Don’t misunderstand what’s going on with the push for school choice in Virginia. It’s not about giving all parents a choice. Just the white ones.
And even among the white ones, you could be more specific and point to the Republican ones.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin is leading the push to take $150 million from the state’s K-12 school budget to build 20 new charter schools in the Commonwealth.
What this means for the vast majority of you is less state money for your local school systems, since charter schools are funded by public tax dollars.
Raise your hand if you think your kid’s school has money to spare?
Teachers, dramatically underpaid as they are, fund classroom materials out of their own pockets, and we’re going to ask teachers and administrators to get by on even less.
All so that parents upset that their kids had to wear masks in school at the height of a once-in-a-century pandemic, and might have to be exposed to lessons on history that don’t whitewash the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, can send their kids to what are essentially publicly-funded private academies.
What Youngkin and his Republican cronies are doing is a throwback to the massive resistance strategy of the 1950s and 1960s, when white parents sent their kids to private, all-white schools and some localities actually shut down their schools rather than integrate.
An uncomfortable truth with charter schools, as we’re seeing already playing here, here and elsewhere, is that they ultimately exacerbate existing racial and socioeconomic disparities in education.
It’s Massive Resistance 2.0, in effect.
The kicker to the Youngkin-backed bill making its way through the General Assembly is that, counter to how Republicans like to say they prefer things to be run, from the bottom up, the authorization to create charter schools in a region would come from the State Board of Education, not local school boards.
Translated: a body that answers directly to the governor has all the power.
This, from a group of people crying and moaning about how we need to get politics out of education.
A Senate committee killed a bill introduced in that chamber by Harrisonburg Republican Sen. Mark Obenshain, but the House voted 50-48 last week to pass a companion bill from Virginia Beach GOP Del. Anne Farrell Tata, which means the issue is still very much alive in the 2022 session.
This will get the bill back to the Senate, and if it gets to the floor there, Sen. Chap Petersen, a soon-to-be-former Democrat, is sure to vote for it, which would be all that would be needed to get the measure to Youngkin’s desk.
Ushering in a redux to one of the darker times in our state’s history.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
