For a series on school segregation. Shes been a new america fellow in 2019 and a spencer fellow at the Columbia University school of journalism in 2018. Her book the death of a the death of Public School conservatives won the war over education. America is a historical account of actors and sites across the u. S. From southern segregationist, famous to our own former state. Wisconsin legislator, democrat williams, who was motivated empower black families and black youth. Milwaukee and she looks at the roles these and many others in the rise of School Choice in u. S. And the u. S. From the 1950s to the present. This is an important book for fitting in how wisconsin story, especially milwaukee now, is part of a larger story of School Vouchers and School Choice in the country. And my own book suddenly diverse, which i the privilege of presenting earlier. It looks at how school them School Board Members and superintendents and to a smaller medium sized districts faced intensifying pressures as they had a dog changing school system. And it deals with overlapping themes including School Choice policy, racial inequality and the undermining of Public Schools. So its really fun to put it also in this broader context and for reason, im really appreciative care for presenting today and helping us to kind of expand the stories that were telling about School Education policy and how think about equity at this moment. Thanks so much. Welcome, kara fitzpatrick. Thanks so much, everyone, for coming. Can you hear me okay . Just to make sure, are we good . Okay. I just have some notes here that are mostly like, dont forget Charter Schools. So just going to talk for a bit and then i hope know if people have questions, you can someone telling me im not quite loud enough. Okay, ill try. Eric is professor voice. So i would just want to talk for a little bit about how i sort of got into the subject i had been, as eric mentioned, a local reporter, florida and i had spent about four or five years writing about school segregation. The traditional Public Schools in Pinellas County, in particular, and a part of the focus was on these five Elementary Schools that essentially had been through policy almost deliberate, early resegregated, and they were ■ underresourced. Families were fleeing these schools. They had just rampant teacher. I talked to one family where their son had had 12 teachers in Something Like three months. They had teachers in the middle of the school day. I mean, some of it was just unbelievable. And so the stories that we wrote were not School Choice, but because has this long history. You know, 20 some years of having choice options. One of the things that i noticed when we to families and we interviewed 100 families at these schools. One of the things that came up quite often was families to find other options. They were trying to get their kids out of these schools. And because florida has choice options, some of them would go to maybe a Charter School, maybe to a private school with a tax credit scholarship with is essentially a type of voucher. You know, some of them went to magnet schools and the public system. And i just kind of had this in interesting that they were trying other options. But then it wasnt always working you know, sometimes they might go to a Charter School and the Charter School had some of the same problems or worse problems than the they had been in. You know, sometimes the options did work out. And i just i had questions kind of about what do you do when . The traditional system isnt working. You know, what are what are sort of the here because theres things you might do systemically and after our series Pinellas County did do some of those things they put more money into the schools. They tried to recruit and retain more experiethey brought recessf schools didnt even have recess. You know, they they added programs and and those schools over time actually did improve. Um but some of those systemic things that you might to fix or try to fix school sometimes, they take a long time and they necessarily help the child isnt learning how to read now or whos getting hit in class by other students. Now, um, and so i just had of these questions and i ended up doing a spencer fellowship at columbia and i had thought i might write more segregation and. Instead, i ended up focusing on the history of School Choice. And so i didnt really like, as a reporter knew kind of the gist of things. I knew what a Charter School, i knew what a voucher was, that kind of thing. Um, but i had heard different origin stories and so one that conservatives often say is that lton, whos a fairly wellknown conservative economist, that he wrote an essay in the fifties proposing a voucher system, a universal vouchers for everyones system, and then nothing really happens until. In 1990. And then we kind of get to today its one origin story. The other origin story that i heard typically from people who are opposed to School Choice was that it had its roots in segregation in in the south, you know, as a mechanism to avoid brown versus board. And i was trying to square how could have two such different origin stories. And so i started there and i was really kind of fascinated by what i came to find, which was that both of those things are true. These are essentially overlapping things. So you did have Milton Friedman write an essay in 1955 saying we should break up this public monopoly of of, you know, of Public Education and we should have everyone get a voucher, will pay for schooling on the and he thought you know that business more efficient than government so you had that idea and then you also did have segregationists in the south who were trying to avoid brown versus. Vouchers is just one of the ways they were doing all kinds things to try to avoid desegregating the schools vouchers. I always it strange but historians will refer to vouchers as as sort of a moderate solution that segregationists tried because the idea was that you would give kids essentially this escape valve that they could take a voucher and they could go to an all White Private School and have it paid for by the government. And so those things happened at the same time in the same era in the fifties. You also had another connection, oddly enough, you had a priest named virgil blum, who was a professor at marquette, and he ■wwas making a case for School Vouchers or some kind of state support to private education and for religious reasons. He really felt strongly that in particular that catholics were essentially doing Public Service with their schools and that families who, you know, chose Catholic Education, that they were getting discriminated against because on the one hand, they would pay taxes, support the Public Schools, and then they also would pay tuition, you know, to go to a private. And so he felt strongly that this discrimination and he was a really interesting sort of lesser known figure. Um, he was, he was kind of a curmudgeon. He felt extremely strongly about his beliefs and he felt that people who disagreed him were pretty irritating. His letters actually make for fantastic reading as far as Research Goes, because he would send people letters that were like, oh, i see you went to georgetown. When did they stop teaching the lution . I mean, his letters were really like aggressive about his views on things and he he also fascinating because he was making arguments for how you could pass Voucher Program and have it be const making argument it was based on religious liberty and that idea right now. Is extremely prevalent with our current supreme court. But at the time, you know, it wasnt i mean he was decades ahead of his time. And so i thought when i was trying to decide, well, where do you start this book because you also i mean, you also could go back to the founding of the country and you uld talk about the ways that the Founding Fathers disagreed about how we might educate the countrys children and who was worthy of education and how much education. And i didnt want to i mean, one, i didnt want to write an encyclopedia and. Have no one actually read the book. But i thought the fifties are so interesting because you have these three strands. You have the economic friedman argument. You know, you have religious liberty argument and you also have the segregationists and i thought all of those ideas are still in play today of who its for and howd why. And so i started the book there. One thing i think is important to note is that t■he segregationist did actually pass a school Voucher Program in louisiana and virginia highlighted a lot in the book ■0because. They had some of the longest running. Virginia had a Voucher Program about ten years and that often doesnt mentioned. But they did. They passed a voucher. And then the courts very quickly shut them down. You know, im not quickly years in virginia, but the down and said, know this is racist youre trying to get around brown versus board but its another in overlap becausee courts are shutting them down and saying is racist, then you also had some sort of liberal more progressive voices saying, you know, actually, you might be able to use a School Voucher as a tool of empowerment for low income kids, very different idea than Milton Friedman. Lets have everybody do it. This was very much, you know, this idea you could empower the families who essentially dont have as much choice because they cant pay for it and those those voices you know that period of time somewhat brief but it sets the stage milwaukee which becomes the countrys first sort of modern program. In 1990. And you know, i at some point when i was doing the book, i spent five years on this. And i always seem to come to milwaukee and, madison to do research when it was like indiana jewry. And there is like ten inches of snow and you might not make your flight out. And i just i dont know why, i did that, but a couple of times i thought, you know, i should Research LikeCharter Schools in hawaii or like just should have picked Something Else because i dont think i fully understood how central to the story wisconsin would be. But i will say its very pretty drive over here today. And then i stopped somewhere to look for gifts for kids and the the clerk asked me if i was coming in for the me, right . The cheese and and the fall leaves and the colors and things. But but when i first when i first came to do research, i was just like, you picked the wrong topic. But so is interesting because. It was sort of in a way, the Perfect Place for the First Program to happen, because you did have possible yams that erica mentioned earlier. So, you know, a black democratic legislator who was very interested in education, you know, very particularly interested the milwaukee Public Schools and really thought they were not doing a good job, particularly for black students, for low income students. And she was, you know, of a political force, a veryforce toe with. And you had governor Tommy Thompson, who politically agreed with polly on very, very little. You know, hes a republican whos white. Hes from a rural area, the state. But he had alreadop times and and gotten nowhere with it. And so the two of them form and what polly came to call the unholy which at one point was actually the title of my book but everyone thought it was like a history of the Catholic Church or the roman empire. And so we had to go a different direction. But i really liked the idea the unholy alliance because you still a lot of that around School Choice issues you still see these sort of strange political bedfellows you know and then ev this year penciled ania had a democratic governor saying he supported vouchers and there was a massive backlash and it was i actually paused and made sure he was a democrat because its become so unusual for that for that to happen. The other thing aside from the the Political Alliance that you had in, milwaukee, is that you had a city that already had this history of independent, secular, private in the city that you know were largely serving black and latino children and were generally felt to be doing a good job of it. And so you kind of had this base of support that be tapped into phrased and kind of framed the public as an experiment. It would be small it would be only low income children. It would be, you know, capped enrollment like 1 of the School Districts enrollment. And it was just going to be this experiment originally. It was supposed to a five year pilot and when it actually passed, Tommy Thompson used wisconsins strange veto power and like kind of crossed that part out. But it started very small and, you know, was an interesting moment. I think for the country because it was the beginning. This kind of conversation about public choice versus private School Choice, because at the same time that you had wisconsin kind of going down this road of private School Choice in minnesota to people were trying to pass the first Charter School legislation and that was very much framed Public School choice you know that it would be outside of you know the sort of the bureaucracy of the School District. But it was going to be autonomous, you know, different type of Public School. And so you have this period of time in the nineties where these two ideas are kind of warring with each other and. Charter schools basically win out because there were fewer legal questions. It didnt raise all of this sort of church, state separation question and it was in a large way for democrat its Charter Schools were an answer to School Vouchers because republicans vouchers. And so if youre trying to talk about education reform and republicans are saying we need School Vouchers, democrats cant really just say, well, we just really love our traditional Public Schools. Its not like an argument reform. And so what they did say was, well, we like choice, but we like public, we like Charter Schools and our were like, well, those are okay. So well get on board with that too. And so that actually is the reform that spread were up to. I think now montana, 46 states have Charter Schools and washington, d. C. Has charter. But i like the idea of how do these two reform ideas sort of bump up against each other politically . And why are certain people supporting one over the other and then the other sort of midwestern city that becomes very important in this history, cleveland and, because cleveland had and ohio had also a republican governor who was interested in choice. It was a slightly different situation and milwaukee had actually pretty good grass support. Cleveland actually had a lot of grass opposition, particularly the black community. So they were not the same sort of setup at all. But what cleveland, was it just been a judge had just taken control away from the local school board. It had a an extremely history of problems and so when the when the legislators in ohio were looking a place where they could maybe try out School Vouchers, cleveland was something that was the city schools were such poor shape that it was hard to make an argument against it. And that is essentially why they chose cleveland. But its interesting because milwaukee started off with secular private schools and then expanded to religious schools. Cleveland went straight for religious schools. So this is the area of the book where in the research i did not understand how much time i would spend trying to figure out a court and the legal. And if i had known and i might have made other life choices, but what i came to understand too late in the process, you know, was that this legal history is incredibly important, because if pass a program and its challenged in court and you dont win there, then thats thats the end of the program. We dont go anywhere. And i church state issues were a little bit clearer than they actually are is it actually its becoming clearer now but it used a fairly murky area of law. And so there were all manner of cases where states had tried to provide different types of support, private schools, you know maybe well pay for textbooks or well try to pay for teacher salaries because there is a legitimate interest for quite a long time in tryin l system, which was declining. You know, schools, Catholic Schools were closing on a pretty regular■p basis. And those cases didnt in a really clear direction. Sometimes they would say, well, yeah you c