Dr. Vernard T. Gant, ACSI Director of ACSI Urban School Services
During the spring of 2008, the White House sponsored a summit to call attention to and address the alarming number of closures and soon-to-be closures of faith-based schools that target and serve innercity children. A few months later, the White House released a report based on its findings. 
The following is part of the report:
On April 24, 2008, President George W. Bush convened in Washington, D.C., a broad array of education and community stakeholders to address a deeply troubling but vastly under-reported phenomenon limiting the education options available to lowincome urban families: the rapid disappearance of faith-based schools in America’s cities.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between the 1999–2000 and 2005–06 school years, the K–12 faith-based education sector lost nearly 1,200 schools and nearly 425,000 students. This is a cause for national concern for a number of important reasons. First, for generations, these schools have played an invaluable role in America’s cities. They are part of our Nation’s proud story of religious freedom and tolerance, community development, immigration and assimilation, academic achievement, upward mobility, and more. To lose these schools is to lose a positive, central character in the narrative of urban America.
More importantly, the disappearance of these schools is having a tragic impact on many of our most disadvantaged families. For many urban parents, the moral grounding, community ethic, safe and structured environment, and academic rigor of faith-based schools are invaluable to their children. These qualities are especially prized because of the unfortunate alternatives many of these children and families face.
The struggles of urban public schools are well known and long-standing. The underserved children of America’s cities deserve access to high-performing educational options. The disappearance of urban faith-based schools—with their strong record of serving the disadvantaged—frustrates the crucial national effort to make educational excellence available to every child.
Experience indicates that the contributions of these schools extend far beyond the classroom. A strong education institution can stabilize a community. It can attract new families and jobs. It can provide safety and hope in areas where both are in short supply. Regrettably, the inverse is also true. In addition to hurting students, the loss of a strong school in an underserved community can destabilize fragile social networks, depress job creation and economic development, and exacerbate the collective sense of despair resulting from scarce community resources and opportunities.
As serious and worrisome as this problem is, there is no villain in the story. No one purposely set about to cause an education crisis. The root causes are several and diffuse—including barriers to government aid, demographic shifts, and staffing changes—and they only begin to corrode urban faith-based schools when combined. However, these factors have, in the end, chipped away at a pillar of American K–12 education. To leave this grave and mounting challenge unaddressed would be irresponsible. The futures of too many young lives and distressed communities are at stake. (U.S. Department of Education 2008, 1; italics added)
In summary, according to this report, the following are occurring in urban America:
- Schools are dying.
- Students are declining.
- Supplies are dwindling.
As a result, Christ-centered urban education is on the verge of near extinction. If the current trend continues, there will be only a remnant of highly effective Christian schools operating in the nation’s central cities, where they are desperately needed. The report highlights the dire impact of school closures on the educational and social plight of children who need a quality education the most but can afford it the least:
This chronic underperformance of so many of our urban schools has also played a part in passing poverty on from one generation to the next. Since low-income city students are too often assigned to chronically underperforming schools, they are robbed of arguably the most important stepladder to upward mobility—a quality K–12 education. As a result, too many children are born into an almost inextricable poverty.
Recent research found that children born to parents with incomes in the lowest 20 percent have the greatest chance of ending up with incomes in the lowest 20 percent when they reach adulthood. In fact, 42 percent of those born into this bottom economic quintile remain there, and 65 percent remain in the bottom two quintiles. The prospects can be especially grim for low-income African-American children. More than half of black children born into the bottom economic quintile remain there as adults, and three quarters remain in the bottom two quintiles.
Students from these underserved urban communities, facing the mountainous challenges associated with poverty, have as great a need for quality schools as any child in America. Improved educational opportunities would not only immediately benefit today’s urban boys and girls, they would also help break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, improve the long-term prospects of economically depressed areas, and fulfill America’s promise of limitless opportunity. (U.S. Department of Education 2008, 14–15; italics added)
The report recommends the following:
Fortunately, this problem is solvable. America’s institutions—from the Federal, State, and local governments to businesses and nonprofits to universities and community-based organizations—have it in their power to turn the tide. This Administration has taken the lead, raising the public awareness of this crisis through the White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools and developing and supporting promising initiatives, including Promise Scholarships, Opportunity Scholarships, Pell Grants for Kids, and the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
However, if we are to succeed in protecting these valuable education options, more must be done. A sustained collaborative effort by educators, elected officials, philanthropists, neighborhood leaders, and many others will be required. America’s faith-based urban schools—so prized by so many families—are well worth this effort. Their preservation will greatly benefit countless disadvantaged students, numerous underserved communities, and as a result, our Nation at large. (U.S. Department of Education 2008, 1)
School Choice/Educational Freedom 
Government subsidies and philanthropic giving are not enough to sustain the cost of educating urban children. The reality is that the children who have less need more. Urban children, for the most part, start school and matriculate through school with an educational D, a resource deficit. The “normal” approach to educating them is insufficient to catch them up to, and keep them up with, their high-resourced peers.
The current level of subsidies is woefully insufficient to fill the gap between what the families can afford to pay and what it costs the schools to educate the children. In other words, the reality for urban families is as follows:
- The tuition the family pays does not cover the costs of educating the child.
- The families cannot afford the real costs of educating the child.
- Under-resourced and undereducated children require significantly more resources.
- The schools cannot effectively educate under-resourced children without having adequate resources for doing so.
Currently, this nation spends, on average, about $10,000 to educate a child each year that the child is in school. The vast majority of Christian schools charge a fraction of that cost in tuition. Under-resourced children bring fewer essential resources to the educational process. As a result, the schools educating them must compensate by providing more resources to effectively educate the child. The tragic irony is, however, that the Christian schools all too often operate with less than what they need—much less. This, however, does not mean that it actually costs less to educate the children. Rather, the balance of the real cost of education is usually borne by the staff as they settle for lower compensation and benefits. Even having teachers work far below their market value, however, does not afford the school the necessary resources to effectively educate under-resourced and undereducated learners.
A more practical and effective solution is to have the funds that are dedicated by this nation for the purpose of educating a child follow the child to a school of the parent’s choosing. This is the essence of true educational freedom, whereby parents—who generally have the best interest of their children at heart—are empowered to act in the best interest of their children by placing them in schools that effectively educate them. Currently, per-pupil educational dollars are not attached to the child but the school system to which the child is assigned because of residency. The irony is that although this nation recognizes the value of an education, it acts in such a way that it compromises and even jeopardizes its interest when educating under-resourced students. It is indeed in the national interest to have an educated populace. As a matter of fact, an education is so highly valued that it is a crime to not educate a child. The system is flawed, however, in that the funds designated for educating the child are assigned to a school system as opposed to the child. As a result, the system gets the funds whether the child is educated effectively or not. Consequently, too many under-resourced children are simply being schooled as opposed to being educated. Surely, that is not and cannot be in the best national interest. Parents ought to be allowed to place their children in schools that best serve their children. That is school choice. That is true educational freedom, and it holds out the greatest chance of addressing the problems plaguing urban America.
A Modern-Day Peculiar Institution
Many in the school choice movement like to compare the school choice movement to the Civil Rights Movement during the middle of the last century. While it has glaring similarities to the Civil Rights Movement, the school choice movement is more apropos to the Abolitionist Movement of the previous century. American slavery was considered a “peculiar institution” because it was unique to the South and was vigorously defended as a “good thing” for the economy, for the Southern way of life, and even for the slaves. The irony of the institution was its glaring hypocrisy. This nation was founded on, and placed the highest premium on, individual freedom and liberty for all, but at the same time, it denied those same freedoms and liberties to blacks. For the most part, the ones who had a problem with granting freedom to the slaves were the very people who were already free and who would have defended their freedom to the death. Again, these were the very people who maintained that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” (the Declaration of Independence). When it came to the blacks, however, those “rights” were trumped by the economic and social institution of the South. The Southern system had to be maintained at all costs, and it therefore took precedence over the freedom and well-being of the blacks. As a result, the people who so vehemently resisted personal choice and freedom for blacks were the very ones who valued and practiced personal choice and freedom. What they opposed politically (the freedom of blacks), they practiced personally (their own freedom).
By the same token, no one opposes school choice or educational freedom personally; it is opposed only politically. Most parents know the role education plays in their child’s future. The higher the level and quality of education a person receives, the better the life options that person will have. A quality education is actually a purchased commodity. The caliber of the education depends on the purchasing power available to the individual. A quality education can be purchased through either paying tuition to private schools or paying higher mortgages and property taxes in neighborhoods with high-performing public schools. Parents who have low and moderate incomes simply do not possess the financial means to secure such an education, and these parents are bound to accept what is offered in their assigned schools on the basis of where they live. These parents have no choice and no freedom in their children’s education. To compound matters, they are often told, from the public’s standpoint, that they should never have a choice because if they did it would financially cripple the public school system. In other words, the important issue to the opponents of school choice is not the best interest or well-being of the child but the wellbeing of the system. Moreover, to add insult to injury, parents are told this by politicians, teacher union representatives, and school officials—all of whom exercise choice in where their children go to school. As a general rule, people of means naturally send their children to schools that effectively educate them. Again, the tragedy is in the hypocrisy; what these individuals practice personally, they oppose politically. Because they have the economic means, they naturally act in the best interest of their children. Yet they insist that the children of less economically advantaged families remain bound to a system that does not benefit them but rather benefits from them.
What is needed today is education emancipation. Children who are now bound to schools that are not working for them need to be set free to find and attend schools that do. A new generation of freedom fighters is needed to champion this cause. It is an exercise in futility to expect that a selfserving “system” would or could actually reform itself to act in the best interest of those who serve it. It was the slaveholders who argued so forcibly about how contented and well cared for the slaves were, as a justification for maintaining the slave system—a system to which they would not have subjected themselves to for one moment.
School choice/educational freedom is a hotly debated issue today, and it is at the heart of the school reform movement. In discussing the plight of under-resourced and undereducated children, both proponents and opponents of school choice begin the debate in reference to the children. All sides assert that they love children and claim that their advocacy is for the children. One can observe, however, as the dialogue ensues about the educational and social well-being of the children, the central focus shifts from the welfare of children to that of the educational institutions established to serve them. With a little closer scrutiny, one can observe the subtle tendency to equate the two. The children are discussed synonymously with the school systems that deliver the educational content. The well-being of the children is intricately tied to the well-being of the system. The reality, however, is that the system that was created to serve the children now exists to be served by the children. These children needto be set free to be educated. Frederick Douglass (1894) described an education in these words:
Education … means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is easy to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness and to defeat the very end of their being. They can neither honor themselves nor their Creator. Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted; and, on the other hand, no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education.
For the record, Frederick Douglass also noted that the actual act of liberation was only part of the equation. As in the case of liberation from slavery, for the educational freedom initiative to be successful, equal attention and support must be given to what happens afterward. The families must be able to choose, and they must have effective schools from which to choose. In other words, as the children are set free to pursue quality education, they must have quality educational institutions from which to choose. Otherwise, it would be akin to what Frederick Douglass described as freedom under the worst circumstances—freedom with no options. In describing the plight of the slaves who were suddenly emancipated, Douglass stated the following:
Emancipation came to him surrounded by exceedingly unfriendly circumstances. It was not the choice or consent of the people among whom he lived, but against a death struggle on their part to prevent it. His chains were broken in the tempest and whirlwind of civil war. Without food, without shelter, without land, without money or friends, he, with his children, his sick, his aged and helpless, was turned loose and naked to the open sky…. A desperate extremity was this forced upon him at the outset of his freedom, and the world watched with humane anxiety to see what would become of him. (Foner 1955, 326)
Even though slavery drove the economy of the South, it was once noted that this nation could not survive as half-slave and half-free. Equally so, in today’s global economy, this nation cannot survive as half-educated and half-uneducated. Since the release in 1983 of one of the most scathing reports on the state of education in this nation, A Nation at Risk, education reform has been a major national thrust. Now, a quarter of a century later, it still commands national attention since very little progress has been made in education reform.
This issue of The Meantime is devoted to the engagement of Christian schools in the school choice and educational freedom movement. Throughout the nation, as under-resourced children are being afforded the resources and the opportunity to attend the schools of their choice, Christian schools are serving as centers of academic hope and educational healing for many of them. These schools are opening their doors in the truest evangelistic sense by offering a kind of “good news” education to families who have been bound to whatever education was offered to them, whether or not it worked for their children. ACSI and the Urban School Services Department encourage this activity. It is our hope that schools will network to encourage and enhance the knowledge available to make such engagements more effective and meaningful for the students and their families.
For additional information on school choice, visit the ACSI website, www.acsi.org, for a helpful Q&A section along with additional school choice programs throughout the nation and testimonials from Christian educators and families. Select the Programs tab, then Legal Legislative Services, and then School Choice Issues. You can also contact the Urban School Services Department for assistance or additional information.
References
Douglass, Frederick. 1894. An oration delivered at the Manassas Industrial School, Manassas, VA. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/dough tml/doughome.html.
Foner, Philip S. 1955. The life and writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, Reconstruction and after. New York: International Publishers.
U.S. Department of Education. 2008. Preserving a critical national asset: America’s disadvantaged students and the crisis in faith-based urban schools.
The Meantime 8.2