School choice is today’s civil rights issue, if you ask Michelle Bernard, and she’s trying to start a movement to get people to fight for those rights.
The Bernard Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy released an ad campaign Thursday, timed to coincide with Black History Month, drawing a connection between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and school choice, and calling on children and parents to take action.
Bernard said she has been thinking about the parallels since she first started working on school choice issues, around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education court decision that ended the “separate but equal” rule that allowed racial segregation in schools.
“I remember thinking … we do as a nation have so much to celebrate … but honestly, what would Thurgood Marshall think to himself if he looked at our public education system today?” Bernard, who is herself African-American, said in an interview with The Daily Caller.
“It’s still segregated,” she said. Schools are “still fundamental separate” and “still fundamentally unequal, except it’s no longer on the basis of race, it’s on the basis of zip code.”
“All parents,” Bernard argues, “regardless of where they live, regardless of race or ethnicity or religious background should have a legal right to put their child in any school that they feel best meets their child’s need.”
The timing of ad campaign, during Black History Month, was deliberate.
“The school choice movement is primarily a white movement,” observed Bernard. “For example, more Republicans than Democrats have embraced school choice,” and “most advocates … happen to not be people of color.”
“However, when you talk about who the beneficiaries of school choice would be, they are predominately the poor, predominately Hispanic and predominately African-American,” Bernard said.
By having the campaign during Black History Month, she hopes to “draw not just the attention of African-Americans to this issue, but draw the attention of all Americans.”
The ad campaign makes the connection between the civil rights movement and school choice, with a print ad that will run in African-American interest papers in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as in student newspapers at historically black colleges and universities. There is also an accompanying video that lays out the ways that schools today are still segregated, this time by ZIP code.
More often than not, she explained, children who live in a low-income zip code are “relegated” to an underperforming school. In higher-income zip codes, on the other hand, the schools are generally much better. In the United States, that means African-Americans and Hispanics are often in underperforming schools.
“It’s wrong,” said Bernard. “I think it’s immoral.”
The achievement gap between black students and white students, or Hispanic students and white students is “still very wide,” Bernard said.
“It’s not narrowing at nearly the place it should be, and I truly believe that if school choice was an option in every state in the country, to the extent that parents get involved and get their children into the best possible schools they can, I think you would see the achievement gap decline.”
She held up the example of New Orleans, which established open enrollment for all schools after many were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. As a result, Bernard said, they are “beginning to see the achievement gap shrink.”
“There’s been so much talk about which Republican candidate speaks for the poor or have the interests of the poor at heart, or how do we deal with American exceptionalism and make sure America is always the greatest nation on earth,” Bernard said. “The answer to all of those questions is education reform.”
“If our citizens can’t read, they can’t write, they can’t do mathematics and do all those things at a high level, how on earth do Americans remain exceptional? How on earth do we have a population that is ready to work in a 21st century economy?” she said.
In addition to the ad campaign, Bernard is traveling around the country to make the case for school choice and encourage people to become “foot soldiers” for the movement.
“This is the beginning of a movement that we’re calling Education Equality Now, and we’ll basically take it around the country to college campuses and low income communities throughout the country,” Bernard explained.
“I think most parents are so disillusioned that they don’t realize how much power they have if they go get involved, if they vote … [we’re] trying to get people to remember that the power of the individual,” Bernard said.
“This is the civil rights issue of your time,” Bernard added, explaining her pitch to students. “Go out and be a foot soldier. Zip code does not determine destiny.”