DV Journal

For an alternate point of view, see: “Point: Parents Must End the Teachers Unions’ Stranglehold on Education”

In 1958, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education order to integrate American schools, the Texas legislature debated a plan that would offer vouchers to parents who opposed the idea that their children would learn in diverse racial settings. Echoing similar efforts throughout the U.S. South, the Texas bill left no ambiguity about the voucher’s purpose. “Such aid,” the legislation read, “should be given only upon affidavit that the child was being withdrawn from the public schools due to the parents’ dislike of integration.”

That voucher bill failed, and 67 years later—70 years this month after the Brown decision itself—Texas still has yet to pass a voucher system. But I think about this piece of legislation every time I hear the claim, from Donald Trump on down, that vouchers and related school choice bills are “the civil rights issue of our time.”

No. They are not.

In the early days of modern voucher systems that use taxpayer funds for private K-12 tuition—1990 through roughly 2010—vouchers were largely limited to students in a handful of urban settings like Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. That fact, combined with firm albeit slowly lifting caps on income for participants, meant that vouchers went disproportionately to children of color.

A handful of studies through 2002 showed those students realized some academic gains as a result. Over the past decade, however, as vouchers expanded into statewide systems in places like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and again in Washington, D.C., those results became negative—catastrophically so. How bad? In Louisiana, for example, students who used a voucher to transfer from public to private school suffered academic declines more than three times what Hurricane Katrina did to test scores for students who survived that calamity. And like Katrina’s victims, Louisiana’s voucher users at that time were disproportionately Black.

The main culprit was the fact the best-run private schools didn’t take vouchers or the students who had them at the time. Louisiana’s system pushed students of color largely into D and F-rated private schools, and the results showed. That’s why I’ve called vouchers the education equivalent of predatory lending: all promise, no results.

Today, however, as voucher systems grow in number and in scope, those warning signs for children of color are changing into something else. With income caps lifting, and now 10 states and counting with “universal” vouchers for all children, the vast majority of new users are White and coming from wealthier communities. We’ve seen this pattern in new data from Ohio and North Carolina, as well as in Arizona.

There’s strong evidence that most of these students were already in private school even before getting the voucher. And new data shows many private schools simply raise tuition further once taxpayers begin picking up some of the tab through the emerging voucher system.

Even when they do use vouchers, students of color are disproportionately likely to leave their private schools—either because they are pushed out or for some other reason. These students are also the most likely to be struggling academically. What this means is that vouchers may provide a temporary coupon to change schools but are hardly a long-term solution to problems of racial inequality that persist across schools and communities.

Beyond the data, it’s important to note that many of the same people pushing the claim that vouchers are a civil rights issue, are also those who want to ban teaching about racial inequality in public schools. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the nation’s largest voucher bill last year, has also repeatedly insisted that slavery had some benefits for African Americans. In Arkansas, home to some of the most important moments in actual civil rights history, the same legislation that created vouchers in that state also put strict new limits on the teaching of race in public schools—and removed African American History from the state’s list of approved AP courses.

All of this simply means that when we look beyond claims and slogans about vouchers providing a new civil rights agenda, the results suggest entirely the opposite.

Saying something doesn’t make that something so.

For decades, left-leaning crusades to solve the problems of the Black community have been either ineffective or outright harmful to the very people they were supposed to help. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the latest and perhaps most dangerous example of this, and it must be opposed by everyone of conscience – and especially everyone of faith.

Self-described civil rights leaders herald CRT as a positive step forward. They appear to believe that tearing down statues and retelling history from a slavery perspective are prescriptions for healing past racial wounds. And they celebrate the inroads they’ve made into many K-12 public schools, universities, and even corporations such as AT&T and Walmart.

But is this wider acceptance of CRT really a victory?

Critical Race Theory isn’t helping to heal wounds from past discrimination and slavery, as its proponents like to claim. Instead, it’s creating new wounds.

For White Americans, CRT’s message is unrelentingly negative. It asserts that the entire White race is inherently racist and can never change. It’s like taking up a sport or a hobby only to be told that, no matter what you do, you’ll never get better.

For Black Americans, the message is even more corrosive – and quite frankly, racist. We are told we are helpless victims of White people and cannot possibly overcome their dominance without the government’s help. Why even attempt to learn and grow when we can’t escape this fate?

The CRT message is particularly damaging in schools, where it is aimed at impressionable children.

But perhaps the most destructive effects of CRT are seen in people of faith. This harm comes regardless of race.

The foundation of faith is redemption, but CRT casts that aside by preaching that many people are irredeemable. Without redemption, spiritual faith ceases to exist. Even self-improvement is apparently impossible since all the laws and institutions allegedly only create more racism.

Even the Black church, which was at the heart of the civil rights movement, is now considered racist by CRT proponents, who believe it exists only to spread more racism. For example, Protestants are oppressors and not even salvation can change them.

According to CRT, all of the advances of the civil rights movement were done to perpetuate racism. We know that many who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had White skin and strong faith. Dr. King admonished Black people who distrusted White people because he acknowledged many of those Whites saw their own freedom tied to the status of Black Americans.

CRT’s undercutting of faith and the King legacy shouldn’t be surprising, since the founders of CRT were atheists invested in tearing down our society. What is shocking, however, is that the movement has found so much acceptance in the churches that are ultimately the targets for repudiation and ultimate destruction.

Both my mother and best teachers emphasized that what I thought about myself was always more important than what others thought of me. They taught me that my self-worth comes from within and that it was up to me to develop positive images of myself and my value. That advice helped me always believe in my abilities and take responsibility for my own success.

And most importantly, as a person of faith, I was taught that it’s not about what happens to me but rather how I respond to the things that happen to me. My fate has always been in my hands; anything else would make my Creator unjust.

That is why people of faith need to recognize that the Critical Race Theory movement is an existential threat to our nation’s founding principles and must be stopped.