By Paul Horton. Part two of three.

In the twenty-five years after the last major Civil Rights Act of 1968, most whites abandoned the Democrats in the South as white flight and the Southern Baptist Convention sought public support for private schools that were created in suburban areas like Cobb and northern Gwinnett counties that ring Atlanta, Georgia. Conservative Republicans demanded vouchers from President Carter, and his rejection of vouchers to protect public schools so outraged a Christian Coalition led by Richard Viguerie, that he organized a letter writing campaign to organize against Democrats for their support of public schools. When Ronald Reagan kicked off his Presidential campaign in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three Civil Rights workers, sent a not so covert message to the Christian Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention that any Republican support for school desegregation, equitable funding for schools, and exclusive support for public schools was over. Reagan hinted that Freedom Summer had led to lawlessness in the South, and that if religious southerners wanted public monies for private schools, schools did not teach secular humanism and evolution, he was their man. So, under Reagan, the Republican base, the former conservative Southern Democrats, were reassured that evolution, secular humanism, and school integration could be avoided with Federal support for private schools in the forms of vouchers. But when Reagan’s voucher proposals were rejected by Congress, money flowed into conservative think tanks to create rationales for school privatization based on Milton Friedman’s idea of vouchers, according to journalist Greg Anrig in a Washington Monthly article (“An Idea Whose Time Has Gone”).

Indeed, the consensus of peer reviewed studies of the country’s most ambitious voucher program in Milwaukee indicates that it is a failure: that voucher schools fare no better than pubic schools, but cripple public school finances. In a 2011 study that compared voucher school students with public school students, public school students performed significantly higher (Wisconsin State Journal, March 29, 2011, “DPI: Students in Milwaukee voucher program don’t score better in state tests,” for example).

Charter schools have become another reform alternative that have received increasing levels of state and federal support since the early 1990s. Heavy funding of private charters really took of in 2006 when President Bush asked for a total of $306 million to support the growth of the charter movement when many public schools could not improve their tests scores under No Child Left Behind policies. Barack Obama made the creation of more charters a cornerstone of his Race to the Top policy program by making School Improvement Grants available for transforming “underperforming” schools into charters.

The idea here is that charters not subject to state laws and regulations will create more dynamic learning environments that will outpace public school performance. Moreover, charters will create competition for public schools that will lead to higher public school performance. In this view, the consumer, the parent and student, will benefit by being able to choose between public and private schools.

But in order to encourage this competition and choice, Obama education policy makers have declared a war on teacher unions and teachers. When the Central Falls, Rhode Island, School Board voted to fire all of the teachers at its high school without due process in February 2010, the President and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, strongly supported the school board. The Obama Administration claimed neutrality when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike 2012 when mayor Rahm Emanuel did not honor wage increases from a previous contract and demanded a longer school day without having appropriated funds to support a longer school day, but Secretary Duncan, a former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, fully supported the mayors’ attempt to break the union. Even more recently, Secretary Duncan was outspoken in his support of the Vergara decision that ruled to deny tenure to California teachers.

In perhaps the most intelligent analysis of the consequences of this decision that is currently stayed pending appeal, Jesse Rothstein, a public policy professor at UC Berkeley argued that denying teacher work protections would not make the teaching profession a popular career choice, further crippling the nation’s public schools. Moreover, according to Rothstein, the elephant in the room for public education is not teacher tenure or quality—most states have determined that only two to three percent of teachers are inadequate—it is funding for public schools.

This is the rub: if removing due process protections for teachers will not lead to adequate funding of education, public or private, why is it a policy objective of a Democratic administration and a party that, at least in the north, historically worked to create collective bargaining and due process protections for all American workers? Why, when a strong consensus of peer-reviewed literature correlates higher test scores to socio-economic status, is the Obama Administration focusing so much energy and money on the defunding of the public school system?

Many critics of Obama education policy are quick to assert with good reason, that there are no funds to do anything about poverty, so that improving schools have become a proxy poverty policy.  Secretary Duncan and key Democratic senators like Tom Harkin and Dick Durbin who oversee education policy and funding, talk often of “reducing the achievement gap” by demanding more accountability for public schools and teachers.  Senator Harkin’s education views are filtered by an education staffer from Teach for America, an organization that seeks to find jobs for recent college graduates who bypass teacher certification programs, receiving five weeks of training to prepare them for tough inner-city classrooms. Senator Durbin’s spouse has close ties to the Joyce Foundation, an organization that supports school privatization, charters, and Teach for America; an organization that benefits from investments in distressed mortgage funds and from gifts of 8 million dollars in three years from the country’s most outspoken supporter of school privatization, Michael Bloomberg. (See the Joyce Foundation IRS 990 PF Forms, 2012, 2011, 2010).

In sum, the war on teachers and due process for teachers is presented by many Democrats as a new war on poverty, and, somewhat obscenely, “the Civil Rights Movement of our time.” Last year Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington D.C. Schools, made speeches at southern civil rights museums that proclaimed that supporting charter schools and making teachers accountable was the key to creating a more equitable America. Closing the achievement gap and not the excuse of poverty was the new focus of the new Civil Rights movement. The National Civil Rights Museum—Lorraine Motel in Memphis recently recognized Geoffery Canada, a Harlem charter school operator and the star of the anti-pubic school documentary, “Waiting for Superman” as a “Civil Rights Hero.”

No southern issue has been more sensitive than schools. White flight from integrated schools is a major issue in the north and the south. Republicans support charters and vouchers to shift public money to religious schools. “Yellow Dog” Democrats fighting for seats in the south and lower Midwest support cutting funds to schools and privatization as a way to avoid tax increases and balance budgets.

Part One: Past as Prelude in the Troubled South

Part Three: The Attack on Teacher Tenure is an Attack on the Black Middle Class