School choice and the liberation of low-income families | VISION TALKS

Education reform: For Marquette professor Howard Fuller, it's not about test scores, it's about liberation and freedom. But Fuller argues that the ed reform movement has three requirements for success: Low-income families need school choices, the schools they choose among must be high quality, and the reform movement must be led by the people it's trying to liberate.

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Partial transcript:
Hello and good evening. I’m Howard Fuller and I’m actually an ed reformer. I actually am proud to say that, but I want you to understand why. I grew up in Milwaukee in the Hillside Housing Project. And then, after a while my mother moved us over on 11th Street between Reservoir and Vine in the inner city. That’s codeword for poor black people lived in our community.

And so my mother, Juanita Smith, and my grandmother, Pearl Wagner, told me, boy, you going to college. And I didn’t know you could ask why. You know, like my grandson was with me for Thanksgiving and I told this little dude to do something and he asked me why. I was long before I knew there was a word called why. I never knew that you could actually ask why.

So they said, hey, you going to college? I said, yes, ma’am, and that was it. But what also happened was I bought into it. You know, I bought into that idea of going to college. And so this whole idea of ed reform is personal to me. And I want to explain like four reasons why I think it’s important or four reasons that describe like what ed reform means to me or what I think needs to happen to really have ed reform.

First of all, it’s very important that low-income and working-class people in this country have choice. I think that that is a critical thing because I know that you don’t want to have an America where only those of us with money have the ability to choose the best educational environment for our children. I know that you feel like I do that we’ve got these three sectors in America. We’ve got the traditional public schools and we’ve got private schools and we’ve got charter schools. Each sector has great schools. Each sector has terrible schools.

School choice and the liberation of low-income families