The battle that was taking place on Buster Drive in Warren was but a small sideshow to the images playing on the nightly news and would soon be eclipsed by the devastating violence that would erupt a few miles away in Detroit in July. But what would transpire over the coming days and months and years on Buster Drive would actually have profound consequences for race relations in America and shape the national political landscape in ways that are still being felt today.

A telegenic housing secretary with presidential ambitions would use the Baileys’ plight to launch a bold plan to desgregate all of America’s suburbs.

Local officials in Warren, stoked by the rage of their white constituents, would stymie his efforts, even though it meant forfeiting millions of dollars of federal aid.

A Republican president facing reelection would torpedo his secretary’s plan, empowering the white middle-class voters he considered crucial to his victory.

Those voters, in turn, would make this corner of suburban Detroit the unofficial capital of America’s white middle class, and shape the strategy of presidential hopefuls of both parties for decades to come.

Ultimately, the whites-only fortress of Warren and surrounding Macomb County would crumble, overwhelmed by the consequences of self-defeating choices made decades before. Like suburbs across the country, it would become more diverse—and increasingly Democratic. But it would retain the scars of unhealed racial fault lines first laid down in 1967—a de facto segregation that would make Macomb County a prime target for populist conservatives bent on appealing to white working-class voters. Few suburbs would suffer the same headline-making unrest or the targeted federal scrutiny as Warren. But its prominent role in the massive demographic and political shifts of the last half century would ensure it remained an important bellwether heading into the 2024 presidential election when, once again, Macomb County would find itself a political battleground for the nation’s all-important suburban vote. 

But before any of that could happen, the Baileys had to outlast the mob.

When they tell the story, it makes them laugh, even now. They’re trying hard to get used to all the things that are gone. Trying to get used to no longer hearing the sounds Tess made, the thump-thump-thump whenever she practiced her pitching.

“This is where our heart’s at,” Jerry says of Tess’ room, and their home, and their small South Texas town next to the now waterless Nueces River.

We didn’t have to grow up alongside the Nueces River, listening to songs and stories of the violence all around us. But we did.

In the late-20th century, Charlotte, North Carolina’s public schools became a shining example of successful racial integration. Many affluent white residents even embraced the efforts by sending their white children to predominantly black schools like West Charlotte High, showing their commitment to making integration work and distinguishing themselves from violently resistant cities like Memphis and Birmingham. For Newsweek, Alexander Nazaryan looks at the history of Charlotte’s school integration and bussing programs, and how far the city and America have degenerated since those promising years.

By the time Foxx became mayor, the Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools decision had largely resegregated schools in Charlotte. “Neighborhoods became more segregated following the declaration of unitary status,” says Amy Hawn Nelson, a University of Pennsylvania education researcher who has closely studied Charlotte’s demographics (a school district has reached “unitary status” when it is no longer deemed segregated). The result, Nelson says, was that real estate brokers could lure buyers by promising that their children would be guaranteed a spot in some well-regarded suburban school, since the fear of those children being bussed elsewhere was pretty much gone. And what typically burnishes a school’s reputation? Racial composition, not academic achievement. “Even when you look at school quality metrics, Nelson told me, “white families are more likely to pick a white school rather than a high performing school.”

There have been efforts by school Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendents—who are independent of the mayor—to skirt the ruling by creating more magnet schools and implementing “student reassignment” plans that modestly push for reintegration. Only the countervailing push is stronger. The internet allows for subatomic analysis of each school’s demographics and academics. If they can get a child into Providence, one of the best high schools in Charlotte, they will. Who wouldn’t? And thanks to Capacchione, they can do so without resorting to a federal lawsuit.

Most of these people are liberals: Mecklenburg County voted for Obama twice, while Hillary Clinton nearly doubled Donald Trump’s vote total in 2016. Yet it is one thing to vote in a school gymnasium for a politician you have never seen, quite another to watch your own child ascend the steps of a yellow bus. It used to be that voting and public education were seen as part of the same set of behaviors collectively called civic participation. No longer so, not when a scholarship to Stanford hangs in the balance. As the education writer Nikole Hannah-Jones has put it: “We began moving away from the ‘public’ in public education a long time ago. In fact, treating public schools like a business these days is largely a matter of fact in many places.” Once citizens, we are now customers.

Read the story

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

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DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems.

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The very nature and meaning of education underwent a change.

Though supported by Democrats as well, the expansion of virtual charter schools accelerated as Republicans increased their margin of control in governor’s mansions and state legislatures across the country. At the start of 2016, Republicans occupied thirty-two of the nation’s fifty governorships, ten more than they did in 2009. During that same period of time, Republican control of state legislatures doubled. What that means is that by 2016, Republicans controlled more legislative chambers than they did in the entire history of their party. The same political winds that have shifted to blow so many Republicans into office have, at the same time, pushed virtual education to the forefront of educational policy for a certain segment of our nation’s youth.

In December of 2015, Congress sent the long-awaited overhaul of the federal government’s education bill to the White House for President Obama’s signature. Called the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new bill updated the previous educational act signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind. When introducing that new act, Bush said that it was a means for our nation’s schools to begin to seriously combat what he termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations” that had so often stood in the way of ensuring the success of America’s children who were poor, of color, special needs, or in any way struggling to achieve academically. President Bush promised the nation that No Child Left Behind would require that by 2014, 100 percent of all public school children could perform at grade level as measured by standardized tests in the areas of math and reading. However, by 2012, President Obama’s administration and much of the rest of the country realized we as a nation were far from successfully achieving the previous president’s promised outcomes. Obama’s education bill made no grand promises such as those found in the previous law, and in many ways was most notable for the fact that, unlike No Child Left Behind, with its push to give the federal government authority to prescribe and enforce educational standards, curriculum, and consequences from Washington, the Every Child Succeeds Act by and large returned such matters to the control of the states and local governments.

Proposals for addressing issues of racial equity and fairness have not tended to benefit the poor and non-white when left to states to decide. In regard to educational equality, according to the progressive Republican watchdog organization American Bridge 21st Century, beginning in 2010 the Republican candidates for governor in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Ohio rode a cresting wave of Tea Party support to elected office. They all campaigned on promises of massive budget overhauls that would cut taxes for both wealthy individuals and businesses. Once elected, in order to deliver on those promises, one governor after another eyed the funding pots set aside for public education as a way to pay for their budget priorities. By 2014, the legislative overhaul was complete, and the impact of the electoral shifts meant that changes were not just a matter of states’ and local governments’ agreeing about the best ways to fund the education of children who were poor and non-white. No, with this shift in the political landscape, the very nature and meaning of education underwent a change as well. Republican governors hewed closely to their party platform on education, which, in sum, aimed to shrink federal oversight of education; increase parental choice and flexibility; allow federal dollars to follow children to the school of their choice; expand school choice by increasing the number of charter schools; return greater control to parents, teachers, and school boards; and defend and increase options for home schooling. In regard to education, the shift was away from government regulation of public schools even while the proposed alternatives required taxpayer dollars.

As educational historian Diane Ravitch has pointed out, the educational reforms championed by these legislators seek to

eliminate the geographically based system of public education as we have known it for the past 150 years and replace it with a competitive market-based system of school choice—one that includes traditional public schools, privately managed charter schools, religious schools, voucher schools, for-profit schools, virtual schools and for-profit vendors of instruction. Lacking any geographic boundaries, these schools would compete for customers.

Virtual schools and their growth in both number and significance were not part of the public discussion surrounding the repeal of No Child Left Behind. Still, in reality, as it became more and more clear that the new education bill would pass, interest groups, state legislatures, and educational nonprofits interested in the lucrative, easy expansion of virtual education all sprang into action. Many knew that states would now have more power to propose the expansion of such schools, allegedly as a way of confronting the challenges facing states in need of creative ways to address the educational deficiencies of their lowest-achieving students, who were usually poor and often of color.

In April 2015, the Alabama State Legislature voted up State Bill 0072, known as the Virtual School Options for Local Boards of Education Bill. It required that, “at a minimum, each local board of education” adopt a policy for providing a “virtual option for eligible students in grades 9–12.” In Maine, two virtual academies opened in 2014 to specifically educate students in the state’s “poorer districts” and in May of 2015 the state explored the feasibility of opening a state-run virtual academy. In June, state education officials in Illinois announced that they would begin to test out limited online learning options during snow days for a three-year period. Following their analysis at the end of the test period, they held open the possibility of more wide-ranging implementation. The Virginia Department of Education piloted a new program during the 2015–2016 school year in which students spent 100 percent of their time in a cyber school, never setting foot inside a school. This flurry of activity was brought on by the ease and speed with which these new computer-based schools could expand and by the fact that the financial rewards were simply too great for cash-strapped politicians to ignore.

By 2015 virtual schools had gone mainstream, aided in part by the fact that between 2008 and 2014, 175 bills that expanded online schooling options passed in thirty-nine states and territories (including the District of Columbia). As a result, today there are public schools in every state that offer some form of online coursework, and in five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, and Virginia—students are actually required to take at least one online or partly digital class if they want to graduate from high school. In thirty states and Washington, D.C., there are fully online schools available.

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Between 2011 and 2014, 100 percent of the children enrolled in Philadelphia-area cyber schools who took state achievement tests failed.

Despite all of the state- and federal-level support for these new education methods, all of this growth has happened without a similar amount of verification of the efficacy of virtual education. Over the past decade, we have heard more about the failure of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to make a memorable impact on the style in which college instruction is delivered than we have about the success or failure of virtual education at the K–12 level. Colleges might get all the attention for going online in part because big brand names like MIT and Harvard now offer virtual courses for free around the world, but K–12 online schooling has, over the past twenty years, become a major player in the educational arena. As a result of MOOCs and other developments overshadowing this conversation, little attention has been paid to where in the country this profitable switch has grown most rapidly: areas with high levels of racial and economic inequality fueled by segregation. In districts that are rural and poor, and overwhelmingly with Republican governors and legislatures, in states like Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, or in urban districts like Philadelphia, virtual schools are quickly becoming the format of choice despite politicians’ having little grasp on how cyber education impacts achievement for the most vulnerable students.

According to a 2012 Philadelphia Citypaper article, “Who’s Killing Philly Schools,” in a district comprised of 80 percent Black and Latino students, the vast majority of whom are below the poverty line, cyber schools accounted for fully educating more than a third of the children in 2014. The goal is for that number to rise to at least three-quarters, if not more, in subsequent years. However, between 2011 and 2014, 100 percent of the children enrolled in Philadelphia-area cyber schools who took state achievement tests failed. The record of Pennsylvania’s fourteen cyber charter schools was so abysmal that the state of Pennsylvania denied all applications to open new cyber charter schools in 2013 and 2014. Their poor track record has not derailed the long-term plan of increasing the numbers of students who take classes via virtual education, however.

Cyber education grew during the term of Pennsylvania’s Republican governor Tom Corbett. Elected in 2010 and serving only a four-year term, his policies exemplified the organized effort on the part of political and business leaders to spearhead the shift to online learning. His first step was taking funding away from “brick and mortar” schools. In his first full year in office, he cut funding to the Philadelphia School District by $198 million, a 20 percent cut. Then, in 2011, he reduced public school funding by another $900 million, or 10 percent. Those cuts, plus more the next year, meant that by 2013 thousands of teachers were laid off and almost 70 percent of Pennsylvania’s school districts increased their class size, 40 percent cut extracurricular activities, and 75 percent cut instruction. The impact of his educational leadership was devastating for schools and communities throughout the state, and districts targeted by Corbett’s cuts felt them intensely. Dozens of schools closed. Thousands of teachers and school support staff were laid off. Art and music became scarce, along with nurses and guidance counselors. School buildings became so unpleasant that virtual education almost seemed like a respite.

In one particularly telling real-world example from 2016 of how such cuts affected students in the “brick and mortar” district, high school junior Jameria Miller talks about why she starts every morning running through the school to get a good seat near the front of the room in her first-period Spanish class. It’s not because she is just excited about the class. It’s because the school is cold. As she explains, “The cold is definitely a distraction. We race to class to get the best blankets.” What she means is that because the classroom where she begins her day has uninsulated metal walls, Jameria’s teacher hands out blankets to the students on a first come, first served basis. It’s the only way for them to stay warm. Miller’s school in the William Penn District is situated in Philadelphia’s “inner-ring” suburbs and serves a student body that is majority Black and overwhelmingly impoverished. Though concentrating in the cold is hard enough, Miller says the hardest part of her daily ordeal is the knowledge that life isn’t like this for students in other districts. She means students in wealthier districts. “It’s never going to be fair, they’re always going to be a step ahead of us. They’ll have more money than us, and they’ll get better jobs than us, always.” She says she doesn’t believe that either funding or systemic school improvement will ever truly equalize: “What I’m about to say might not be very nice, but rich people aren’t going to want [funding fairness]. They want their kids to have better things so that their kids can get a jump start in life and be ahead of everyone else. And, as long as people feel that way, we all won’t be equal. We won’t receive equal education ever, because education is what gets you success.” Her district is not the only one in Pennsylvania so affected.

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The companies who run online and virtual schools are also consistently accused of financial impropriety.

Since 1998, Philadelphia schools—the largest city and school district in the state—have been run by the governor-appointed School Reform Commission. In the summer of 2013, in order to address a $350 million hole in its budget, the commission passed what was termed a “doomsday budget.” Thirty schools were closed that year. In 2014, Thomas Knudsen, chief recovery officer for the School Reform Commission, told a reporter writing a story for Salon that the commission wanted to “close 40 schools and an additional six every year thereafter until 2017.” At that point, he believed the district, which at its height had over 180 schools, would be down to 20 to 30, and those would be placed into “achievement networks” where public and private groups would compete to manage them. This news led the Salon reporter to describe what once was our nation’s tenth-largest school district as being in its “death throes.” The district wasn’t to be saved, or even managed, by the Reform Commission as much as dismantled.

Despite such severe money worries and their negative impact on “brick and mortar” schools, virtual educational sectors thrived during the same years. According to a 2011 New York Times article, five Pennsylvania cyber charters received $200 million in tax money in 2010–2011, and Agora Cyber Charter, which is run by the for-profit company K12, took in $31.6 million in 2013 alone from state taxpayers in Philadelphia. By 2015, cyber schools received over $60 million in per-student payments from the chronically starved and often bankrupt school districts. To make matters worse, the companies who run online and virtual schools are also consistently accused of financial impropriety. In 2011, the New York Times conducted a months-long investigation into virtual schools. By way of summing up its overall findings, the article begins by showing how, in the realm of education, what is good for business is not necessarily good for the students those businesses claim to educate:

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

The amount of money involved, as well as the potential profit, is significant.

One of the largest companies providing virtual education, Agora Schools, was on track to earn $72 million in 2011, a number it has bested each succeeding year from 2011 to 2014, when out of Agora’s $849 million in profit, $117 million came from its virtual schools division. And those profits are for just one company, in just one area of a crowded field of online education providers. In order to help build a market for their services, these companies often target children via huge advertising buys on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, as well as on teen sites such as MeetMe.com and VampireFreaks.com.

In addition to its seeming inability to properly educate students and the unsavory targeting of children with its product, it is worth noting that Agora’s parent company, K12 Inc., was founded by a man who had served federal time for financial improprieties. His name is Michael Milken. Milken not only came to symbolize 1980s-era Wall Street greed and excess by serving as the inspiration for the Michael Douglas character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street; he also spent almost two years in a federal penitentiary for securities fraud. Once released from prison, he joined forces with another junk bond dealer, Ron Packard, who specialized in mergers and acquisitions for Goldman Sachs in the 1980s. Together they invested $10 million into K12 Inc. and formed a company with the goal of profiting from the $600 billion public education “market.” They have been dogged by financial improprieties. In 2012, K12 settled a federal lawsuit for $6.8 million. The suit alleged its executives inflated stock prices by misleading investors with false student-performance claims. In the summer of 2016, the company agreed to pay $168.5 million to settle alleged violations of California’s false claims, false advertising, and unfair competition laws, though the company admitted no wrongdoing. No matter; by 2016 Milken had a net worth of around $2.5 billion, according to Forbes—almost all of that money from contracts with public schools.

Pennsylvania has the second-highest cyber charter enrollment (after Ohio), and it accounts for about 17 percent of the national cyber charter school population, which across the country numbers over 220,000 students. In terms of instruction, students usually take lessons at home, so the virtual school operators have no classrooms to maintain, staff to hire, or heating bills to pay. Teachers are paid less, and student-teacher ratios are massive, sometimes as high as fifty students for each teacher. But, despite the widespread belief in their affordability, in Pennsylvania the district pays cyber schools as much per child as it pays to educate students in brick-and-mortar schools. In 2016, most of Pennsylvania’s cyber schools had dismal results. According to the state’s School Performance Profile website, only three—21st Century, PA Cyber, and PA Virtual—had a score above 60. The state considers 60 and below to be substandard. None of the cyber schools scored higher than 70, which is the state’s minimum passing score for all schools, and some cyber schools in the study scored down in the 30s. Such schools are neither inexpensive nor effective, yet they continue to expand.

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 The undereducation of the poor and people of color is a business opportunity.

In addition to questions about how effective cyber schools are in terms of a return on investment for taxpayer dollars, an issue of particular concern is the sector’s emphasis on serving so-called high-risk students who don’t have the parental and other support structures that research shows are necessary to make the most of the model. Poor, rural, and urban districts are prime candidates, since cyber educators have explicitly stated that it is their business strategy to go after kids who—because it is believed that they do not have motivated parents—would demand the least from their educational experience. Students in foster care and Native Americans schooled on their tribal homelands are two categories of students targeted by virtual school providers in Florida.

Targeting the most economically vulnerable students ultimately yields cyber education businesses increased profits resulting from the segrenomics of apartheid schools. The undereducation of the poor and people of color is a business opportunity that generates great profit for businesses but provides little in the way of quality instruction.

Toward that end, it is important to take a few steps back and at least notice that, despite the near-universal enthusiasm for projects that give technology to educationally vulnerable poor children of color, computer-aided instruction, when not deployed in an informed, responsible manner, actually widens the gap between the financially and educationally privileged and everyone else. Nonetheless, over the past ten years, public school districts have invested millions of dollars in various types of online and computer-aided learning and instruction programs, and few are able to show the educational benefit of their expenditures for a majority of students. Those who benefit most are already well organized and highly motivated. Other students struggle and, according to researchers studying students in a variety of digital settings, might even lose academic ground.

Supporters of online learning say that all anyone needs in order to access a great education is a stable Internet connection, but only 35 percent of households earning less than $25,000 have broadband Internet access, compared with 94 percent of households with income in excess of $100,000. In addition, according to the 2010 Pew Report on Mobile Access, only half of Black homes have Internet connections at all, compared with almost 65 percent of white households. In its 2016 report on Internet usage, Pew related that a whopping 94 percent of Latinos used mobile phones to access the Internet, generally a much more expensive and less-than-ideal (if not altogether ineffectual) method for taking part in online education. In short, the explosion of this type of educational instruction, though on the rise, may leave wanting the very students who need public education while at the same time offering businesses providing Internet access an opportunity to reap significant rewards.

As but one example of how touting the benefits of cyber education goes hand in hand with profits for businesses, we need look no further than South Carolina. There, the growth of cyber education in the state got an advantageous boost in 2014 when the governor at the time, Nikki Haley, announced a new education budget and asked the state legislature for tens of millions of dollars to provide WiFi service to rural schoolchildren. It was a precursor to the expansion of virtual education. Once approved, the 2015 education budget provided “$29 million for improving bandwidth to school facilities, bolstering wireless connectivity within school walls, and furthering the push to ensure that every student has a computer or tablet.” These changes were enacted because, according to the press release announcing the allocations, “modernizing technology and improving bandwidth will give students greater access to educational content and will help improve critical computer skills their future employers will demand.” An additional $4 million was also provided for teacher technology training. Schools facing difficulties hiring could also offer courses in a “blended” setting, with students being taught online while sitting at a desk in their traditional school. Schools pay $3,500 for an entire classroom to take a virtual course—far less than the cost of a teacher. The allocation of those funds also set the stage for the aggressive expansion of online learning to a cohort of students who would benefit most from high-quality, in-person instruction.

The same year that Governor Haley released her technology-enhancing budget, the National Education Policy Center issued a 2015 report finding that, “despite the considerable enthusiasm for virtual education, there is little credible research to support virtual schools’ practices or to justify ongoing calls for ever greater expansion.” Though the authors concede that the available data are limited, which may make their findings less than definitive, “there is not a single positive sign from the empirical evidence presented here.” Nonetheless, Governor Haley and others like her insisted that this particular form of free-market public education would help the state’s children who were poor and without high-quality schools. She told the state’s citizens that an increase in cyber education was, in the language of school choice advocates, tantamount to “taking a stand against the idea that where you are born and raised should influence the quality of your education.”

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These types of educational arrangements simply do not take place in districts that are wealthy.

Black and Latino children and their parents and communities have reason for concern about the rapid and unchecked growth in cyber education. It tends to impact them most. When Florida’s severe budget cuts in 2011 made it difficult for schools to meet class-size rules and left them too cash-strapped to hire more teachers, some schools in the Miami-Dade district required seven thousand of their students to take online classes in virtual labs with only noncertified teacher’s aides available to provide assistance. Students did not know of these new arrangements until they showed up for school one day, and parents were neither asked about nor informed of this change. Of the district’s roughly 344,000 students, 324,000 are Black or Latino. These types of educational arrangements simply do not take place in districts that are wealthy and have low numbers of students of color.

It is then surprising that, to a large extent, the success of the shift to digital learning has been aided by rhetoric that positions education as a basic right of citizenship, a civil rights mountain still in need of scaling. Nonetheless, to refer back to Stephanie Mencimer’s Mother Jones piece, “beneath the rhetoric, the online-education push is also part of a larger agenda that closely aligns with the GOP’s national strategy: It siphons money from public institutions into for-profit companies.” She continues to say that the tangible result of such efforts is to undercut “public employees, their unions, and the Democratic base. In the guise of a technocratic policy initiative, it delivers a political trifecta—and a big windfall for Bush’s corporate backers.” What it rarely delivers is a quality education, never mind one that comes close to the sort found in the wealthy, white school districts to which the Bush and DeVos families would send their own children.

In many virtual school settings, students rarely even hear or see their teachers. At some cyber charter schools, students need only sign in to the school website and/or communicate with a teacher once every three days to prove they’re actually attending. In Wisconsin, a state legislative audit found that 16 percent of the virtual teachers surveyed had contact with individual students as little as three times a month. Other schools in the state outsource duties such as paper grading to contractors in India, making it difficult for the teachers to meaningfully explain to students the basis for the grades they received. While virtual education is a growth industry in Wisconsin, it is important to note that the state has the largest achievement gap between Black and white students in the country and ranks last in reading-comprehension tests among Black fourth graders. Milwaukee, one of the largest cities in the state and home to the highest number of Black students, is the biggest contributor to Wisconsin’s racial achievement gap. Four out of five Black children in Milwaukee live in poverty.

While much of the sector’s growth can be seen as being tied to states with Republican governors and legislatures, it was greatly aided in 2013 by the Obama administration when it launched the ConnectED Initiative, a five-year plan to connect nearly all U.S. students to high-speed wireless systems in their schools and libraries, earmark funds to train teachers to incorporate digital technology and devices into their lesson plans, and “unleash private sector innovation” in order make it easier for educational technology providers to offer personalized educational software, online education opportunities, and online textbooks to entire school districts. If such policies and practices actually worked to educate students who are undereducated, that might not be cause for concern. However, given all of the information that we have, we must conclude that they do not. It is then hard to understand why there is such a push to expand them. At the very least, it would make sense to also expand policies that would make it possible for schoolchildren who attend schools that lack heating in the winter to sit comfortably in their classrooms without resorting to huddling under a blanket.

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Copyright © 2017 by Noliwe Rooks. This excerpt originally appeared in Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, published by The New Press, and is used here with permission.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

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DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems.

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The very nature and meaning of education underwent a change.

Though supported by Democrats as well, the expansion of virtual charter schools accelerated as Republicans increased their margin of control in governor’s mansions and state legislatures across the country. At the start of 2016, Republicans occupied thirty-two of the nation’s fifty governorships, ten more than they did in 2009. During that same period of time, Republican control of state legislatures doubled. What that means is that by 2016, Republicans controlled more legislative chambers than they did in the entire history of their party. The same political winds that have shifted to blow so many Republicans into office have, at the same time, pushed virtual education to the forefront of educational policy for a certain segment of our nation’s youth.

In December of 2015, Congress sent the long-awaited overhaul of the federal government’s education bill to the White House for President Obama’s signature. Called the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new bill updated the previous educational act signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind. When introducing that new act, Bush said that it was a means for our nation’s schools to begin to seriously combat what he termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations” that had so often stood in the way of ensuring the success of America’s children who were poor, of color, special needs, or in any way struggling to achieve academically. President Bush promised the nation that No Child Left Behind would require that by 2014, 100 percent of all public school children could perform at grade level as measured by standardized tests in the areas of math and reading. However, by 2012, President Obama’s administration and much of the rest of the country realized we as a nation were far from successfully achieving the previous president’s promised outcomes. Obama’s education bill made no grand promises such as those found in the previous law, and in many ways was most notable for the fact that, unlike No Child Left Behind, with its push to give the federal government authority to prescribe and enforce educational standards, curriculum, and consequences from Washington, the Every Child Succeeds Act by and large returned such matters to the control of the states and local governments.

Proposals for addressing issues of racial equity and fairness have not tended to benefit the poor and non-white when left to states to decide. In regard to educational equality, according to the progressive Republican watchdog organization American Bridge 21st Century, beginning in 2010 the Republican candidates for governor in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Ohio rode a cresting wave of Tea Party support to elected office. They all campaigned on promises of massive budget overhauls that would cut taxes for both wealthy individuals and businesses. Once elected, in order to deliver on those promises, one governor after another eyed the funding pots set aside for public education as a way to pay for their budget priorities. By 2014, the legislative overhaul was complete, and the impact of the electoral shifts meant that changes were not just a matter of states’ and local governments’ agreeing about the best ways to fund the education of children who were poor and non-white. No, with this shift in the political landscape, the very nature and meaning of education underwent a change as well. Republican governors hewed closely to their party platform on education, which, in sum, aimed to shrink federal oversight of education; increase parental choice and flexibility; allow federal dollars to follow children to the school of their choice; expand school choice by increasing the number of charter schools; return greater control to parents, teachers, and school boards; and defend and increase options for home schooling. In regard to education, the shift was away from government regulation of public schools even while the proposed alternatives required taxpayer dollars.

As educational historian Diane Ravitch has pointed out, the educational reforms championed by these legislators seek to

eliminate the geographically based system of public education as we have known it for the past 150 years and replace it with a competitive market-based system of school choice—one that includes traditional public schools, privately managed charter schools, religious schools, voucher schools, for-profit schools, virtual schools and for-profit vendors of instruction. Lacking any geographic boundaries, these schools would compete for customers.

Virtual schools and their growth in both number and significance were not part of the public discussion surrounding the repeal of No Child Left Behind. Still, in reality, as it became more and more clear that the new education bill would pass, interest groups, state legislatures, and educational nonprofits interested in the lucrative, easy expansion of virtual education all sprang into action. Many knew that states would now have more power to propose the expansion of such schools, allegedly as a way of confronting the challenges facing states in need of creative ways to address the educational deficiencies of their lowest-achieving students, who were usually poor and often of color.

In April 2015, the Alabama State Legislature voted up State Bill 0072, known as the Virtual School Options for Local Boards of Education Bill. It required that, “at a minimum, each local board of education” adopt a policy for providing a “virtual option for eligible students in grades 9–12.” In Maine, two virtual academies opened in 2014 to specifically educate students in the state’s “poorer districts” and in May of 2015 the state explored the feasibility of opening a state-run virtual academy. In June, state education officials in Illinois announced that they would begin to test out limited online learning options during snow days for a three-year period. Following their analysis at the end of the test period, they held open the possibility of more wide-ranging implementation. The Virginia Department of Education piloted a new program during the 2015–2016 school year in which students spent 100 percent of their time in a cyber school, never setting foot inside a school. This flurry of activity was brought on by the ease and speed with which these new computer-based schools could expand and by the fact that the financial rewards were simply too great for cash-strapped politicians to ignore.

By 2015 virtual schools had gone mainstream, aided in part by the fact that between 2008 and 2014, 175 bills that expanded online schooling options passed in thirty-nine states and territories (including the District of Columbia). As a result, today there are public schools in every state that offer some form of online coursework, and in five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, and Virginia—students are actually required to take at least one online or partly digital class if they want to graduate from high school. In thirty states and Washington, D.C., there are fully online schools available.

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Between 2011 and 2014, 100 percent of the children enrolled in Philadelphia-area cyber schools who took state achievement tests failed.

Despite all of the state- and federal-level support for these new education methods, all of this growth has happened without a similar amount of verification of the efficacy of virtual education. Over the past decade, we have heard more about the failure of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to make a memorable impact on the style in which college instruction is delivered than we have about the success or failure of virtual education at the K–12 level. Colleges might get all the attention for going online in part because big brand names like MIT and Harvard now offer virtual courses for free around the world, but K–12 online schooling has, over the past twenty years, become a major player in the educational arena. As a result of MOOCs and other developments overshadowing this conversation, little attention has been paid to where in the country this profitable switch has grown most rapidly: areas with high levels of racial and economic inequality fueled by segregation. In districts that are rural and poor, and overwhelmingly with Republican governors and legislatures, in states like Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, or in urban districts like Philadelphia, virtual schools are quickly becoming the format of choice despite politicians’ having little grasp on how cyber education impacts achievement for the most vulnerable students.

According to a 2012 Philadelphia Citypaper article, “Who’s Killing Philly Schools,” in a district comprised of 80 percent Black and Latino students, the vast majority of whom are below the poverty line, cyber schools accounted for fully educating more than a third of the children in 2014. The goal is for that number to rise to at least three-quarters, if not more, in subsequent years. However, between 2011 and 2014, 100 percent of the children enrolled in Philadelphia-area cyber schools who took state achievement tests failed. The record of Pennsylvania’s fourteen cyber charter schools was so abysmal that the state of Pennsylvania denied all applications to open new cyber charter schools in 2013 and 2014. Their poor track record has not derailed the long-term plan of increasing the numbers of students who take classes via virtual education, however.

Cyber education grew during the term of Pennsylvania’s Republican governor Tom Corbett. Elected in 2010 and serving only a four-year term, his policies exemplified the organized effort on the part of political and business leaders to spearhead the shift to online learning. His first step was taking funding away from “brick and mortar” schools. In his first full year in office, he cut funding to the Philadelphia School District by $198 million, a 20 percent cut. Then, in 2011, he reduced public school funding by another $900 million, or 10 percent. Those cuts, plus more the next year, meant that by 2013 thousands of teachers were laid off and almost 70 percent of Pennsylvania’s school districts increased their class size, 40 percent cut extracurricular activities, and 75 percent cut instruction. The impact of his educational leadership was devastating for schools and communities throughout the state, and districts targeted by Corbett’s cuts felt them intensely. Dozens of schools closed. Thousands of teachers and school support staff were laid off. Art and music became scarce, along with nurses and guidance counselors. School buildings became so unpleasant that virtual education almost seemed like a respite.

In one particularly telling real-world example from 2016 of how such cuts affected students in the “brick and mortar” district, high school junior Jameria Miller talks about why she starts every morning running through the school to get a good seat near the front of the room in her first-period Spanish class. It’s not because she is just excited about the class. It’s because the school is cold. As she explains, “The cold is definitely a distraction. We race to class to get the best blankets.” What she means is that because the classroom where she begins her day has uninsulated metal walls, Jameria’s teacher hands out blankets to the students on a first come, first served basis. It’s the only way for them to stay warm. Miller’s school in the William Penn District is situated in Philadelphia’s “inner-ring” suburbs and serves a student body that is majority Black and overwhelmingly impoverished. Though concentrating in the cold is hard enough, Miller says the hardest part of her daily ordeal is the knowledge that life isn’t like this for students in other districts. She means students in wealthier districts. “It’s never going to be fair, they’re always going to be a step ahead of us. They’ll have more money than us, and they’ll get better jobs than us, always.” She says she doesn’t believe that either funding or systemic school improvement will ever truly equalize: “What I’m about to say might not be very nice, but rich people aren’t going to want [funding fairness]. They want their kids to have better things so that their kids can get a jump start in life and be ahead of everyone else. And, as long as people feel that way, we all won’t be equal. We won’t receive equal education ever, because education is what gets you success.” Her district is not the only one in Pennsylvania so affected.

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The companies who run online and virtual schools are also consistently accused of financial impropriety.

Since 1998, Philadelphia schools—the largest city and school district in the state—have been run by the governor-appointed School Reform Commission. In the summer of 2013, in order to address a $350 million hole in its budget, the commission passed what was termed a “doomsday budget.” Thirty schools were closed that year. In 2014, Thomas Knudsen, chief recovery officer for the School Reform Commission, told a reporter writing a story for Salon that the commission wanted to “close 40 schools and an additional six every year thereafter until 2017.” At that point, he believed the district, which at its height had over 180 schools, would be down to 20 to 30, and those would be placed into “achievement networks” where public and private groups would compete to manage them. This news led the Salon reporter to describe what once was our nation’s tenth-largest school district as being in its “death throes.” The district wasn’t to be saved, or even managed, by the Reform Commission as much as dismantled.

Despite such severe money worries and their negative impact on “brick and mortar” schools, virtual educational sectors thrived during the same years. According to a 2011 New York Times article, five Pennsylvania cyber charters received $200 million in tax money in 2010–2011, and Agora Cyber Charter, which is run by the for-profit company K12, took in $31.6 million in 2013 alone from state taxpayers in Philadelphia. By 2015, cyber schools received over $60 million in per-student payments from the chronically starved and often bankrupt school districts. To make matters worse, the companies who run online and virtual schools are also consistently accused of financial impropriety. In 2011, the New York Times conducted a months-long investigation into virtual schools. By way of summing up its overall findings, the article begins by showing how, in the realm of education, what is good for business is not necessarily good for the students those businesses claim to educate:

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

The amount of money involved, as well as the potential profit, is significant.

One of the largest companies providing virtual education, Agora Schools, was on track to earn $72 million in 2011, a number it has bested each succeeding year from 2011 to 2014, when out of Agora’s $849 million in profit, $117 million came from its virtual schools division. And those profits are for just one company, in just one area of a crowded field of online education providers. In order to help build a market for their services, these companies often target children via huge advertising buys on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, as well as on teen sites such as MeetMe.com and VampireFreaks.com.

In addition to its seeming inability to properly educate students and the unsavory targeting of children with its product, it is worth noting that Agora’s parent company, K12 Inc., was founded by a man who had served federal time for financial improprieties. His name is Michael Milken. Milken not only came to symbolize 1980s-era Wall Street greed and excess by serving as the inspiration for the Michael Douglas character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street; he also spent almost two years in a federal penitentiary for securities fraud. Once released from prison, he joined forces with another junk bond dealer, Ron Packard, who specialized in mergers and acquisitions for Goldman Sachs in the 1980s. Together they invested $10 million into K12 Inc. and formed a company with the goal of profiting from the $600 billion public education “market.” They have been dogged by financial improprieties. In 2012, K12 settled a federal lawsuit for $6.8 million. The suit alleged its executives inflated stock prices by misleading investors with false student-performance claims. In the summer of 2016, the company agreed to pay $168.5 million to settle alleged violations of California’s false claims, false advertising, and unfair competition laws, though the company admitted no wrongdoing. No matter; by 2016 Milken had a net worth of around $2.5 billion, according to Forbes—almost all of that money from contracts with public schools.

Pennsylvania has the second-highest cyber charter enrollment (after Ohio), and it accounts for about 17 percent of the national cyber charter school population, which across the country numbers over 220,000 students. In terms of instruction, students usually take lessons at home, so the virtual school operators have no classrooms to maintain, staff to hire, or heating bills to pay. Teachers are paid less, and student-teacher ratios are massive, sometimes as high as fifty students for each teacher. But, despite the widespread belief in their affordability, in Pennsylvania the district pays cyber schools as much per child as it pays to educate students in brick-and-mortar schools. In 2016, most of Pennsylvania’s cyber schools had dismal results. According to the state’s School Performance Profile website, only three—21st Century, PA Cyber, and PA Virtual—had a score above 60. The state considers 60 and below to be substandard. None of the cyber schools scored higher than 70, which is the state’s minimum passing score for all schools, and some cyber schools in the study scored down in the 30s. Such schools are neither inexpensive nor effective, yet they continue to expand.

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 The undereducation of the poor and people of color is a business opportunity.

In addition to questions about how effective cyber schools are in terms of a return on investment for taxpayer dollars, an issue of particular concern is the sector’s emphasis on serving so-called high-risk students who don’t have the parental and other support structures that research shows are necessary to make the most of the model. Poor, rural, and urban districts are prime candidates, since cyber educators have explicitly stated that it is their business strategy to go after kids who—because it is believed that they do not have motivated parents—would demand the least from their educational experience. Students in foster care and Native Americans schooled on their tribal homelands are two categories of students targeted by virtual school providers in Florida.

Targeting the most economically vulnerable students ultimately yields cyber education businesses increased profits resulting from the segrenomics of apartheid schools. The undereducation of the poor and people of color is a business opportunity that generates great profit for businesses but provides little in the way of quality instruction.

Toward that end, it is important to take a few steps back and at least notice that, despite the near-universal enthusiasm for projects that give technology to educationally vulnerable poor children of color, computer-aided instruction, when not deployed in an informed, responsible manner, actually widens the gap between the financially and educationally privileged and everyone else. Nonetheless, over the past ten years, public school districts have invested millions of dollars in various types of online and computer-aided learning and instruction programs, and few are able to show the educational benefit of their expenditures for a majority of students. Those who benefit most are already well organized and highly motivated. Other students struggle and, according to researchers studying students in a variety of digital settings, might even lose academic ground.

Supporters of online learning say that all anyone needs in order to access a great education is a stable Internet connection, but only 35 percent of households earning less than $25,000 have broadband Internet access, compared with 94 percent of households with income in excess of $100,000. In addition, according to the 2010 Pew Report on Mobile Access, only half of Black homes have Internet connections at all, compared with almost 65 percent of white households. In its 2016 report on Internet usage, Pew related that a whopping 94 percent of Latinos used mobile phones to access the Internet, generally a much more expensive and less-than-ideal (if not altogether ineffectual) method for taking part in online education. In short, the explosion of this type of educational instruction, though on the rise, may leave wanting the very students who need public education while at the same time offering businesses providing Internet access an opportunity to reap significant rewards.

As but one example of how touting the benefits of cyber education goes hand in hand with profits for businesses, we need look no further than South Carolina. There, the growth of cyber education in the state got an advantageous boost in 2014 when the governor at the time, Nikki Haley, announced a new education budget and asked the state legislature for tens of millions of dollars to provide WiFi service to rural schoolchildren. It was a precursor to the expansion of virtual education. Once approved, the 2015 education budget provided “$29 million for improving bandwidth to school facilities, bolstering wireless connectivity within school walls, and furthering the push to ensure that every student has a computer or tablet.” These changes were enacted because, according to the press release announcing the allocations, “modernizing technology and improving bandwidth will give students greater access to educational content and will help improve critical computer skills their future employers will demand.” An additional $4 million was also provided for teacher technology training. Schools facing difficulties hiring could also offer courses in a “blended” setting, with students being taught online while sitting at a desk in their traditional school. Schools pay $3,500 for an entire classroom to take a virtual course—far less than the cost of a teacher. The allocation of those funds also set the stage for the aggressive expansion of online learning to a cohort of students who would benefit most from high-quality, in-person instruction.

The same year that Governor Haley released her technology-enhancing budget, the National Education Policy Center issued a 2015 report finding that, “despite the considerable enthusiasm for virtual education, there is little credible research to support virtual schools’ practices or to justify ongoing calls for ever greater expansion.” Though the authors concede that the available data are limited, which may make their findings less than definitive, “there is not a single positive sign from the empirical evidence presented here.” Nonetheless, Governor Haley and others like her insisted that this particular form of free-market public education would help the state’s children who were poor and without high-quality schools. She told the state’s citizens that an increase in cyber education was, in the language of school choice advocates, tantamount to “taking a stand against the idea that where you are born and raised should influence the quality of your education.”

* * *

These types of educational arrangements simply do not take place in districts that are wealthy.

Black and Latino children and their parents and communities have reason for concern about the rapid and unchecked growth in cyber education. It tends to impact them most. When Florida’s severe budget cuts in 2011 made it difficult for schools to meet class-size rules and left them too cash-strapped to hire more teachers, some schools in the Miami-Dade district required seven thousand of their students to take online classes in virtual labs with only noncertified teacher’s aides available to provide assistance. Students did not know of these new arrangements until they showed up for school one day, and parents were neither asked about nor informed of this change. Of the district’s roughly 344,000 students, 324,000 are Black or Latino. These types of educational arrangements simply do not take place in districts that are wealthy and have low numbers of students of color.

It is then surprising that, to a large extent, the success of the shift to digital learning has been aided by rhetoric that positions education as a basic right of citizenship, a civil rights mountain still in need of scaling. Nonetheless, to refer back to Stephanie Mencimer’s Mother Jones piece, “beneath the rhetoric, the online-education push is also part of a larger agenda that closely aligns with the GOP’s national strategy: It siphons money from public institutions into for-profit companies.” She continues to say that the tangible result of such efforts is to undercut “public employees, their unions, and the Democratic base. In the guise of a technocratic policy initiative, it delivers a political trifecta—and a big windfall for Bush’s corporate backers.” What it rarely delivers is a quality education, never mind one that comes close to the sort found in the wealthy, white school districts to which the Bush and DeVos families would send their own children.

In many virtual school settings, students rarely even hear or see their teachers. At some cyber charter schools, students need only sign in to the school website and/or communicate with a teacher once every three days to prove they’re actually attending. In Wisconsin, a state legislative audit found that 16 percent of the virtual teachers surveyed had contact with individual students as little as three times a month. Other schools in the state outsource duties such as paper grading to contractors in India, making it difficult for the teachers to meaningfully explain to students the basis for the grades they received. While virtual education is a growth industry in Wisconsin, it is important to note that the state has the largest achievement gap between Black and white students in the country and ranks last in reading-comprehension tests among Black fourth graders. Milwaukee, one of the largest cities in the state and home to the highest number of Black students, is the biggest contributor to Wisconsin’s racial achievement gap. Four out of five Black children in Milwaukee live in poverty.

While much of the sector’s growth can be seen as being tied to states with Republican governors and legislatures, it was greatly aided in 2013 by the Obama administration when it launched the ConnectED Initiative, a five-year plan to connect nearly all U.S. students to high-speed wireless systems in their schools and libraries, earmark funds to train teachers to incorporate digital technology and devices into their lesson plans, and “unleash private sector innovation” in order make it easier for educational technology providers to offer personalized educational software, online education opportunities, and online textbooks to entire school districts. If such policies and practices actually worked to educate students who are undereducated, that might not be cause for concern. However, given all of the information that we have, we must conclude that they do not. It is then hard to understand why there is such a push to expand them. At the very least, it would make sense to also expand policies that would make it possible for schoolchildren who attend schools that lack heating in the winter to sit comfortably in their classrooms without resorting to huddling under a blanket.

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Copyright © 2017 by Noliwe Rooks. This excerpt originally appeared in Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, published by The New Press, and is used here with permission.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Longreads | June 2017 | 2,900 words ( 12 minutes)

In 1962, teenager George F. Jackson wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy with an appeal: “I am a thirteen-year-old colored boy and I like to spell. Do you think you could help me and get the Lynchburg bee opened to all children?”

The long road to the National Spelling Bee has always begun with local contests, often sponsored by a local newspaper. Nine publications, organized by the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, banded together in 1925 to create the first National Bee in Washington, D.C.

Decades later, George Jackson was protesting the policies of the local newspaper that sponsored the Lynchburg, Virginia contest, which excluded black students from participating in the official local competition — the necessary step that might send a lucky, word-loving Lynchburg child to nationals. There was more at stake than a coveted all-expenses-paid trip to the capital, an expensive set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and a $1,000 cash prize. For local and national civil rights activists, keeping black children from the spoils of spelling fame was an extension of Jim Crow educational policies that should have ended, in theory, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

While the Warren Court decided in 1954 that “separate but equal” would no longer be the law of the land, there were still “Negro” schools and white schools educating children across the South less than a decade later. A patchwork of local responses met the desegregation orders that followed the Supreme Court ruling, including deliberate foot-dragging, some real confusion about how to undo what years of white supremacy had wrought in the nation’s schools, and full-throated defiance to educational equity.

In the summer of 1959, when public schools in Prince Edward County — not far from Lynchburg — were ordered to integrate, the local government decided to close their schools instead of integrating them. (They remained closed for more than three years.) The Lynchburg public school system, which educated five thousand white students and a thousand black students, slowly but steadily contemplated its own integration. Lynchburg had been Virginia’s capital for part of the Civil War, and some of the city’s boosters continued to fight Reconstruction-era battles over memory and public space, bragging the city had evaded Union capture during the “War Between the States.” In 1960, six years after the Supreme Court decision, the city finally began to consider concrete plans to integrate—one proposal suggested taking it incrementally, one grade level at a time, until black and white seniors were in high school together.

A year before the city opened the doors of E.C. Glass High School to black students, the policy of the spelling-bee sponsor, the Lynchburg News, threatened to roil an already fraught racial climate. The newspaper ducked the federal mandate for fairness by cloaking racism as a private business matter, arguing for “tradition.” Lynchburg’s spelling bee controversy was past, present, and prologue rolled into a single, contentious conflict. It pointed back to Jim Crow and demonstrated the small ways that segregation could still thrive, even after it had been ruled unconstitutional by the nation’s highest court.

***

The Lynchburg spelling bee’s separate and unequal practices came to light through a timely clerical error. Just before Christmas 1961, principals and teachers of fifth through eighth grade students in black schools received a document that outlined the rules for the Lynchburg spelling bee. After the holiday, when school reconvened, the document was retracted. “Spelling test materials were distributed to Negro schools through the error of a new secretary in the office of a city school supervisor … Negro participation is not expected.” A green employee may not have known the lay of the land when it came to spelling bee policy, but Lynchburg’s black educators, students, and families were surely aware the courteous un-invitation was a statement that the local spelling bee that had served whites only since the 1940s would continue to do so.

Lynchburg NAACP President W.T. Johnson sent a letter to the bee’s national sponsor, the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, laying out the facts and closing with a one-two punch. Of course, Johnson demurred, the Lynchburg branch of the civil rights organization did not “want to believe that the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance would wish to become involved in a segregated Spelling Contest … we are certain that holding the finals of a Jim Crow contest in Washington would be courting disaster.” Understanding the power of public shaming and building off the Brown v. Board of Education victory — which had marshaled evidence that segregation was harmful to black children — Johnson followed with the explicit threat of “possible legal action and publicity in Washington and elsewhere.”

The NAACP’s team of lawyers and nationwide army of activists were not to be trifled with. Since its founding in 1909, the group had protested the release of Birth of a Nation, blocked a Supreme Court nomination, pressured President Harry Truman to ban discrimination in federal employment, and launched dozens of legal challenges to the many-headed hydra of segregation. They would picket on street corners and petition in courtrooms. The Scripps alliance, one of the nation’s powerhouse publishers, worked to quell the damage for their premier event, but its response varied from no-nonsense to irritated. 

Responding to the NAACP, National Spelling Bee Director James Wagner fired back that “some of the statements indicate you are being misled, or are ignoring the facts insofar as the conduct of the National Spelling Bee … a program that has enjoyed the respect of the public and educators alike since 1925.” He explained that each participating newspaper “determines its own rules and procedures, and otherwise operates completely independently.” But Wagner refused to identify all newspaper sponsors —including 50 that weren’t Scripps newspapers — and said the only rules regarding the spellers themselves was that they had to be of appropriate age and grade. Wagner clarified the national contest’s nondiscrimination policy. He noted that several black students had competed in the national bee in recent years and had performed well.

The National Spelling Bee — at least the finals in Washington — wasn’t formally segregated, and hadn’t been so “long before the Supreme Court decision regarding segregation.” MacNolia Cox, a 13-year-old from Akron, Ohio, is believed to be the first black child to advance to the finals in 1936. According to poet A. Van Jordan, who wrote a book about MacNolia partly based on her mother’s journals, the straight-A student memorized 10,000 words in preparation. Traveling from Ohio, Cox had to board a segregated train to Washington, D.C. She wasn’t lodged with other participants, and when MacNolia arrived at the bee, she was sent to a separate table. During the contest, when she continued to spell words correctly and advanced to the final rounds, she was given a word that wasn’t on the official list: “nemesis.” The young Akron girl who wanted to be a doctor ended her spelling bee run in defeat. MacNolia went on to work as a domestic, like so many African-American women of her time.

The black and white competitors of the 1960s National Spelling Bee stayed in the same hotel — though it’s unclear if they shared rooms — boarded sightseeing buses together, and broke bread together at banquets during a time when Americans had recently watched white Southerners mob the interracial Freedom Rides with vile heckling and unrepentant violence. The complaints against the Lynchburg bee came a few short years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated that public spaces such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters had to open their doors to African-American sleepers, diners, and consumers.

By contrast, the National Spelling Bee appeared to be a feel-good story of meritocracy and sportsmanship, a contest that was unafraid of “social amalgamation.” In the minds of perpetually sex- and race-obsessed minds of some whites, sporadic interracial contact could trigger “social equality,” which meant sex, interracial marriage, the inevitable arrival of biracial children, and nothing less than the catastrophic decline of white civilization. Because who knew what one chance encounter dealing with a black person on an equal playing field could do?

Even as the National Spelling Bee promoted itself as a bastion of progressivism, its rules of “each contest for itself” sounded like a more polite translation of the argument for states rights that retained local (read: white) control. While the National Spelling Bee had an open-door policy, local school systems and newspaper sponsors governed exactly which students would get a crack at the “big dance” in Washington.

Indeed, when national NAACP officials investigated how many of the participating sponsors discriminated against black students, they found that the Memphis Press-Scimitar held an annual Shelby County Negro Spelling at Booker T. Washington High School, but barred black participants from the regional qualifier, the pipeline to the Washington finals. The editor of the Tennessee newspaper promised verbally it would “take steps.” (“Whatever that means,” wrote an NAACP official in a February 1962 memo.)

The Memphis approach of sponsoring separate, segregated contests was echoed across dozens of cities, where black spelling contests had been established decades earlier. In 1905, Baltimore community members organized a spelling bee because African-American students weren’t allowed to take part in the white-only competition. The mayor showed up to the festivities and a black businessman made sure that the top prize was an exact replica of the trophy awarded in the white competition. (Similarly, in Birmingham, Alabama, black insurance broker and hotelier A.G. Gaston filled the void by personally bankrolling a statewide Black spelling bee beginning in 1954.) By all accounts, these segregated black-only bees appear to not have been eligible as qualifiers for to the national bee. But that didn’t stop problems when white Southern students traveled to Northern bees where they encountered black students who sometimes outspelled them.

In 1908, readers of New Orleans’ largest newspaper, the Picayune, were apoplectic when a spelling delegation traveled to a National Education Association bee in Cleveland, Ohio. When the Louisiana spellers came in third behind Marie Bolden, a 13-year-old black girl, the Picayune’s pundits suggested the New Orleans competitors had been so distracted by the “dusky maid” that she was able to best them by writing out 400 words correctly and spelling another 100 orally. Before the contest, Louisiana school superintendent Warren Easton consulted with a handful of school board members. His question: What should he do if his students were faced with competing against black students in the Northern city? The reply from a school board member: “Knock the nigger out.”

The fallout from the spellers’ defeat by a young black Ohioan continued in vitriolic letters to the editor, some of them strident cries that the superintendent should be fired for putting white students in the inappropriate position of competing with black students. The flap revealed white Southerners’ deep commitment to the hard work of maintaining white supremacy. It exposed, in stark terms, the danger of interracial spelling bees: A mundane contest that happened in schools everywhere, the spelling bee was a merit test that could provide evidence that African-Americans’ memories and intellectual prowess rivaled, or even exceeded, the smarts of their white neighbors.

“Certainly in the days following the National Spelling Contest, the race problem was in evidence, if it ever was, in New Orleans and the South!” wrote a New Orleans clergyman about the fracas over the spellers’ brush with Marie Bolden. “Did it show itself, then as a problem of Negro crime, or brutality, or laziness? Assuredly not! Of the Negro’s personal repulsiveness? By no means! There is no evidence of Negro criminality, or brutality, or laziness, in the Negro child’s victory. … The ‘intense feeling’ can be explained on one ground only: the Negro girl’s victory was an affront to the tradition of Negro inferiority.”

With its notion of meritocracy, the spelling bee was innocuous and purposeful — clean educational fun for all. But it also suggested that black Americans could be “improved” by educational opportunity — and sometimes outpace whites along the way. When 12-year old Gloria Lockerman, described by Jet as a “fat-cheeked, blasé little girl from Baltimore” and “television’s million-dollar baby,” appeared on The $64,000 Question game show four times in 1955, she wowed audiences by spelling a tongue-twisting sentence —“The belligerent astigmatic anthropologist annihilated innumerable chrysanthemums”— and won $16,000 for her college education. A pickle company gave her a lifetime supply of her favorite treat, and she made the rounds on TV variety and talk shows. In a later moment of racist candor, one of the show’s writers described her as “Cinderella in blackface.”

A few years later, allegations surfaced that the $64 ,000 Question was rigged and that the youthful spellers (not just Gloria) who delighted TV viewers were given a word list and coached. An English professor from Northwestern who wrote for the show explained he would only ask Lockerman words she could spell, or that were seemly. “We discarded words like ‘nephrectomy,’ for instance, because it wouldn’t do to have a little girl talk about a kidney operation. Similarly we wouldn’t use a world like ‘niggardly’ because some viewers might think it had something to do with ‘nigger.’” Gloria’s victory, her detractors suggested, was a fraud, though show producers conceded she was an exceptional speller, coached or not. During the investigation, Gloria was a 16-year-old college freshman at Morgan State University. When media sought her out on campus, she ran from a journalist, screaming, “I’m not saying a word!” and reportedly had to be quieted with sedatives.

What a hard, heavy weight for black children to bear, to be the person who literally spelled trouble for white supremacy.

***

Black leaders, educators, and activists valued the spelling bee as proof positive their children were just as capable and gifted as white pupils. National magazines like Jet and the NAACP’s Crisis continually shared celebratory notes of black children’s achievements, pointing out that middle-class African-American youth could play piano sonatas, recite Latin oratory, and spell as well as anyone else.

Months after the NAACP began agitating for equity in the qualifying rounds to the national bee, Jocelyn Lee, a 12-year-old seventh grader at Tulsa’s Marian Anderson High, became the first black winner in the Oklahoma City bee’s 25-year history. In 1965, the April issue of Jet showed 15-year-old Clorrine Jones, wearing a smile, a glistening beehive, a checked jumper, and a banner—the winner of Memphis’ first integrated spelling bee, three years after NAACP officials had blown the whistle on the segregated local contests. She won in the last round with the word “campanile.”

Adolescent spelling bee champions like Lee and Jones were pioneers of desegregation, even if they never attended truly integrated schools. They were descendants of enslaved people for whom literacy was forbidden, and whose educational institutions were built from the ground up with community support. It was no coincidence that one of writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s most popular poems was “The Spellin’ Bee” (1913). Written in dialect, the poem follows the drama of a black church spelling bee, complete with flirting, finery, and a narrator who throws the contest so his sweetheart can win. There are lawyers, the shabbily dressed, a pastor whose “speeches were too long fur toleration,” farmer’s daughters, and the everyday laborer like Ole Hiram who was disqualified for bungling the word “charity.” But all were united in the quest for community, and a coveted spelling book:

The master rose an’ briefly said: “Good friends, dear brother Crawford,
To spur the pupils’ minds along, a little prize has offered.
To him who spells the best to–night—or ’t may be ‘her’—no tellin’—
He offers ez a jest reward, this precious work on spellin’.”
A little blue–backed spellin’–book with fancy scarlet trimmin’;
We boys devoured it with our eyes—so did the girls an’ women.
He held it up where all could see, then on the table set it,
An’ ev’ry speller in the house felt mortal bound to get it.

The vision of an entire town turning out in pursuit of a spelling book is quite a different picture of community that that described in the 2006 film Akeelah and Bee, the fictional story of an 11-year-old girl whose family and friends largely don’t understand her quest for learning. This is a modern misunderstanding — historically, African-Americans have understood the spelling bee as a contested racial space, where mastering a word list was a feat of skill, motivation, and racial resistance through direct competition with one’s “social betters.” If black spellers weren’t actually sparring with white rivals, each word memorized—the letters, language of origin, possible meanings—was another symbolic brick building a black community hungry for the book-learning denied to them in slavery and segregation.

While George Jackson’s letter to President Kennedy was published in newspaper articles across the country, George remained shut out of the Lynchburg bee. When a New York Times reporter called the school’s chief administrator to cover the controversy, the journalist asked the official to spell “apartheid” — a request denied after a long pause. The school system similarly refused to budge on having an open, integrated spelling bee. Because everybody knows that spelling can be dangerous.

***

Dr. Cynthia R. Greenlee is a historian who specializes in African-American and Southern history. She is also senior editor at Rewire. You can find more of her work at Echoing Ida and follow her on Twitter @CynthiaGreenlee.

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Longreads | June 2017 | 2,900 words ( 12 minutes)

In 1962, teenager George F. Jackson wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy with an appeal: “I am a thirteen-year-old colored boy and I like to spell. Do you think you could help me and get the Lynchburg bee opened to all children?”

The long road to the National Spelling Bee has always begun with local contests, often sponsored by a local newspaper. Nine publications, organized by the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, banded together in 1925 to create the first National Bee in Washington, D.C.

Decades later, George Jackson was protesting the policies of the local newspaper that sponsored the Lynchburg, Virginia contest, which excluded black students from participating in the official local competition — the necessary step that might send a lucky, word-loving Lynchburg child to nationals. There was more at stake than a coveted all-expenses-paid trip to the capital, an expensive set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and a $1,000 cash prize. For local and national civil rights activists, keeping black children from the spoils of spelling fame was an extension of Jim Crow educational policies that should have ended, in theory, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

While the Warren Court decided in 1954 that “separate but equal” would no longer be the law of the land, there were still “Negro” schools and white schools educating children across the South less than a decade later. A patchwork of local responses met the desegregation orders that followed the Supreme Court ruling, including deliberate foot-dragging, some real confusion about how to undo what years of white supremacy had wrought in the nation’s schools, and full-throated defiance to educational equity.

In the summer of 1959, when public schools in Prince Edward County — not far from Lynchburg — were ordered to integrate, the local government decided to close their schools instead of integrating them. (They remained closed for more than three years.) The Lynchburg public school system, which educated five thousand white students and a thousand black students, slowly but steadily contemplated its own integration. Lynchburg had been Virginia’s capital for part of the Civil War, and some of the city’s boosters continued to fight Reconstruction-era battles over memory and public space, bragging the city had evaded Union capture during the “War Between the States.” In 1960, six years after the Supreme Court decision, the city finally began to consider concrete plans to integrate—one proposal suggested taking it incrementally, one grade level at a time, until black and white seniors were in high school together.

A year before the city opened the doors of E.C. Glass High School to black students, the policy of the spelling-bee sponsor, the Lynchburg News, threatened to roil an already fraught racial climate. The newspaper ducked the federal mandate for fairness by cloaking racism as a private business matter, arguing for “tradition.” Lynchburg’s spelling bee controversy was past, present, and prologue rolled into a single, contentious conflict. It pointed back to Jim Crow and demonstrated the small ways that segregation could still thrive, even after it had been ruled unconstitutional by the nation’s highest court.

***

The Lynchburg spelling bee’s separate and unequal practices came to light through a timely clerical error. Just before Christmas 1961, principals and teachers of fifth through eighth grade students in black schools received a document that outlined the rules for the Lynchburg spelling bee. After the holiday, when school reconvened, the document was retracted. “Spelling test materials were distributed to Negro schools through the error of a new secretary in the office of a city school supervisor … Negro participation is not expected.” A green employee may not have known the lay of the land when it came to spelling bee policy, but Lynchburg’s black educators, students, and families were surely aware the courteous un-invitation was a statement that the local spelling bee that had served whites only since the 1940s would continue to do so.

Lynchburg NAACP President W.T. Johnson sent a letter to the bee’s national sponsor, the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, laying out the facts and closing with a one-two punch. Of course, Johnson demurred, the Lynchburg branch of the civil rights organization did not “want to believe that the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance would wish to become involved in a segregated Spelling Contest … we are certain that holding the finals of a Jim Crow contest in Washington would be courting disaster.” Understanding the power of public shaming and building off the Brown v. Board of Education victory — which had marshaled evidence that segregation was harmful to black children — Johnson followed with the explicit threat of “possible legal action and publicity in Washington and elsewhere.”

The NAACP’s team of lawyers and nationwide army of activists were not to be trifled with. Since its founding in 1909, the group had protested the release of Birth of a Nation, blocked a Supreme Court nomination, pressured President Harry Truman to ban discrimination in federal employment, and launched dozens of legal challenges to the many-headed hydra of segregation. They would picket on street corners and petition in courtrooms. The Scripps alliance, one of the nation’s powerhouse publishers, worked to quell the damage for their premier event, but its response varied from no-nonsense to irritated. 

Responding to the NAACP, National Spelling Bee Director James Wagner fired back that “some of the statements indicate you are being misled, or are ignoring the facts insofar as the conduct of the National Spelling Bee … a program that has enjoyed the respect of the public and educators alike since 1925.” He explained that each participating newspaper “determines its own rules and procedures, and otherwise operates completely independently.” But Wagner refused to identify all newspaper sponsors —including 50 that weren’t Scripps newspapers — and said the only rules regarding the spellers themselves was that they had to be of appropriate age and grade. Wagner clarified the national contest’s nondiscrimination policy. He noted that several black students had competed in the national bee in recent years and had performed well.

The National Spelling Bee — at least the finals in Washington — wasn’t formally segregated, and hadn’t been so “long before the Supreme Court decision regarding segregation.” MacNolia Cox, a 13-year-old from Akron, Ohio, is believed to be the first black child to advance to the finals in 1936. According to poet A. Van Jordan, who wrote a book about MacNolia partly based on her mother’s journals, the straight-A student memorized 10,000 words in preparation. Traveling from Ohio, Cox had to board a segregated train to Washington, D.C. She wasn’t lodged with other participants, and when MacNolia arrived at the bee, she was sent to a separate table. During the contest, when she continued to spell words correctly and advanced to the final rounds, she was given a word that wasn’t on the official list: “nemesis.” The young Akron girl who wanted to be a doctor ended her spelling bee run in defeat. MacNolia went on to work as a domestic, like so many African-American women of her time.

The black and white competitors of the 1960s National Spelling Bee stayed in the same hotel — though it’s unclear if they shared rooms — boarded sightseeing buses together, and broke bread together at banquets during a time when Americans had recently watched white Southerners mob the interracial Freedom Rides with vile heckling and unrepentant violence. The complaints against the Lynchburg bee came a few short years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated that public spaces such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters had to open their doors to African-American sleepers, diners, and consumers.

By contrast, the National Spelling Bee appeared to be a feel-good story of meritocracy and sportsmanship, a contest that was unafraid of “social amalgamation.” In the minds of perpetually sex- and race-obsessed minds of some whites, sporadic interracial contact could trigger “social equality,” which meant sex, interracial marriage, the inevitable arrival of biracial children, and nothing less than the catastrophic decline of white civilization. Because who knew what one chance encounter dealing with a black person on an equal playing field could do?

Even as the National Spelling Bee promoted itself as a bastion of progressivism, its rules of “each contest for itself” sounded like a more polite translation of the argument for states rights that retained local (read: white) control. While the National Spelling Bee had an open-door policy, local school systems and newspaper sponsors governed exactly which students would get a crack at the “big dance” in Washington.

Indeed, when national NAACP officials investigated how many of the participating sponsors discriminated against black students, they found that the Memphis Press-Scimitar held an annual Shelby County Negro Spelling at Booker T. Washington High School, but barred black participants from the regional qualifier, the pipeline to the Washington finals. The editor of the Tennessee newspaper promised verbally it would “take steps.” (“Whatever that means,” wrote an NAACP official in a February 1962 memo.)

The Memphis approach of sponsoring separate, segregated contests was echoed across dozens of cities, where black spelling contests had been established decades earlier. In 1905, Baltimore community members organized a spelling bee because African-American students weren’t allowed to take part in the white-only competition. The mayor showed up to the festivities and a black businessman made sure that the top prize was an exact replica of the trophy awarded in the white competition. (Similarly, in Birmingham, Alabama, black insurance broker and hotelier A.G. Gaston filled the void by personally bankrolling a statewide Black spelling bee beginning in 1954.) By all accounts, these segregated black-only bees appear to not have been eligible as qualifiers for to the national bee. But that didn’t stop problems when white Southern students traveled to Northern bees where they encountered black students who sometimes outspelled them.

In 1908, readers of New Orleans’ largest newspaper, the Picayune, were apoplectic when a spelling delegation traveled to a National Education Association bee in Cleveland, Ohio. When the Louisiana spellers came in third behind Marie Bolden, a 13-year-old black girl, the Picayune’s pundits suggested the New Orleans competitors had been so distracted by the “dusky maid” that she was able to best them by writing out 400 words correctly and spelling another 100 orally. Before the contest, Louisiana school superintendent Warren Easton consulted with a handful of school board members. His question: What should he do if his students were faced with competing against black students in the Northern city? The reply from a school board member: “Knock the nigger out.”

The fallout from the spellers’ defeat by a young black Ohioan continued in vitriolic letters to the editor, some of them strident cries that the superintendent should be fired for putting white students in the inappropriate position of competing with black students. The flap revealed white Southerners’ deep commitment to the hard work of maintaining white supremacy. It exposed, in stark terms, the danger of interracial spelling bees: A mundane contest that happened in schools everywhere, the spelling bee was a merit test that could provide evidence that African-Americans’ memories and intellectual prowess rivaled, or even exceeded, the smarts of their white neighbors.

“Certainly in the days following the National Spelling Contest, the race problem was in evidence, if it ever was, in New Orleans and the South!” wrote a New Orleans clergyman about the fracas over the spellers’ brush with Marie Bolden. “Did it show itself, then as a problem of Negro crime, or brutality, or laziness? Assuredly not! Of the Negro’s personal repulsiveness? By no means! There is no evidence of Negro criminality, or brutality, or laziness, in the Negro child’s victory. … The ‘intense feeling’ can be explained on one ground only: the Negro girl’s victory was an affront to the tradition of Negro inferiority.”

With its notion of meritocracy, the spelling bee was innocuous and purposeful — clean educational fun for all. But it also suggested that black Americans could be “improved” by educational opportunity — and sometimes outpace whites along the way. When 12-year old Gloria Lockerman, described by Jet as a “fat-cheeked, blasé little girl from Baltimore” and “television’s million-dollar baby,” appeared on The $64,000 Question game show four times in 1955, she wowed audiences by spelling a tongue-twisting sentence —“The belligerent astigmatic anthropologist annihilated innumerable chrysanthemums”— and won $16,000 for her college education. A pickle company gave her a lifetime supply of her favorite treat, and she made the rounds on TV variety and talk shows. In a later moment of racist candor, one of the show’s writers described her as “Cinderella in blackface.”

A few years later, allegations surfaced that the $64 ,000 Question was rigged and that the youthful spellers (not just Gloria) who delighted TV viewers were given a word list and coached. An English professor from Northwestern who wrote for the show explained he would only ask Lockerman words she could spell, or that were seemly. “We discarded words like ‘nephrectomy,’ for instance, because it wouldn’t do to have a little girl talk about a kidney operation. Similarly we wouldn’t use a world like ‘niggardly’ because some viewers might think it had something to do with ‘nigger.’” Gloria’s victory, her detractors suggested, was a fraud, though show producers conceded she was an exceptional speller, coached or not. During the investigation, Gloria was a 16-year-old college freshman at Morgan State University. When media sought her out on campus, she ran from a journalist, screaming, “I’m not saying a word!” and reportedly had to be quieted with sedatives.

What a hard, heavy weight for black children to bear, to be the person who literally spelled trouble for white supremacy.

***

Black leaders, educators, and activists valued the spelling bee as proof positive their children were just as capable and gifted as white pupils. National magazines like Jet and the NAACP’s Crisis continually shared celebratory notes of black children’s achievements, pointing out that middle-class African-American youth could play piano sonatas, recite Latin oratory, and spell as well as anyone else.

Months after the NAACP began agitating for equity in the qualifying rounds to the national bee, Jocelyn Lee, a 12-year-old seventh grader at Tulsa’s Marian Anderson High, became the first black winner in the Oklahoma City bee’s 25-year history. In 1965, the April issue of Jet showed 15-year-old Clorrine Jones, wearing a smile, a glistening beehive, a checked jumper, and a banner—the winner of Memphis’ first integrated spelling bee, three years after NAACP officials had blown the whistle on the segregated local contests. She won in the last round with the word “campanile.”

Adolescent spelling bee champions like Lee and Jones were pioneers of desegregation, even if they never attended truly integrated schools. They were descendants of enslaved people for whom literacy was forbidden, and whose educational institutions were built from the ground up with community support. It was no coincidence that one of writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s most popular poems was “The Spellin’ Bee” (1913). Written in dialect, the poem follows the drama of a black church spelling bee, complete with flirting, finery, and a narrator who throws the contest so his sweetheart can win. There are lawyers, the shabbily dressed, a pastor whose “speeches were too long fur toleration,” farmer’s daughters, and the everyday laborer like Ole Hiram who was disqualified for bungling the word “charity.” But all were united in the quest for community, and a coveted spelling book:

The master rose an’ briefly said: “Good friends, dear brother Crawford,
To spur the pupils’ minds along, a little prize has offered.
To him who spells the best to–night—or ’t may be ‘her’—no tellin’—
He offers ez a jest reward, this precious work on spellin’.”
A little blue–backed spellin’–book with fancy scarlet trimmin’;
We boys devoured it with our eyes—so did the girls an’ women.
He held it up where all could see, then on the table set it,
An’ ev’ry speller in the house felt mortal bound to get it.

The vision of an entire town turning out in pursuit of a spelling book is quite a different picture of community that that described in the 2006 film Akeelah and Bee, the fictional story of an 11-year-old girl whose family and friends largely don’t understand her quest for learning. This is a modern misunderstanding — historically, African-Americans have understood the spelling bee as a contested racial space, where mastering a word list was a feat of skill, motivation, and racial resistance through direct competition with one’s “social betters.” If black spellers weren’t actually sparring with white rivals, each word memorized—the letters, language of origin, possible meanings—was another symbolic brick building a black community hungry for the book-learning denied to them in slavery and segregation.

While George Jackson’s letter to President Kennedy was published in newspaper articles across the country, George remained shut out of the Lynchburg bee. When a New York Times reporter called the school’s chief administrator to cover the controversy, the journalist asked the official to spell “apartheid” — a request denied after a long pause. The school system similarly refused to budge on having an open, integrated spelling bee. Because everybody knows that spelling can be dangerous.

***

Dr. Cynthia R. Greenlee is a historian who specializes in African-American and Southern history. She is also senior editor at Rewire. You can find more of her work at Echoing Ida and follow her on Twitter @CynthiaGreenlee.

The video above is an incredibly moving piece by The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, filmed at our Longreads Story Night in New York City. Our thanks to Hannah-Jones, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, and all of our special guests for an amazing night. We’ll share more clips from Story Night soon, and you can see all of our videos on our YouTube page or Facebook.