Voters in two states reject the corporate education reform 'civil rights' scam

It's hard to say that there were any bright spots on Tuesday, given the worry that whatever wins were eked out at the state level could be steamrollered by an authoritarian president. But it's worth paying attention to two education-related ballot measures, one in Massachusetts and one in Kentucky, that delivered wins for public education and a reminder of the cynical framing of corporate education reformers.

Kentucky's Amendment 2 was essentially a lightly disguised school voucher proposal that would have funneled public funding – potentially more than $1 billion a year – to private schools. Proponents claimed this would somehow not affect public school funding. Voters overwhelmingly rejected it.

Massachusetts Question 2 proposed to eliminate the state's use of a high-stakes test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, as a high school graduation requirement. The test would remain in place as an assessment, but would no longer block diplomas for students who failed the test despite passing their classes and otherwise fulfilling graduation requirements. It passed comfortably.

The two measures are different in significant ways: One was an attack on public education funding, the other was an effort to roll back an oppressive requirement imposed by a decades-old state education law. But one thing proponents of the Kentucky amendment and opponents of the Massachusetts measure shared was a misleading attempt to frame their positions as being in the best interests of low-income families and families of color. As Diane Ravitch, a former education reform advocate who became one of the ideology's fiercest critics, has noted, corporate education reformers claim the mantle of "civil rights" while remaining silent on issues like desegregation and poverty and all too often seeking to defund public schools. That civil rights language was in evidence on the wrong side in both Kentucky and Massachusetts, in different ways.

In Kentucky, the people trying to send public money to private schools predictably claimed that it would "create new opportunities for low-income, minority, and special needs students while empowering all Kentucky students to meet their full potential." (That's from the website promoting the amendment, which I won't link.) The claim was, as it always is with voucher programs, that lower-income families would be able to get their kids out of "failing public schools" and send them to private schools which must surely be better. The reality, as we've seen in state after state, is that a small minority of the families who get vouchers had their kids in public schools to begin with, and they are heavily used by high-income families. 

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy notes that families in the state already sending their kids to private school – the ones who the data from other states suggest would be the ones to use the voucher program – are wealthier and whiter than public school students. But it's not just a question of families. There's a question of schools: Private schools are located where their students are, in wealthy areas, making them harder for lower-income and rural families to access. 

If vouchers are a thinly veiled effort to defund public education and give middle- and upper-income families help in paying for private schools they are already sending their kids to – and it is well established that that is what vouchers are – while claiming it's a benefit to "low-income, minority, and special needs students," the Massachusetts ballot measure is a little more complicated. But only a little.

Proponents of keeping the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement argued that it benefits students of color, students with disabilities, and students in low-income schools by ensuring that standards are upheld. Without a high-stakes test, they claimed, schools in high-income cities and towns will remain strong and those students will be well served, while schools in low-income cities and towns will deteriorate dramatically, harming students. Making this argument relies on downplaying the damage the high-stakes MCAS is doing now to the students who they claim it helps. Go figure, the students who fail the exam are disproportionately multilingual learners or have disabilities.While students who fail it in tenth grade can retake it, educators say that these students lose opportunities to take classes other than remedial ones narrowly tailored to the test, and some drop out instead of trying again. Additionally, the fact that diplomas are on the line leads to teaching to the test from day one, so that even early elementary students have an education focused on drilling them on the 43% of Massachusetts state education standards covered by the MCAS and not an education that teaches them to investigate, explore, ask questions.

But the "the MCAS helps disadvantaged kids" crowd would not be deterred, and the Walton family was happy to use its Walmart fortune to propel that, funding the "National Parents Union" to offer alleged grassroots parent opposition to Question 2 – in particular through highly paid NPU head Keri Rodrigues, a longtime corporate education reform operative cosplaying as just another parent whose kids have been helped by high-stakes testing. Rodrigues' presence as a prominent high-stakes MCAS defender, of course, was frequently used, implicitly or explicitly, to suggest that communities of color opposed Question 2. 

Cambridge School Committee Member Richard Harding articulated the MCAS-as-civil-rights argument in the Harvard Crimson. “If we have a public school system that is assessment-less, the kids who are most vulnerable and closest to the pain will feel the brunt,” he said. “Look, the kids who are affluent, the kids who are sophisticated, the kids who do well in the Cambridge Public Schools system — the MCAS doesn’t matter.” (Note that Harding was being misleading here, since Question 2 leaves the MCAS in place as an assessment.)

So, how did Massachusetts vote on this issue? Did the families whose kids are most vulnerable and closest to the pain rise up to defend the MCAS as a graduation requirement, while privileged families wanted to strike it down despite the harm it would cause vulnerable kids?

Ah, no. The few cities and towns across the state that voted no on Question 2 were overwhelmingly white and wealthy.

• Winchester, 74.9% white, 2.4% Black, 2.6% Latino, 15.8% Asian, with a median household income over $200,000, voted 56.8% to 43.2% against Question 2.
• Wellesley, 75.8% white, 2.1% Black, 5.3% Latino, 13.3% Asian, with a median household income over $250,000, voted 62.6% to 37.4% against Question 2.
• Newton, 74.7% white, 2.7% Black, 3.6% Latino, 14.3% Asian, with a median household income over $175,000, voted 56.6% to 43.4% against.

Since a majority of the communities across the state voted in favor of Question 2, there's no single characterization of them that applies. But it's clear that the communities the opponents of Question 2 claimed to be speaking in support of did not agree that the MCAS graduation requirement was good for their kids:

• Brockton, 32.4% white, 40.3% Black, 12.3% Latino, 1.8% Asian, with a median household income of $74,000, voted 64.2% to 35.8% in favor of Question 2.
• Everett, 46% white, 14.7% Black, 29.1% Latino, 8.9% Asian, with a median income of $78,000, voted 62.1% to 37.9% in favor.
• Holyoke, 51.7% Latino, with a median income of $49,000, voted 72.6% to 27.4% in favor.

While some of the opponents of Question 2 knew they were being disingenuous on this front, some were no doubt well-meaning liberals who saw Keri Rodrigues as a scrappy Latina mom speaking truth to power or Richard Harding as a voice of, from, and for Black Cantabridgians. Those people sincerely believed that they were taking the anti-racist position – and the one supportive of multilingual learners and students with disabilities – by opposing Question 2. These results, predictable as they were if you've followed Massachusetts education politics even a little, offer a challenge to anyone sincerely making the civil rights argument: Do you think that the families of Brockton or Everett or Holyoke don't know what's best for their kids? Do you think it's worth reassessing which prominent voices you listen to and which ones you dismiss? 

And that's a challenge everyone who thinks about education policy needs to take up, because the "corporate education reform is the real civil rights campaign" scammers are not going to give up just because of a couple rejections.