Ms. DeVos's Fake History About School Choice - By The NYT Editorial Board

[DonViejo]

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos offered a positively Orwellian explanation Monday of why historically black colleges and universities were created in the United States. Incredibly, she suggested that they were “real pioneers” in the school-choice movement and “started from the fact that there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education.”

The Education Department’s own website — on a page titled “Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Higher Education Desegregation” — offers a more accurate history. These colleges, it shows, were created, beginning in the 19th century, as a direct response to rigid racial segregation when the doors of white colleges were typically closed to African-Americans.

Rather than integrate colleges, the Southern and border states established parallel, Jim Crow systems in which black college students were typically confined to segregated campuses handicapped by meager budgets and inferior libraries and facilities. Litigation over the funding equity issue continues to this day.

Ms. DeVos’s insulting distortion of history, which she tried to pull back after furious criticism, grows out of her obsession with market-driven school policies, including the idea of a publicly funded voucher program that public school students could use to pay for private education.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/opinion/ms-devoss-fake-history-about-school-choice.html?emc=edit_th_20170301&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284

[Solly Mack]

1. And, once schools were desegregated, white people would start inexpensive private

schools to keep their white children from attending public schools with black children.

And - this is the actual birth of "school choice" - those all white segregation academies demanded taxpayer vouchers to pay their tuition.

Same thing DeVos supports now. Taking money away from public schools to fund vouchers in the name of "school choice".

So, school choice began as a racist response to school desegregation. White people not wanting their kids to attend public schools with black students.

Betsy DeVos told a huge lie about HBCU and school choice and she knows she lied because she knows the racist history of school choice in America, but pretends she doesn't. Which makes her statement that much more egregious.


Segregation Academies and Other History Stuff by me

And, to add, because my research was used by a school district in New Jersey to fight against vouchers and taking public school funds away from public schools.

In Southern Towns, 'Segregation Academies' Are Still Going Strong