Howard Fuller offered a passionate plea Wednesday to give families living in poverty the choice of where to send their children to school.
“Why are we afraid to free the people?” Fuller asked the audience of about 60 people gathered at the Shaw Center for the Arts.
Fuller is a former Milwaukee public school superintendent and is now a professor at Marquette University. For years he has been a leading proponent of school choice. He is the chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.
Fuller is the first of a handful of speakers being brought to the capital city by Advance Baton Rouge in the coming weeks.
Kristy Hebert, executive director of Advance Baton Rouge, said she hopes the talks will spark conversation throughout the Baton Rouge region about what education should look like in this area.
Another goal is to set the stage for a planned leadership academy Advance Baton Rouge is forming to help train future principals and school leaders, Hebert said.
“It is a community conversation and we are embracing all of your thoughts and conversations,” she said.
Fuller painted a grim picture of education in many communities today.
“People always ask me, ‘Why are you so mad? Why are you such an angry Negro?’” he said. “I’m mad because on average 17-year-old black and brown teenagers do math as well as a 13-year-old white child.”
Even as this achievement gap, as measured by national standardized tests, persists, Fuller cannot understand why it does not arouse the same passion as previous civil rights struggles for racial quality.
“What I’m really mad at is we ain’t mad,” Fuller said. “What we have is a bunch of docile, conciliating black people who should be in the streets every day.
“Here are we in 2007, we can sit down at the lunch counter, but our kids can’t read the menu,” he said.
To change things for the better, Fuller offered many suggestions. These include, among other things, more charter schools, different school configurations, outside partnerships, private for-profit schools and new uses of technology.
But the suggestions also included publicly funded school vouchers and much of Fuller’s talk focused on vouchers.
Milwaukee started the first publicly funded school voucher program in the early 1990s and Fuller sits on the board of a small Christian school filled with students receiving vouchers.
Fuller carefully qualified what he means by vouchers. He supports “mean-tested” vouchers where the poorest children get government money, not universal vouchers. He likened it to Pell Grants available to college students.
“I don’t believe we ought to give money to people who got money,” he said.
Vouchers are not popular in much of the black community, a community where many people are employed by public schools, he said.
“I have accepted that I’ve lost people who I considered very good friends on this issue,” Fuller said.
Fuller dismissed the idea that poor people will not know how to choose good schools. He said rich people make bad choices too.
“People with money make good decisions and bad decisions,” he said. “They just can cover their bad decisions.”
Fuller also talked at length about meeting today’s teenagers on their level. He said he advocates no particular curriculum or approach, saying many approaches can work.
“If you don’t love people, you can’t understand them, if you don’t understand them you can’t reach them, and if you can’t reach them, you can’t teach them,” he said.
Vouchers, he admitted, are not a panacea. He said fixing schools — he called them “learning spaces” — will take a variety of initiatives, including economic and social remedies outside the school grounds. He said he measures improvement in children’s lives.
“I get up every day saying I’m trying to improve the whole system,” he said, “but as I do it, I have a moral responsibility to save every child that I can.”