The respected Southern Education Foundation recently released the results of a study showing that for the first time in more than half a century, over 50 percent of public school students nationwide are considered low income, i.e. poor. Those who have been fleeing the public schools and advocating public funding for alternative schools must consider this a significant victory: The prospects of sending their children to school with "those people" diminish as the number of charter schools grows and the voucher movement succeeds in more and more communities. As well, those who are hoarding the nation's wealth and who disparage as wasteful and useless spending for such wrap-around services as public school hygiene and health care, mental counseling, after-school programs, summer programs and early childhood initiatives must consider this class evacuation of the public schools a success.
The first alternative school in Anchorage was Chugach Optional, started in 1973. Concerned parents wanted a school environment that rewarded self-discipline and student initiative, and manifested a greater capacity to discover and nurture individual differences among students; it served a self-selecting clientele from across the city. The School Board at the time was a hard sell; the advocacy parent group invested countless hours and endless meetings, and encountered substantial resistance before persuading a majority of board members to give it a try.
Because it wasn't clear how many parents would actually enroll their children, and to avoid the charge of elitism, the original Chugach Optional occupied only one-half the school; the other half served neighborhood children and used a standard curriculum. As a result, an economically and socially diverse population of kids met on the school playground and in the cafeteria, and even shared a few classes together.
Today's charter schools are different; they generally serve exclusively a distinct student population, organized around a specific criterion, such as language immersion, ethnic identity or educational philosophy or technique. In fact, in many cases parents shop around for any option, less concerned about which one it is than determined to get their kids out of the neighborhood school. Not surprisingly, given the relationship between ethnicity and poverty in a nation now characterized by gross income inequality, alternative public and completely private schools are overwhelmingly white, leaving most all other children quite far behind.
The alternative school movement began in the South, after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and picked up steam in the 1970s, alongside Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," capitalizing on Southern, white middle-class race anxiety. White kids have since been persistently and systematically siphoned from the public schools there, and in the West, so that Mississippi has the highest percentage of poor students in its schools, followed by the other Deep South states, and by Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada and, no wonder, California. Now, with growing income disparity, communities across the nation are imitating the model, which has been transformed into an instrument of class protection.
It's hard to argue that all poor students are less capable. A Washington Post reporter pointed out that Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was born in 1959 in a charity hospital to a single mother. Head Start and Pell grants, both federal programs, helped him navigate the public school system with great success. President Barack Obama wants to add $1 billion to the $14.4 billion already going to help states educate the poor, but Congress seems likely to balk.
Congress also seems likely to balk at the president's proposal to fund community college for those who can't afford it. Tom Hanks wrote an upbeat piece for the Jan. 14 New York Times in which he recounted his experience at Chabot Community College in Hayward, California. He wrote that it made him all he is today. But he is skeptical the Congress will embrace the president's idea.
After the Civil War, there were national leaders who understood that freedom needed support with education, and land or training and jobs. Their absence would create a dependent, subjugated class. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this, too, in his call for educational and economic, as well as civil, justice. It's a plea yet unheard. It's unfinished national business.
Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
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