Charter schools give minority kids a choice

Ten days ago, some of our board members, including two of us, attended the hearing in Fulton County Superior Court where seven public school boards and superintendents sought to continue their monopoly power and control over public education in Georgia by obtaining a ruling that House Bill 881, which allows state-authorized and -funded charter schools, was unconstitutional.

As longtime veterans of the civil rights movement, but newcomers to the charter school fight, we were both encouraged and disappointed by what we saw.

We were appalled by how little public education politics in Georgia had changed in 50 years. School boards and superintendents are still using taxpayers’ money to hire high-priced lawyers, to make lofty, esoteric arguments to deny African-American children the right to attend a school of their choice.

We were encouraged by a courtroom packed with white and African-American parents, business leaders and educators who had come to support giving parents a way out of the stifling monopoly known as traditional public schools.

Finally, we cheered the judge who skewered the lawyers for the school districts with her analysis and pointed questions, and issued a quick decision to rule in favor of the constitutionality of HB 881.

All of us felt we had been in a time warp back to the 1960s, and that Georgia had yet to fulfill the goals and aspirations of the civil rights movement in which we participated as students at Morehouse and Spelman colleges 50 years ago.

Until the hearing, we did not know that in 2010, the public school monopoly still resists making Brown v. Board of Education a reality. This refusal is even more galling when you consider that 53 percent of students attending public schools in Georgia today are minorities.

Judge Wendy Shoob, in upholding HB 881, was effectively ruling that all parents in Georgia are now free to realize the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that all children, regardless of race, creed or income, have the same opportunities to excel.

Not even the proponents of continuing the governmental monopoly can argue in good faith that African-American parents should be denied the right to choose an alternative to government-run schools, in light of these statistics:

● The graduation rate for African-American students in Georgia, depending upon the report, ranges from 43 to 60 percent.

● Fifty years after we marched with King, there is still a three-year academic achievement gap between white and African-American seniors in Georgia.

● According to the 2009 ACT profile of Georgia’s graduating students, 60 percent of African-American graduates do not meet ACT college readiness in English, 86 percent do not meet readiness in math, 77 percent fail to meet readiness standards in reading, and 94 percent fail to meet ACT college readiness standards in science.

Before we founded Peachtree Hope Charter School in 2009, the three of us thought our work in the civil rights movement was finished.

We now know it has only begun. However, we remember a sermon by King in 1968 in which he said:

“And I said to my little children, ‘I’m going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don’t ever want you to forget that there are millions of God’s children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don’t want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.’ ”

We need to remember that, in Georgia in 2010, hundreds of thousand of children are not what they ought to be because our political leaders, until recently, denied them the chance “to be all they can be.”

Our task now is to use the wisdom of our General Assembly in passing HB 881, as affirmed by Shoob, to fulfill King’s dream by opening as many high-quality charter schools in Georgia as possible.