Obama thinks school choice is racist — here’s why that hurts black families

The Obama administration has left its lofty heights in Washington D.C. and descended upon a small southern town to impose its will on parents who have worked hard to find the right fit for their children’s education.

Cleveland, Mississippi is ground zero right now for a Department of Justice intervention that wasn’t asked for or needed. Cleveland should be the model for school choice in the nation but instead, President Obama is up to his usual tactics, using the power of government to force racial integration into a school system that is working very well as is.

Since the 1960s, the local school district there has made school choice a top priority and it’s yielded great results by giving parents a choice on where to send their children. Two schools epitomize the success in the district: American East Side High, which is a majority black school, and Cleveland High, which is almost perfectly mixed between black and white students. These demographics didn’t happen because of forced integration but naturally through school choice.

Ashley Bateman writes extensively about how the Obama administration is flipping this on its head over at The Federalist. She spoke with Michael Carr, a public defender and graduate of Cleveland High, who opposes the administration’s meddling and said the school system is running exactly like they want:

“East Side has an award-winning and highly respected principal—who happens to be white—and many white teachers who prefer teaching there over teaching at Cleveland High. CHS had a black student body president last year who won top awards at the MS High School Mock Trial Competition and got a full ride to Ole Miss. It’s not just ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We are all mixed up here. And that’s on purpose and how we want it. This lawsuit has just brought race to the forefront when it really was not headline news in our town.”

According to Bateman, the DoJ has resurrected a case from 1965, Cowan v. Cleveland School District, to impose forced integration on the town. Vice president of EdChoice Leslie Hiner told her that “the Department of Justice appears to be arbitrary and unfair to African-American parents, who stand to lose their freedom to choose what’s best for their own children.”

“African-American children are being pushed around by bureaucrats in Washington to achieve what the bureaucrats believe is a perfect balance of the races—regardless of the wishes of parents, regardless of the impact on those children and the quality of their lives,” Hiner added.

Since the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Hiner said, public schools  have actually seen an “alarming” increase in segregation. Bateman explains the impact of that unintended consequence:

In other words, forced desegregation was a policy for times in which individuals had less leverage to solve their own problems, before today’s greater access to school choice. Since Cleveland lets families choose which school their kids will attend, the fact that East Side is majority black is only so because families choose to put their children in a school with that composition. The federal lawsuit is telling these mostly African-American families that their choices have created systemic racism that requires federal intervention.

“Ordering schools to consolidate as a means to desegregate goes against local efforts of parents, teachers, and public school administrators to build an educational culture in the schools that offers greater opportunity for all students, regardless of their school of enrollment,” Hiner said. “If a school’s enrollment remains segregated as a result of the free choice of African-American families, does the government have a right to force these families to send their children to a different school against their wishes?”

The shortest answer is hell no.

Read more about how the Obama administration is threatening the will of Cleveland families here.