Blacks Split Over Vouchers

In South-Central Los Angeles, which has some of the lowest performing public schools in a district that has careened from crisis to crisis, preschoolers at the private Marcus Garvey School were completing a lesson on the solar system.

Down the corridor, another teacher was preparing to introduce her kindergarten class to the periodic table of elements.

In buildings painted red, black and green--the colors of black liberation--Garvey’s African American students take on calculus in fifth grade.

Sixth-graders work from textbooks written for high school seniors, and Garvey’s seventh- and eighth-graders--supervised by a professional technician--built the computers in the school’s online lab.

And Garvey is not alone.

Students at the West Angeles Christian Academy on Crenshaw Boulevard routinely score two or more grades above grade level on standardized reading and math tests. Graduates from Price High School on the South Vermont Avenue campus of the Crenshaw Christian Center often have their pick of top universities.

That so many students do so well at these small, overwhelmingly black private schools while so many others do so poorly at public schools a stone’s throw away has opened fissures in the African American community over school choice.

In California, Proposition 38 on the November ballot will ask voters if the state should provide parents $4,000 in taxpayer-paid vouchers to help send their child to the private school of their choice. A Field poll last month showed that support for the measure has declined, with 36% of voters saying they support it, compared to 39% in June.

One black organization, the Los Angeles-based National Alliance for Positive Action, says it is “outraged at the campaign by the conservative, Republican sponsors of Proposition 38 . . . to target blacks in their school voucher drive.”

The results of a 1999 national survey, however, show that Proposition 38 backers might find fertile ground from which to harvest support for their initiative in black communities.

A whopping 76% of African Americans between 26 and 35--a group including many who have school-age children--support a voucher system under which the government would give parents money to send their children to the public, private or parochial school of their choice, the survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found.

But black elected officials and civil rights leaders, with very few exceptions, oppose vouchers, seeing them as a threat to public education.

It is unclear however, whether those officials run any risk at the voting booth by opposing vouchers because the age group where support is strongest doesn’t vote in big numbers, said Joint Center pollster David Bositis.

“Elected officials tend to listen to people who vote as opposed to people who have opinions,” he said. “Black senior citizens are not big supporters of vouchers, and they are the key voting bloc among African Americans.”

Given that voting pattern, Bositis said, “it’s much more understandable why a lot of African American officials don’t support vouchers. They may very well be reflecting the majority opinion among black voters.”

The Joint Center poll, with a margin of error of 3.5%, found that 60% of blacks overall supported vouchers, up from 48.1% in the center’s 1998 poll.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Day Higuchi, whose union strongly opposes vouchers, said the Joint Center poll does not surprise him.

“It’s pretty clear that we have two educational systems in this country: one for most folks and another for inner cities,” he said. “Student achievement in inner cities is completely unsatisfactory. The question is whether the answer is vouchers.”

Fed Up With the Status Quo

The answer may not be vouchers, but black parents are unwilling to continue with the status quo, pollster Bositis said.

“My interpretation is not necessarily that there is support for vouchers, per se,” Bositis said.

Among African Americans, he said, “there is substantial dissatisfaction and frustration with the status quo. If you basically say anything is better than the status quo, then you’re willing to try any alternative that comes up. That’s really what school vouchers represent.”

Many parents are angry. They see children as having a narrow, critical window between kindergarten and third grade when they either get a solid grounding in basic academic skills or spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up.

“Look at how many children are being lost while reforms are being put in place,” Crenshaw district resident Johnnie Morgan, whose son and daughter attended Garvey, said of efforts to improve Los Angeles’ public schools. “We can’t afford [to wait]. Never could--and not now, especially in this technological age.”

The impatience of parents like Morgan and the debate over vouchers in the presidential campaign are likely to grow even more with the release of a study last week showing that test scores improved among African American children who used vouchers to switch to private schools. Children from other ethnic groups showed no similar improvement.

The study, led by Harvard professor Paul Peterson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, found that black students enrolled in privately funded experimental voucher programs in New York, Washington and Dayton, Ohio, improved an average of 6.3 points in percentile rankings in test scores in math and reading relative to a control group that remained in public schools.

In Los Angeles, small private schools like Garvey, West Angeles and Price, run largely by churches, have several advantages over public schools--small classes and involved parents among them.

Their students are screened and are often required to take entrance exams. More important, these schools can expel problem students, sending them back to public school.

As important as those advantages are, some parents of private school students say, they do not fully explain the widening gap in student performance between predominantly black public and private schools.

Some parents are left wondering whether public schools have become too large--too hamstrung by bureaucracy--to work for too many students.

“In public school, your children just seem to get lost in the shuffle,” said Althea Weeks of Lynwood, whose son Brannon was one of three Garvey students to go directly to community college in 1998 after completing seventh grade.

Weeks said she knows other parents who would also send their children to private schools--if they could afford to.

“I have friends who have investigated Garvey,” Weeks said. “They think Garvey is too good to be true, but most cannot make it with their financial situation.”

Garvey’s tuition of $6,000 a year is a formidable economic barrier to many parents. That hard economic reality, Weeks said, convinced her and her late husband of the need for some kind of voucher system.

“With vouchers, more kids would have been able to get a good opportunity,” she said, “an opportunity they are not getting in public school.”

For parents like Marketta Martin of Compton, the time has long since passed when public schools should be the only option for their children.

“I pay taxes and I should be able to send my child to any school I want to,” Martin said. “I should have that money. With vouchers, my choice could be a public or private school.”

Martin, whose daughter attends Compton’s Dominguez High School, said that if vouchers were available in Compton, “everybody would be out of public schools. One teacher told me her ninth-graders read at the third-grade level. ‘How can I teach them writing?’ she asked.”

Garvey parent Morgan echoes her sentiments.

“I think the public system is becoming less and less effective for African American students in particular,” he said. “Unless you have the means or are willing to sacrifice as my wife and I have done, there is no choice.”

Vouchers would allow more students to enroll at Garvey, “and with more funds we would be able to pay teachers more,” said Garvey’s Executive Director Vanessa Beverly. “But that has never been a problem for teachers committed to teaching black children. They’re not in it for the money.”

Garvey, a secular campus whose teachers earn between $1,400 and $1,600 a month, is staunchly Afrocentric, and it gets impressive performances from students even though none of its teachers have degrees or teaching credentials.

“We know all black children can learn,” Beverly said. “You want to do everything you can to make these students successful. You already have that natural love for them. But you are not only loving, guiding and protecting them; you also have to nurture the students.”

With teachers who love and nurture “and expect the performance, that’s where you get the performance,” she said.

High Expectations Crucial to Success

High expectations--and an effort to build self-esteem--are crucial to the success of such schools. In class after class, teachers deliver a powerful message: You are the best, and we know you’ll learn like the best.

This message, private school advocates say, is not delivered so forcefully in the public schools. In the view of these advocates, public schools have a long history of routinely steering black students into non-college prep curricula or worse, shuttling them off to special education classes.

Such intangibles are more important than brick and mortar, staffers and administrators at Garvey say.

The attitude is similar at the West Angeles Christian Academy, where all of the teachers have degrees and four of 11 have credentials. There, Principal Deloris Armstrong also looks for what she calls “a special kind of teacher.”

“We want a teacher who has more than a credential,” she said. “We want someone who wants to be here. If we don’t see that you are really here for the children, you don’t get hired.”

Many religious schools see teaching as a ministry, one that brings an extra dimension to a classroom where instruction is grounded in spiritual values.

Garvey’s founder, Anyim Palmer, gives teachers there a class on African and African American history. The idea, Executive Director Beverly said, is to ensure that teachers know “some of the experiences we’ve gone through as a people--raising the consciousness of that teacher.”

Although Garvey is generally acknowledged to be an academically outstanding school, it does not measure student achievement on standardized tests.

If school officials say a child is reading on a college level, Palmer said, “that is determined by his ability to use a college-level text.”

Dolores Blunt, principal of Sheenway School near Watts, also does not give her students standardized tests, unless they are donated. She, like Palmer, has no room in her extremely tight budget to pay for them.

But she is also concerned by experiences her students have had taking such tests. She remembers an incident when students were given several choices from which to choose the discoverer of America.

Her students, having been taught that Native Americans had been on this continent long before Europeans arrived, selected “none of the above.” But that answer was judged incorrect, she said.

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) is a great admirer of Garvey and Sheenway and has contributed her honoraria from speaking engagements to both schools.

“I think Marcus Garvey is a wonderful school,” she said. “My grandson went many years ago. I also know there are some wonderful public schools with teachers like the teachers at Marcus Garvey in various places throughout America. There are not enough of them. We don’t reward them enough; we don’t support them enough.”

Waters, however, has long been a staunch opponent of vouchers, seeing them as the brainchild of political conservatives. She questions why what she calls “business giants” like Wal-Mart Stores’ John Walton and former junk bond king Michael Milken have become deeply involved in education.

“Education cannot and should not be privatized or marketed like Wal-Mart Stores,” she said.

She said she does not blame black parents for being angry.

“What I don’t want parents to do is to simply resort to an unknown solution,” she said. “I want them to spend time in the schools, at the board of education. I want them to demand more from education and I want them to be in touch with their children’s growth and development and not think somebody else is going to do it.”

Concerned About a Lack of Challenges

Racquel Sheppard is a parent who says she has been very involved at Los Angeles’ Figueroa Street Elementary school, where her daughter Rayven is a student.

The school has improved with class-size reduction, she said, but she doesn’t believe it is challenging her daughter.

“If I had a voucher, I most definitely would place her in a private setting,” Sheppard said.

“I’m also concerned about safety in the environment surrounding the school,” she said, recalling a highly publicized incident in which a teacher was shot there when a stray bullet from a gang confrontation outside slammed though a library window, leaving him brain damaged.

That concern is shared by parents with children at Garvey, West Angeles and Price. As important as academics are to those parents, officials at those schools say, safety is parents’ main reason for enrolling their children there.

If California had tax-supported vouchers tomorrow, however, there simply wouldn’t be enough classrooms in private schools to accommodate public school students who would want to transfer, private school officials say.

Many of those schools have enrollments of about 300. Garvey’s Beverly said her school could expand. Other schools want to remain the same size.

While there is not enough capacity, there are also classrooms that are not being used, said former Rep. Floyd Flake (D-N.Y.), one of the few black elected officials who has supported vouchers.

Flake, a minister whose congregation runs a 500-student school for grades preschool through eight, said churches have “invested a great deal of capital in buildings they only use for two or three hours a week.”

“My challenge to them is rather than look at vouchers as a right-wing, white conspiracy, look at them as an opportunity because vouchers are here to stay. We ought to take them and use them to our advantage now by opening schools in these vacant spaces that our churches have during the weekdays.”

Flake would also like to see African Americans look at alternatives to public schools with more of a sense of urgency.

“When a white person kills a black person, we all go out in the street to protest,” he said. “But our children are being educationally killed every day in public schools and nobody says a thing.”