Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates should listen to the stories of students who benefitted from school choice options. (Commentary)
by Denisha Allen and Hera Varmah
Recently, Stacy Davis Gates, who serves as both the president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the executive president of the American Federation of Teachers, publicly revealed that she has chosen to enroll her eldest son in a private school. Mrs. Gates is now facing criticism for her hypocrisy regarding education policies, given the decision she made to pull her son from Chicago Public Schools.
In her own words, Gates expressed that “If you are a Black family living in a Black community, high quality neighborhood schools have been the dream, not the reality.”
The question that arises is why Gates obstructs the opportunity to attend a school of choice for so many children who share a similar background with her sons. Why does she oppose families, like ours, accessing a quality education that they are not receiving from their neighborhood school?
And it does appear that Chicago students are not receiving a quality education: just 29% of Chicago’s high school seniors are college ready. Just 21% of elementary schoolers are proficient in grade-level math, and the number decreases to just 14% as students move into high school. Only 25% of Chicago Public Schools students are reading proficiently at grade level in elementary school; just 14% of CPS students are reading proficiently at grade level in high school.
According to the National Institutes of Health, Chicago high school students also face a staggering rate of on-campus violence, which, in turn, greatly impacts academic performance.
The problem does not appear to be financial: the district spends more than $18,000 per student per year. And yet, parents with students in the Chicago public school system have no choice but to accept this substandard level of education.
Gates’ decision to avoid sending her own children to CPS suggests that she believes that better opportunities are available outside the public schools – but she wants the benefits of school choice for her own child but not for families like ours. Mrs. Gates has even gone on record claiming that school choice is a choice rooted in racism. As Black women who have dedicated our careers to fighting for school choice because of how it changed our lives we must speak up.
Hera is a child of immigrant parents, one from West Africa and the other from the Caribbean, raised twelve children. Nine out of twelve siblings, including the last three, benefited from the Florida tax-credit scholarship and attended public schools they were not zoned for.
Thanks to school choice, Hera’s family now boasts four college graduates, six college students, and two high school students excelling in their studies. Among the college graduates, there is a chemical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a medical school student, and Hera, working in policy to ensure that every child in America has the same access to a quality education that she was fortunate to receive.
Denisha failed third grade twice because her local public school failed her. At age 10, she wasn’t able to read – a basic skill that should be the foundation of American education. Thanks to Florida’s Step Up for Students scholarship, Denisha was able to attend a private school – a change that ultimately revolutionized her life. She became the first person in her family to graduate high school, to graduate college, and to earn a master’s degree.
The transformative power of school choice and the many generations who the system had left behind are what inspired Denisha to start Black Minds Matter. Amid the summer of Black Lives Matter protests and social upheaval in 2020, Denisha couldn’t help but notice that nobody was talking about the one institution that has failed generations of Black Americans – the educational system — and giving Black families a better choice.
The reasons for our family’s decisions were the same that led Mrs. Gates to send her own son to a private school: Our zoned public school was failing us, just like it was failing so many other families.
Our stories are just two among thousands of success stories made possible by school choice. Educational freedom has opened countless doors for our families, providing us with opportunities we never had before. It allowed us to flourish and pursue the lives we envisioned for ourselves. So, the next time Mrs. Gates asserts that school choice is rooted in racism, we would urge her to not only consider her own family’s situation but also to explore the stories of families like ours.
We invite you, Ms. Gates, to delve into the experiences of the many families who have broken the cycle of poverty simply because they had access to a quality education. Those Black students Gates references in Chicago can transition from merely dreaming about attending a quality school to actually living that reality, but not if she has her way and they are stuck in the system that’s failing them.
Hera Varmah is a first-generation American, graduate of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship programs, 2020 Future Leaders Fellow, and a communications and events assistant at the American Federation for Children.
Denisha Allen is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a graduate of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program as well as the founder of Black Minds Matter.
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