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For years charter proponents lamented the tight control local boards kept on their school dollars in Virginia towns and counties, and how hard the Virginia charter school market was to crack. But all that changed in November 2021 with the election of Glenn Youngkin. The dream of having a super-disruptor, a CEO of a mega leveraged buyout firm, stage the ultimate takeover of some of the very best school systems in the country looked like a sure bet. The plan was straight-forward. No more incrementalism. Attack on all fronts at once, in a concerted all-out blitzkrieg. Attack the organizational infrastructure Disrupt local school boards with screaming astro-turf groups and recall campaigns. Go after local superintendents, with threats of lawsuits. Marginalize the teacher training schools, in favor of business department education development. Drive those teachers in the field out by challenging “divisive concepts,” and by extending conditional employment to 5 years, and doing away with due process. Harden the schools with police in every building, by placing metal detectors at every door, and criminalizing elementary playground scuffles. Appoint highly partisan candidates to key positions in the state department of ed. Destroy the curriculum and standards through deconstructing the state school board and eliminating the resources provided by the state DOE. Challenge existing funding by cutting the educational budget. Attack with every kind of new school, private conversion scheme you can think of to siphon money from local public schools while creating the illusion of something new and shiny. 20 new business run governor’s schools, 20 or more new schools through regional charter boards, 20 new business owned university lab school, Eliminate requirements for charter applications, Expand tax breaks and grants to businesses to start and run their own state-paid-for training schools, Increase Dollar for dollar tax breaks for the wealthy giving to private schools. And cloak it all with massive media and micro-targeted public relations campaigns using carefully crafted messaging about how it is all for the parents and takes back control for individuals. So, what would the schools look like if the school choice lobby and Glenn Youngkin’s hostile takeover was accomplished? What is the school choice vision for the commonwealth’s children? 1. Any participation of women, blacks, or otherwise “different” people in the history of Virginia and its building will be disappeared - illegal to mention in a school room as divisive. That’s what the anti-CRT movement is about. History will only be about people who own property and have high status. The new 5 proposed Youngkin appointees to the state school board will be poised to usher in the new-old history of Virginia in June when the rewrite of the History Standards of Learning is scheduled to begin. 2. The schools will be more segregated - racially and economically. Because transportation is not provided for charter/privates only students with parents who can drive them to the “choice” schools will get to go to them. Students who are expensive to educate - those with special needs will be counseled out of the “choice” schools. The initially small, unregulated schools will be less resourced as management companies gather up tuition dollars. Though charter schools currently are not religious by federal policy, the school choice movement is litigating that in the courts, and vouchers/savings accounts can create school choice that increases more sectarian divisions. They will be more ideologically driven by private religious beliefs, and less open to scientific ideas. Parents will have little say when private charter management companies make decisions about their children with no appeal. 3. Poor families will be priced out of the market with their local schools being looted of the resources that enabled much needed services. The state currently only funds about $5.4K per student, the average cost of educating a student in VA whether in public or private schools is about $14K. The $9,000 difference is not likely to be affordable for working class families. 4. Choice schools will be unstable, as the 3-5 year MOUs expire and out of town school managers take the money and run. Even Nina Rees, the CEO of National Alliance for Public Charters acknowledges that charters are meant to be closed if they are not working, not improved. So, why should local parents be concerned, cautious, and leery of this complete overhaul of their top rated public schools, currently run by people who live down the street and in the neighborhood, and staffed by teachers, 62% of whom have master’s degrees or higher, trained at highly rated Virginia universities that others around the nation call “public Ivys?” The more pressing question is: Why would we even consider a change to charters?

Since Virginia’s infancy, African-Americans have advocated for, built, and championed public education for all Virginians. This support for public education by African-American government officials, educators, families and students has provided lessons learned, which are relevant in today’s quest for quality public education for all now and in the future. The first laws prohibiting education of black Virginians came as backlash to one of the most well-known slave revolts in America which took place in Virginia in Southampton County. Nathaniel (Nat) Turner was an enslaved man who led a rebellion of enslaved people on August 21, 1831. In response in 1831, the Virginia General Assembly made it a criminal offense to receive a salary for teaching enslaved people and prohibited assembling classes of free blacks for the purpose of teaching them. In 1867, the US Congress required Virginia to write a new state Constitution. Virginia’s first post-Civil War Constitution was ratified in July 1869, and included an article for the state’s first system of public schools. During the post-Civil War state constitution convention, African American Convention delegate Thomas Bayne, who had escaped from slavery, introduced an amendment to the education clause requiring the schools to be “free to all classes, and no child, pupil or scholar shall be ejected from said schools on account of race, color, or any invidious distinction.” Another former enslaved person, African-American Constitution Convention delegate, Samuel F. Kelso introduced a resolution calling for free public education open to all on an equal basis under the new Virginia Constitution. Despite the sincere efforts of these government officials to provide for equal access to quality, equitable public education for all people, regardless of race, creed, color, or other discriminatory factors, segregationist elements within the Constitution Convention prevailed. So, the Virginia public education system legislation was enacted with the inherent flaw of segregation as part of the law of Virginia. Virginia’s public schools had been segregated racially since their inception in 1870. So, too, were the state’s public colleges and universities. With the passage of a new Virginia Constitution of 1902, large numbers of African Americans and working-class Whites were disenfranchised from their right to vote. This constitutional change provided fewer government officials to counter the attempts by secessionists and white racist officials to deny all Virginians their citizenship rights to quality public education and participation in the government process. The 1902 Constitution remained in effect until July 1, 1971, and did much to shape Virginia politics in the image of the old Confederacy by battling the civil rights movement, especially the federally mandated laws for public school desegregation. For many Virginians whose forebears may have arrived in the US in the post-Civil War and post-Civil Right eras, this history may not appear relevant to guaranteeing current rights to a quality public education. However, such an assumption only leads to a greater vulnerability for contemporary groups of Virginians, such as Asian-Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and Hispanic Americans to be denied their rights to access a quality public education and to participate in the governmental process by voting. The means to accomplish these racist and segregationist goals for newer groups of Virginia citizens and residents have been previously established, vetted, and perfected through the laws and legislative enactment designed to suppress the rights of Whites, Indians (Native Americans), and African Americans. The Virginia Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930) legislation was passed to protect “whiteness” against what many Virginians perceived to be the negative effects of race-mixing, including: The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 prohibited interracial marriage. It defined a white person as someone “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” The Public Assemblages Act of 1926 required all public meeting spaces to be strictly segregated. A 1930 act defined a person to be “black” who had even a trace of African American ancestry. This way of defining whiteness as a kind of purity in bloodline became known as the “one drop rule.” These acts would remain in place until the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court case of 1967, but it took decades before the Virginia legislature condemned 1924 and 1930 laws in 2001. Across the 1950’s, and as late as the 1970’s, Virginia authorities staged organized resistance to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school integration busing case to insure African American students received an equal education to that provided to white students. While Senator Harry Byrd spear-headed those efforts, many policy makers participated in organized resistance to equal education for black Virginians. To counteract the inequality in the distribution of quality public education, local African American grass-roots activists and national organizations such as the NAACP began to form coalitions to counter the unjust legislation of segregationist government officials. An early rural branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in Fairfax County, Virginia. In 1915, the Town of Falls Church proposed an ordinance to segregate black and white residential sections. Local African Americans formed the Colored Citizens Protective League and fought this ordinance. In 1918, the League became the Falls Church and Vicinity Branch of the NAACP. This African American grass-roots activism is exemplified in the life’s work and accomplishment of pioneer Falls Church NAACP members and leaders EB Henderson and Mary Ellis Henderson. In 1951, African American students, led by sixteen-year-old Barbara Rose Johns, walked out of Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville to protest the school's poor condition. Students and NAACP attorneys Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson filed a lawsuit in federal court to demand integration, instead of “equal” schools. Their case became part of the landmark case, Brown vs. Board of Education. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954, that "separate, but equal" in public education is unconstitutional. Since the inception of the British colony of Virginia in 1607, and later as the 10th independent State to ratify the Constitution of the United States in 1788, Virginia has and continues to be the epicenter for the struggle in our Nation between the ideas and actions of Unionist and Secessionist ideologists. To their credit, Virginians were among the leaders of the American Revolution and of the events leading to it. Phrases like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “Give me liberty or give me death” were coined here in Virginia, but the full accomplishment of those ideals have yet to be achieved. And there are those today who would still block the opportunity for equal access to education. Today’s quest for quality public education for all now and in the future follows in the footsteps of so many African American Virginians of the past. It is time now for contemporary Virginians to be the champions of equal education for all. See accompanying PDF for a full collection of materials on Virginia Black History of Education: Artwork: “The State Convention at Richmond, Va., in Session,” Remaking Virginia: Transformation Through Emancipation, accessed February 26, 2022, https://www.virginiamemory.com/online-exhibitions/items/show/602.

Across America, a small minority of people seeking to undermine our schools point to individual books and declare unilaterally that they are inappropriate. All schools have clear rules for each book; where it is shelved, what ages can check it out, etc. There are also rules and processes for reviewing each book before it is purchased, and again if it is questioned. These processes usually entail a team of dedicated librarians and teachers fully involved in our kids’ lives and who understand what is age appropriate and what is not. They also know that challenging kids with different ideas at the right age is actually the best thing for our kids, and our society as a whole. Over and over in the last few months, a small number people are trying to undermine our schools and libraries by claiming that short scenes or graphics in books are pornographic or otherwise unfit for our kids to read. There is a growing use of book protests seeking to ban selected books. Some of these books are award-winning for their careful and sensitive portrayal of important issues. When a book is questioned, librarians and teachers review the targeted books, read them thoroughly, consider the age-appropriateness and make their fully informed professional decisions. Repeatedly, these professionals find that the books should go back to the shelves with the appropriate rules for our kids. We can point to the reviews of books in Fairfax County and also in Virginia Beach (two widely different parts of our state) that resulted in complete reinstatement of the challenged books. I fully support parents questioning what their kids learn and applaud parents who are fully involved in their children's education. That said, a small subset of people cannot set the rules for everyone and cannot prevent other kids or their parents from seeking a variety of ideas, concepts, and viewpoints. We need to support our public education teachers and other professionals as they work hard to provide our kids a variety of tools to understand the world around them. These book challenges, while appropriate enough for parents to start, are consistently overturned by our existing procedures and review protocols. The processes work to carefully protect both parents who want restrictions and those that want access for their kids. Learn more: https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/education/fairfax-county-reinstating-banned-books/65-3b79bdaa-d1a0-4212-90ec-d8881e135dc8 https://www.pilotonline.com/news/education/vp-nw-virginia-beach-banned-books-20220212-ibj5flyrp5hwtfiidipylfgs74-story.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/30/us/book-banning-american-library-association-statement/index.html

The radical right strategy for accessing the deep pockets of the American taxpayer, and diverting the billions set aside for public education into the pockets of the for-profit charter school industry, is simply to sow discontent—lots of it. The charlatans don’t need to win any battle. They just need to touch a nerve with enough parents on one topic or another to create a groundswell of angry mothers clamoring for something—anything—that is different. They attempt to villainize our elected officials and intimidate anyone who disagrees, then they will swoop in with the panacea of charter schools to better educate our kids. Not so fast. Nowhere have these scare tactics been more obvious than in the backlash against the proposition that we cease white-washing American history, and instead, own the sins of our forefathers—not with guilt or shame, as the detractors want parents to believe, but with understanding and hopes for reform. What’s more American than that? We teach history so that we can learn from its successes and failures. We teach about the Nazis and the Holocaust, for example, to prepare us to see totalitarianism and genocide when they, inevitably, raise their ugly heads again. At the Fairfax County School Board meeting on February 10th the At-Large Representative Karen Keys-Gamarra presented a resolution celebrating Black History Month. In her remarks, she noted the increasing lack of comity in discussions with constituents, and referenced an email she’d received in which the author threatened to “tar and feather” her. Either the author was unaware of the sordid history of this reference for African-Americans, or they knew and didn’t care. The regular performance artists in the “Public Comments” portion of the meeting behaved as expected—hurling insults and donning large paper bags and Vendetta masks, in mockery of the pandemic mask mandate. In their midst, however, stood one elderly, earnest, white male. He’d come to decry teaching the experiences of Black Americans, referring to those lessons as Critical Race Theory (CRT), because it “makes everyone look at race instead of the person.” He was afraid his grandchildren would be “made to feel ashamed of their skin color.” He grew up in a small New York city apartment with five others, and with his sister “we shared time on one beach chair. That’s not white privilege,” he assured the room. It would be easy to lump this man’s fear with all the other theater of the evening. A better course, for a better world, is to note the irony of a white man who grew up poor, who now believes that gives him a pass on white privilege, and who is now against our schools teaching his own grandchildren the origins and implications of that privilege. He couldn’t understand how his dad’s opportunity (like my own father’s) to get a college degree after World War II, with its attendant opportunity for advancement, was denied to black veterans, so the post-war boom left them behind. He couldn’t understand how, because of red-lining, his family had an opportunity to live in better neighborhoods, with better schools, than an equally-placed black one. And he doesn’t want his grand-kids to learn this because they might feel bad. Teachers don’t teach to shame kids. This is a myth devised by those who believe that a rose-colored view of our history will shield our children from some manufactured trauma that the truth will unveil. That is ridiculous. I’m of German ancestry. I did just fine learning about World War II. My son learned about men’s subjugation of women without needing any therapy. White students are not so fragile that we must shield them from the truth about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Just the opposite is true. We need to teach all our children that our places in this world are due to our drive, our brains, and our luck–and also teach them about the accidents of our history, including our race, gender, place of birth, and time. We must be wary of the child who believes that their own bootstraps, however broken or worn, are solely responsible for their upward (or downward) mobility. Indeed, it is the most important lesson we can teach if we strive for a more just and caring world.

For Immediate Release February 10, 2022 media@4PublicEducation.org FAIRFAX, Virginia—Holly Hazard, Chair of 4 Public Education, a Virginia-based public education advocacy group, is announcing the group’s launch during her Community Participation speaker slot at tonight’s Fairfax County Public School Board meeting - 7PM - Luther Jackson Middle School, 3020 Gallows Rd. Falls Church, VA. 4 Public Education is a grassroots organization founded by a team of community leaders in response to increasing attacks on public education. 4 Public Education supports and promotes the right of every child to an exceptional public education that is welcoming, inclusive, safe, relevant, and nurturing. 4 Public Education advocates for public schools at school board meetings, before local and state legislative bodies, curates research related to the importance of public school education, and defends public school education wherever opponents surface, while demanding truth and civility in every discussion. Holly Hazard states, “Negative forces are at work today to undermine our democratic system of government by using our public education system to divide us, terrorize elected officials, and destroy our collective commitment to our public education students. 4 Public Education will inform and engage communities; support educators and policymakers who are committed to freedom of speech, equity and inclusion; bring back truth and civility to conversations about education; and create a community of informed voters who embrace truth in our education system.” “Strong public schools are an important foundation of our democracy,” said Rose Conde, a 4 Public Education founder and a mother of Fairfax County Public School students. “I want my children to learn in an environment where every child is nurtured, challenged, and inspired. Public schools are our best hope of leveling the playing field and ensuring our democratic ideals are passed along to the next generation.” 4 Public Education welcomes parents, community members and advocates to join us in building a strong base to help protect our public schools. When all students’ needs are met, our society benefits from a successful workforce, vibrant culture, and healthy, resilient individuals and families. -end- ABOUT 4PE: 4PE is a grassroot organization founded in 2021 by a team of community leaders in response to increasing attacks on public education. 4PE supports and promotes the right of every child to an exceptional education that is welcoming, inclusive, safe, relevant, and nurturing. 4PE informs and engages communities to champion these values in public education.

Today we launch an initiative with purpose and care: we champion the American ideal of public schools as the cornerstone of a healthy democracy and the right of every child to an exceptional public education. The precept of a free and just society is grounded in an educated populous. When scholars discuss the three or four pillars of democracy, they may list separation of powers, rule of law, a free press, fundamental human rights or elections. However, these are outcomes of a culture that holds up education as sacrosanct. Without this, the pillars crumble because, as history has shown again and again, an ignorant, biased, or mis-informed people will easily be led by the will of a despot, the greed of a corporation, or the frenzy of the self-righteous. Dark forces are at work today to undermine our democratic system of government by targeting not just the voter, or the political class, but by using our public education system to troll unsuspecting parents, divide us, terrorize elected officials and destroy our collective commitment to public education. For some, the cost of education (which can be 50% of some government budgets) is too high and untenable. For others, the lure of the billions of dollars taxpayers invests is too attractive to leave to educators; that treasure trove is waiting to be mined by corporate interests so they can commodify public education, cut costs and value, and hand over the spoils to their stockholders. For still others, this fight isn’t about education at all. We could as easily be at war over climate change or religion. For them this is simply about sullying the reputation of the quality of our schools (Virginia is consistently ranked as the 4th among the top five best school system in the country) in enough parents’ minds so that they will vote for the candidate, any candidate, who will save their children from their fantasy of indoctrination, shame or fear. They use tactics like conflating American history with shaming our kids, creating fear of bathroom use as a means of isolating our LGBTQ+ students, encouraging parents and kids to snitch on their teacher, and also the tried and true grandfather of despotic tools—to ban books that inspire controversy. We ask that you raise your hand in support of public education. Please join us as we celebrate the amazing opportunities our schools provide each child to live up to their potential. Please support us as we advocate for the principle that public education is the fabric that brings Americans together by giving us a common understanding of science, civic engagement, history and kindness. We are excited to champion the ideals of our founding fathers and to remind people that the gift of education is not only the great leveler in a free and open society.