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A New Group of Emerging Leaders

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By Derrell Bradford
Deputy Director of Excellent Education for Everyone.
The School Choice Advocate

I was in a cab taking the long ride out to Northwest D.C. The sun glistened off the window and reminded me of one of my favorite Philip Larkin poems, and the drone of the street massaged the air around me. I went to an all-boys private school outside of Baltimore on a scholarship, so I am no stranger to wealth, or, rather, to other people’s wealth.

But the scenery shocked me—Washington D.C., like so many old cities in the Northeast, is two cities locked in a fight for survival, with one trying to slowly extinguish the other. And like anyplace that has wealth and poverty shoehorned against one another, it is a microcosm of disparities as well.

But there were two places on that long beautiful drive that stood out to me more than others. St. Albans, where former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, Jr., and former Vice President Al Gore both went to school, and Sidwell Friends, where President Obama’s daughters are the latest in a long line of political heirs to claim a bright educational future.

But I don’t have anything in common with Sasha and Malia. My parents aren’t Ivy Leaguers (though I am sheepishly one) or high-powered lawyers who now reside in the White House. And my dad certainly never held the most powerful political office on the planet. Nah. I’ve got nothing in common with Sasha and Malia, but I have everything in common with the kids who attend Sidwell Friends on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, and with another beneficiary of a private school scholarship like mine: Barack Obama.

I often describe the school choice movement as a series of state-based revolts against educational inequity. No American would, or should have to, willingly send their child to a school they know is failing.

Right now, the most visible of these revolts is happening in the nation’s capital, under the watchful eye of some newspapers which realize just how obscene it is to rob the city’s poorest children of a chance to attend some of the area’s best private schools. It comes with the aid of some folks anyone should be honored to call friends: Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. Councilman and board member of the Center for Education Reform, and Virginia Walden Ford, the founder of D.C. Parents for School Choice.

In October, Kevin and Virginia, along with the Black Alliance for Educational Options Chairman Howard Fuller, Darrell Allison of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, and others, blocked the door to the U.S. Department of Education, demanding to see Secretary Arne Duncan and get the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Act reinstated, at a minimum, for the 200-plus students whose applications were rejected after Illinois Senator Dick Durbin installed the notorious, eponymous, language into the program’s funding framework. The “sit-in” brought the fight full circle, and I view it with a raw sense of irony. I wasn’t alive in the 1950s when the Brown decision came down. But I did grow up in the shadow of Thurgood Marshall’s alma mater, Frederick Douglass High, now one of Maryland’s worst schools. I lived in a house full of active African American democrats and now Sen. Durbin, with the tacit seeming approval of President Obama, seeks to kill a program that would give a kid like me in D.C. the same chance I had. Then, like now it seems, poor kids can wait for reform. Being African American or Hispanic in a city with terrible schools means “change” will get there when it gets there, if it ever does. And, more importantly, it means that when someone who doesn’t believe in school choice says we need reform “by any means necessary,” they don’t understand the meaning of the word “any” one bit.

What’s happening in D.C. has provided some important lessons tactically. Criticism of Sen. Durbin and President Obama has been blistering. The civil disobedience of the “D.C. Six” has framed the advocacy narrative differently and favorably. Television and new media advertising have placed uncomfortable pressure on elected officials, who are not used to having their betrayal of children in failing schools made public. Indeed, the D.C. effort is a test case for a key strategy; they’ve made school choice the cool choice by building the right lifestyle cluster for it. It’s a case study we can all learn from.

You can believe in choice because you believe in competition, or because you believe in freedom. You can believe in it because you think the market has amazing power to generate opportunity where capital and the will of free people are available. Though valid and true, I don’t care about any of this, and I think it’s important for the movement as a whole to grow beyond these arguments, which have sustained us but which have not made us full. Right now across this country, there are hundreds of thousands of children dying a civic death in the nation’s worst schools. In some places, those schools are among the most expensive not just in the country, but in the world, like in Camden where, for 13,000 students, we’re spending $360 million this year—that’s over $27,000 per student. For that, Camden students get the state’s two worst high schools and five middle schools that have failed for the last eight years in a row. They get schools no one would ever send their children to if they had a chance to go someplace else.

For me, and for my set—the video-gaming Gen X-ers growing up in the era of alleged post-racial progressivism—the injustice is all that remains, and all that matters. The simple exhausting wrongness of, as Mary Theroux of the Independent Institute asserts, leaving a child subject to the “vicissitudes of chance and exploitation,” solely because of their zip code and the school that owns them as a result of it. Those who embrace President Obama don’t, or won’t, realize that without a scholarship to attend the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii, he would have likely been just another kid on the corner in Baltimore, or Newark, or Chicago, or Los Angeles. This dissonance simply cannot be allowed to continue.

I would argue that there has been no more important time to fight for school choice than this time, this moment, when all is bathed in conflict and the great inertia of Washington seems poised to erode much of the liberty we hold dear. There is no worse time to “go away” or compromise. The will to fight and win, for our children, even with the defeats and uncertainty catalogued to date, is what has created the moment we have before us: a brighter and hotter one than any defender of the status quo could ever have imagined. That fire comes from the spark of freedom and the promise of knowledge for our children so they can, one day, take up the mantle of this country as equal partners in our democracy.

With stakes this high, what can I say? I’m all in.

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