COVID Exposed How Public Schools Are Failing Black Kids. Will Progressives Care? | Opinion

Americans today are questioning the public school system more than at any other time in my life. And it's not just conservatives. Recently, liberals have started voicing their discontent with teachers unions, school closures and mask mandates for kids. And on Tuesday, voters in the progressive haven of San Francisco voted out three school board members who spent the pandemic trying to scrub George Washington's name from a public school building—while keeping those schools closed through the fall of 2021.

But this renewed attention to the pandemic failures of America's public schools is opening the eyes of many to their other failures, too. Suddenly, people are discussing things like the fact that public schools have been under-educating the children of marginalized communities like mine for decades as we pour millions and millions of dollars into ineffective schools. And people whose children are trapped in these schools are starting to speak up against a progressive elite that cares more about getting George Washington's name off a building than getting their child into it.

The hypocrisy has become just too apparent. In the same breath, progressives will bring up how minorities in underserved areas have been disenfranchised in America by "systemic racism" while throwing their support behind one of the biggest perpetuators of system-wide disparities. They call themselves "progressive" but then advocate for the status-quo in education, regardless of how badly this system has been failing Americans in poorer neighborhoods.

These people can easily understand how a private corporate monopoly would hurt a consumer's ability to choose well, but they don't have an issue with a government monopoly on education that harms Black parents' ability to choose a better future for their children.

What does the status quo actually look like? Take Detroit, a city I was born in. Last year, 20 percent of elementary and middle school students and 35 percent of high school students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District failed at least one class in the first quarter. Detroit public schools have the worst test scores and graduation rates in the nation. Only 7 percent of Detroit eighth grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient reading level.

I left Detroit before entering the public school system, but I often wonder what would have happened to me educationally if I stayed there.

Progressives often blame funding when presented with these disparities, yet while Detroit Public Schools chronically rank among the lowest in the nation for reading and mathematics, it also received the most money per pupil in the state.

It's not a lack of funding. The model is clearly broken. We have a public school system which fails its children year after year, decade after decade, yet progressive elitists want nothing to change. They put up "Black Lives Matter" signs on their lawns yet perpetuate a system that destines poor Black children to lives of poverty.

There is an alternative. Based on M-STEP standardized tests, Detroit charter students outperformed district students in 15 out of 18 subjects, proving nearly twice as proficient in English language arts. With these results and the continued expansion of charter schools, Detroit could start to see an educational change that's long overdue.

And yet, instead of supporting charter schools, progressives have thrown their weight into opposing them—many while exercising their own choice to send their children to private schools.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once bragged about getting her goddaughter into a charter school, and yet she's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America whose NYCDSA platform called charters "tools for privatizing education and weakening the power of unionized teachers."

"Get away from charter schools," New York City's former mayor, Bill de Blasio, famously said. "I hate the privatizers."

"No one should be doing for-profit charters in America," said another progressive, Elizabeth Warren, who waged a war on charter schools despite having constituents who prefer them. "I had a lot of folks visit my office and say 'But I love my charter school'," Senator Warren admitted. "And my question always was, if you don't like your public school, what's going to happen to the other children who are there?"

What we're seeing in progressive opposition to school choice is not support for lower income people of color; the people who are the loudest about systems failing Black Americans are in fact hindering the very change needed to positively alter the trajectory of many Black children. They find us more useful as political victims who they can pretend to care about by publicly highlighting deficiencies while privately preventing things from changing.

The progressive elite "anti-choice" stance in regards to our children's education doesn't protect our children; it protects the upper class. They understand how education can lead to upward mobility for children of a lower economic class regardless of race, and perhaps unconsciously, they've taken the approach that limits their competition, advocating for public corruption, uplifting unions that put the interests of their members over those of our children and voting for policies which perpetuate an unfavorable norm for the lower class.

Recently, states like Oklahoma and Utah are considering educational alternatives to public schools like vouchers, where the money follows the child instead of the district, allowing children to go to educational institutions which they couldn't otherwise afford. On February 15 2022, Oklahoma's voucher bill made it through committee, and while it still has a long way to go, school choice advocates are enthusiastic at the gains made.

Real progressives who care about real change for our community should throw their weight behind such measures. That's where a better future for our children lies.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of "Black Victim To Black Victor" and the Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @wrong_speak.

The views in this article are the writer's own.