, wanted them to actually be "equal" to the white schools. The black high school might have gotten the 15-year-old schoolbooks when the white high school got brand new ones, but they could kick your ass on the football field or on the basketball court.)
And again, even if you take Ted Cruz's mantra of "school choice" at face value, he's still being dishonest. He says that parents should be able to choose the schools that best meet the needs of their children -- public, charter, private, faith-based, or home school. But he might as well have left out much of "public," and probably a good chunk of private and faith-based as well. Because, well, just what do you think the whole point of white flight is? Parents who move out to a far-flung suburb or exurb frequently are doing so precisely because it's in a separate school district -- and thus can prevent "inner-city" (read: minority) children from attending school there. If they actually believed the "good schools" garbage that they use to justify an hour-long commute through miles and miles of sprawl, the result of decades of white flight (and more white flight; after all, when minority families started getting the means to move out to the suburbs some white people responded by moving even further away from the central city), then the obvious answer to improve education would be to allow minority children to attend the schools that their children do.
Except that they don't. Meaning that either the "good schools" mantra is bogus, or "good schools" is really just code for "white schools." (My bet is on the latter; if you look at the actual test scores of some of the "good schools" they're actually pretty mediocre.)
To the Republican establishment, the reason for switching from school vouchers to charter schools as their privatization method of choice might have had to do with allowing big donors to get their hands on that education cash instead of non-profit private schools, but to the GOP rank-and-file, the inconvenience of vouchers was that, well, the parents on the receiving end of the vouchers might have used them to send kids to the GOPers' schools. Charter schools thus emerged as a method to privatize the schools (and pretend to care about improving education for poor and minority children) while at the same time keeping them in their schools. All too often, the only "choice" promoted by Republicans is between a public school where almost all of the students are poor minorities, and a charter school where almost all of the students are poor minorities (but where the education is "better," meaning the teachers are underpaid and aren't unionized and some corporate honcho gets a cut of people's tax dollars.)
We currently live in a country where schools are now more segregated than they were in the 1970s, and if we're being bluntly honest about it, almost all of it has to do with a deliberate effort by whites to make (or keep) it that way. And while "education reform," to the GOP establishment, is about privatization, to the rank-and-file GOP voter, it's sold with segregationist dog whistles (because, let's face it, most of the GOP rank-and-file really wouldn't care for the actual reasons that the establishment is pushing its version of "education reform.") Dog whistles like "local control" and "school choice" -- which you might not have even known were dog whistles.