2024 is the new 1972: Desegregation

Classical Liberal Education, Charters, Magnets, Vouchers and Desegregation

Backlash to Desegregation

Just as the Civil Rights movement was becoming more visible, the Supreme Court ruled on the matter of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The unanimous ruling stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. This decision overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896.

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling had far-reaching implications for desegregation efforts across the United States and laid the groundwork for subsequent civil rights legislation to promote educational equity and integration. It is considered one of the most significant legal decisions in American history; however, seventeen years later, many communities across the nation continued policies that effectively perpetuated “separate but equal.” 

The kindergarten class of 1954 were constitutionally guaranteed access to an equal education. In communities all across America that promise went unrealized and just as they were preparing to graduate, in 1971, the Supreme Court heard Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. In another show of commitment to desegregation, the Court held that busing - the transportation of students from one community to another for classes - could be used as a tool to achieve school desegregation and promote equal educational opportunities for all students.

The Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education put busing at front and center during the 1972 Presidential election. The issue, which is really about educational inequality, shone a spotlight on an ongoing commitment to segregation and supremacy. 

Backlash to Busing

President Richard Nixon argued that busing would disrupt to local communities and infringe on parental choice. Nixon also stoked his supporter’s innate distrust of “government intervention.” Meanwhile, Democratic candidate Senator George McGovern thought busing could achieve racial integration and provide access to a more equal education for all children. McGovern’s stance, which resonated with civil rights advocates, was that if the schools weren’t going to comply with Brown v. Board of Education, the government had a duty to protect the civil rights of those children by forcing schools to comply.

In 1974, schools in Boston, Massachusetts, were issued a court-ordered desegregation plan. Violence erupted, and racial tensions flared. Once again, diversity, equity, and inclusion collided with states’ rights and local control. 

During the riots, a Boston teenager by the name of Joe Rakes beat Ted Landsmark with a pole that still had an American flag attached to it. Dr. Landsmark, who was simply passing through the square on his way to a meeting, graduated from Yale Law School just the year before. He remains on staff at Northeastern University, where he teaches Public Policy. Six years after Joe Rakes was convicted of assaulting Dr. Landsmark, he was arrested for beating Thomas Dooly, his sister’s boyfriend, to death in Boston.

Backlash to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

The response to Brown v. Board of Education and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was calculated. The “Father of Vouchers,” Milton Friedman, published a manifesto on “educational choice” in 1955 in reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.

“Friedman and his allies saw in the backlash to the desegregation decree an opportunity they could leverage to advance their goal of privatizing government services and resources. Whatever their personal beliefs about race and racism, they helped Jim Crow survive in America by providing ostensibly race-neutral arguments for tax subsidies to the private schools sought by white supremacists.”

Nancy Maclean, Institute for New Economic Thinking

In 1971, “education choice” was used to mask a backlash to Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, and with that, the first school-to-work training pipeline opened in Texas. They called it a “Magnet School.”

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan released A Nation At-Risk, which cherry-picked Department of Education data to feed a predetermined narrative, according the author.

A Nation At-Risk used muddled data and “apocalyptic, almost militaristic” language to stoke fear in American parents. It would be almost forty years before Americans would know that the Reagan Administration “started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.” Shortly thereafter, the “Nixon Tapes,” which included racist conversations with then-Governor Ronald Reagan. In the end, it was never about global competition. It was always about sending the message to white families that desegregation deluded the American talent pool. 

In Minnesota, the concept of Charter Schools was bubbly about and A Nation At-Risk gave advocates just the ammunition they needed. Hell, by 1988, the President of the American Federation of Teachers was calling Charter Schools “a new kind of publicly funded, independently managed school,” and in 1992, the first Charter School opened its doors.

Without regard to the data and narrative manipulation, subsequent Presidents built their education policies on the back of that report through the 1990s and early 2000s.

Meanwhile, beginning in the mid-1970s, private religious schools were resurrecting or fortifying their commitment to Classical Liberal Education. In an exceptional piece for the New Yorker Magazine, Emma Green dives into the modern history of the Classical Liberal Education movement and became vogue in secular settings as a backlash to “Wokeism.” 

Classical education has historically been promoted by religious institutions and expensive prep schools. (Many classical schools have adopted the Harkness method, pioneered by Phillips Exeter Academy, in which students and teachers collectively work through material via open discussion.) More recently, powerful investors have seen its potential for cultivating academic excellence in underserved populations: the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, has put millions of dollars into classical schools and networks.

Emma Green

As Green explains, educational philosophy began dividing in the late 1940s. “Progressive reformers planted the seeds of two trends. The first was shifting the focus of school toward appealing to the interests of the child rather than transmitting ancient knowledge and wisdom, which these reformers considered élitist. (“Academic and scholastic, instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach,” Dewey wrote.) The second was a utilitarian impulse—some scholars thought that the purpose of education was to train workers.” 

As public schools began to diversify and include a broader swath of children, Christian schools maintained their commitment to Classic Liberal Education. Evangelical Pastor Doug Wilson established the Association of Classical Christian Schools. But, “even in Christian circles, Wilson is a polarizing figure—he promotes a theology that prizes strictly traditional gender roles and has made inflammatory comments about race relations.” 

The massive amounts of money behind the Classical Liberal Education push have resulted in a large following among homeschoolers, charter schools, and religious schools. But “anti-woke” conservatives aren’t interested in stopping at K-12. 

Thinkers v. Laborers

In 2023, after West Virginia University President Gordon Gee eliminated 28 academic programs and 143 faculty positions, Christopher A. Snyder, professor of history at Mississippi State University and University of Oxford research fellow, wrote, “We run the risk in America of only the wealthiest, attending the wealthiest colleges, having access to liberal education while our own senatorial class—most graduates of elite institutions—tell the rest of us to choose a more practical major.”

Professor Synder’s piece for Insider Higher Education makes it clear that a Liberal Arts education is not the same as a Classical Liberal Education, but too many Universities have confused the two because while men like Governor Ron DeSantis are extolling the virtues of Classical Liberal Education and the virtuousness it creates in people, they are also mocking the pursuit of Liberal Arts such as the humanities and sociology. 

The liberal arts (artes liberales) has meant, for most of the last 2,500 years, the arts and sciences appropriate for a free person to learn. It is an invention of classical antiquity, formalized in the medieval universities, infused with Renaissance humanism and broadened by scientific method, increasing literacy and democratic impulses.

Professor Christopher Synder

Despite Professor’s Synder caution not to confuse a Liberal Arts Education with a Classical Liberal Education, people - even academics - continue to conflate the two.

For example,  Vice President of Academic Affairs at Northwest Florida State College, Henry “Mack” Maklakiewicz, and the author of “Higher Education’s Aims: A Philosophical Defense of Education for Democratic Citizenship and Liberal Arts Learning,” concludes that “fragmented, overly specialized curriculum is a bad one, pedagogically and politically speaking.” This led him to argue that all postsecondary experiences should include “the Great Books” and should have the primary aim of creating virtuous citizens as a means of achieving the common good.

Mack, who acknowledged that the social and economic stresses of the the 1970s, which included “the increase in nontraditional students,” resulted an outmigration from “liberal arts colleges to shift toward offering career and technical and preprofessional education,” argues the answer is to require career, technical and vocational education experiences to include Western canon.

liberal arts education should be the exclusive major of every undergraduate—at if it were to come at the expense of career and technical education and vocational training. On the contrary, I argue that a kind of liberal arts education should be the foundation for every major or postsecondary experience. Our future nurses, computer scientists, aviation mechanics, commercial vehicle drivers, lawyers, and engineers should all be liberally educated; it is not the case that everyone major in philosophy or the humanities.

Professor Henry Maklakiewicz

In a 2023 interview, City Journal Editor Daniel Kennelly asked Professor Mack about the DeSantis Administration’s vision for higher education reform. Professor Mack said, “First, we must have a higher education system that educates in view of democratic citizenship and does so in a way that mirrors the postcolonial curriculum. It not only aim to ground students in the rich history of the Western Canon, or Great Books, but in doing so, it seeks to restore human reason’s ability to arrive at discernable truths about human nature, the Common Good, and life in a free society.” 

It is my contention that a kind of classical liberal arts education need not necessarily succumb to the critiques of postmodernism or multiculturalism, or concede to the demands of market-driven education. On the contrary, the outcomes of a classical liberal arts education may be complementary to the aims of a liberal society and the belief that higher education should aim at intellectual autonomy and career readiness.

Henry Maklakiewicz

Journalist Jennifer Berkshire and Historian Jack Schneider have joined forces to author The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual. Together they host an education policy podcast Have You Heard. Their recent piece, “The Old College Try,”appeared in Slate Magazine. It weaves together the convergence of education and workforce development. The push and the pull of thinking and laboring. 

The piece also spells out a more sinister motive among Classical Liberal Education advocates. “Among political observers, Americans’ sinking belief in college is being interpreted as yet another threat to the Democrats’ already unwieldy coalition, one in which college-educated voters now make up the majority. As voters turn away from college, goes the refrain, they’ll inevitably turn away from the Democratic Party.”

Human capital is a better sales pitch than it is an economic policy. And in this new Gilded Age, it seems almost comical to worry about a win-win. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize outer space. Meanwhile, nearly 40 million Americans live in poverty.

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider

Root Bound

I wrote about how education has long been used as the great decider. Who is genetically predisposed to think great thoughts and who is genetically predisposed to teach “the Great Books,” and who is genetically predisposed to labor laborious labor. History has shown us that the powerful are willing to manipulate equitable education for their continued status. The way we educate our prodigy is rooted in unclean soil.

In other words, Classical Liberal Education, whether it is delivered in public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, technical schools, colleges, or universities, is rooted in a time in which wealthy, white, Christian men were presumed to be “great thinkers” while daughters were relegated to a domestic education designed to keep their future wealthy, white, Christian husbands pleased with them. It is rooted in a time in which wealthy, white, Christian families enslaved people whose only value was presumed to be labor.

Magnets and Charters schools are rooted in a time in which working-class, white families were afraid that integration would mean that the education of their children would suffer. A fear stoked by President’s, academics, researchers, and dynasties.

Education professionals who do not recognize and grapple with the fact that the roots of the American education system are firmly planted in segregation are - wittingly or not - pushing an agenda that will lead in continued exclusion.