The most vicious lie told by the Charter School movement is that Charters will help poor people, especially those from communities of color. 

The origin of the Charter School movement in the United States is generally pegged at 1988, when American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker embraced the idea of University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Ray Budde and called for “schools of choice.”

But twenty years earlier, a Black American community group created a group of charter schools that were quickly crushed by the U.S. government.

Between 1966 and 1971 the Black Panthers ignited Black American urban youth around a radical liberation agenda.  Utilizing infrastructure that had previously been organized around turf and resistance to police brutality, the Panthers turned gang energy toward a liberation politics inspired by Malcolm X and built on a heady theoretical blend of Marx, Fanon, and Mao.   They are most remembered in the popular imagination for their guns and leather jackets, but the thing that frightened power the most about the Panthers was their breakfast for kids programs and their schools. 

Panther Liberation Schools did all the things that charter schools claim to do.  They originated in the community and were community controlled.  They were not subject to district rules and they were free to develop innovative curricula and teaching practices.  Instead of pledging allegiance and being force fed pilgrims and Abraham Lincoln, Black inner city youth learned the economic and historical structure of racism, fingered the jagged edges of their own oppression, and learned to organize against it.  They were given a sense of possibility that they couldn’t get anywhere else.

The response to these proto-charters came swiftly from the same sort of ruling elites that are now trying to buy charter schools in the state of Washington.  Working together, local police departments and the FBI subjected the Black Panthers to a brutal and illegal storm of fire and blood  that is only rivaled in U.S. history by government campaigns against Native Americans and organized labor.  COINTELPRO has become a textbook case of illegal government activity and both the U.S. government and major mainstream media repeatedly lied about the Panthers in an effort to cover up the state violence (and there’s no need to take the lefto blog’s word for it, all of this information is available in the Congressional Record). 

To this day, much of the official story remains that the Panthers were crushed because of their guns and their militancy, but the truth is that they were targeted because they were teaching their children about the relationship between capitalism and racism and showing them how much they had in common with oppressed people of color around the world.  This truth becomes clear when we look at the way that the narco-capitalist gangs that grew out of the ashes of the Panthers in the 1980s and 90s, with all of their guns and none their radical politics, have been allowed to flourish under the cover of a bullshit War on Drugs.

And now we are being subjected to a multi-million dollar campaign telling us that the children and grandchildren of communities that have been devastated by state-sanctioned violence, the importation of crack cocaine, and the exportation of American jobs should put their faith in Charter Schools.  The impetus for these schools comes not from the community but from the checkbooks of a handful of very wealthy white people who benefit from and reinforce arrangements of inequality, and are willing to buy enough signatures and votes to make it legal in Washington to give tax money to education profiteers masquerading as reformers. 

The charter schools that Initiative 1240 would bring to Washington will not open up opportunity and possibility for those who have been denied both.  They will train and track in a way that will only reinforce racial and class barriers.  They will funnel public money away from children of color and toward mostly white managerial bureaucracies and unaccountable corporations. 

It is immoral to look down from the skyscrapers of Seattle and Bellevue and scapegoat teachers and their unions for the racial and economic structures that have created the “achievement gap.”  Any honest appraisal of that gap must start with the deep histories of racism and discrimination and move on to a desperately underfunded public school system and the most regressive tax structure in the country.

The millions that are being spent to buy charter schools would have bought a lot of health care and breakfast for kids who go to school every day without either.