Professor Says School Choice Is Racist, But Isn’t It More Racist to Rob Black Children of Educational Opportunities?

In case you haven’t gotten the memo, everything is now “racist.” At least if you buy into the constant narrative the left is trying to establish.  Recently, for example, Natalie Hopkinson of Howard University claimed in the Huffington Post that school choice is the latest example to be labeled with the scarlet “R.”

She writes:

Radical self-interest and self-preservation is the rotten, racist core of the whole ideology of school choice. There is no “we” in this: The entire point is to give individual kids an advantage. In putting his daughter above everyone else, Wilson used the school choice system precisely as it’s designed to operate. This vision must change, both from the top down and from the bottom up. Families and taxpayers have swallowed the line that a privatized school “marketplace” will deliver on its promise of upward mobility for all. It is a cynical game that has done nothing to build up communities like mine, despite all promises to the contrary.

She goes on to write:

It was in the 1950s, when civil rights reformers used the legal system to attack the system of apartheid, that the notion of “choice” first came to public attention. White parents demanded the right to “choose” not to send their kids to school with black children. They set up private academies, and in some cases shut down entire public school districts. Here in Washington, D.C., white families fled en masse, pretty much overnight, from the city’s public school system, in pursuit of the best “choices” for their children.

So, trying to do what’s best for your own kid now gets you lumped into the same category as the KKK?   Ben Shapiro isn’t buying it.  “Why, pray tell, is it racist to remove your children from failing public schools and attempt to place them in schools where they are likely to receive a better education?” he asks.  “Because the real reason you want your kids out of those schools is to avoid black and brown people. Or something.”

Right.  I don’t think anyone actually believes that.  In fact, I’d go further and say that trying to keep kids of color in failing schools is racist.  Robbing them of a future is definitely evil.

“I’m sure as hell not going to put my daughter and son in garbage public schools out of some misguided sense of Marxist fairness, ” Shapiro continues.  “That would make me a rotten parent.”  I totally agree.  As the President of Citizens for Self-Governance, I believe it’s best to make decisions as close to home as possible.  Parents make better choices for their children than some faraway bureaucrats.  Giving moms and dads the most flexibility as they make these decisions will yield the best results.  I’ll give Shapiro the final word:

Those inequities and disadvantages will not disappear unless choice is restricted. People will simply move from districts with bad schools to districts with good schools — and those people will be those who can afford to do so. Unless Hopkinson is proposing a government crackdown on the ability to attend schools of our choice, where we can live, and how much we can spend on our children’s education, she’s offering no solution. And she’s ignoring the biggest problem of all: school failures today are less about spending shortages than about parents who can’t or won’t do the work necessary to ensure the best educational path forward for their children. Hopkinson’s child will do fine, because her parents spend inordinate amounts of time and money to ensure she does. The same doesn’t hold true for every parent. The least we can do is give parents the option to do the right thing by putting more money back in their pocket and opening more options to them, rather than jailing them in failing schools defined by location rather than quality.

Hat Tip: Daily Wire

Image Credit: PRO US Department of Education