Howard L. Fuller: The Champion of Choice
(Note: this week and next, Gadfly will profile the winners of the 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Prizes for Excellence in Education. Next week, Eric A Hanushek)
When a fellow alumnus called in 1977, Howard Fuller knew he had to get involved in the fight to save his old high school. North Division High in Milwaukee had "meant everything" to Fuller. He had played center on its championship basketball team in 1958, and had never forgotten the thrill of starring on the first team from the city of Milwaukee to go to the state tournament. But Fuller's affection for his alma mater was hardly unusual. The school board's plan to close North and open a citywide magnet school in its place - all ostensibly in the name of racial integration - had dismayed dozens of prominent blacks who had attended the popular neighborhood school. Already, students had walked out in protest. Soon, Fuller - joined by fellow alums like state lawmaker Annette "Polly" Williams - was leading the protest rallies, marching with hundreds of students on the headquarters of the Milwaukee public school system.
Over a year later, Fuller and his allies won a rare victory, forcing the school board to keep North Division open as a neighborhood school. But the showdown with the board made Fuller rethink how "black power" could be used to bolster educational opportunity and student achievement among low-income African American children.
In the two decades since he quietly completed his Ph.D., Howard Fuller has gone on to become one of the nation's most outspoken and effective advocates for educational choice and one of its most impassioned practitioners. He was an important backer of the groundbreaking 1990 legislation that created the Milwaukee Parental Choice program, which enabled low-income students in that city to begin attending nonsectarian schools at public expense for the first time. The following year, school-board critic Fuller unexpectedly became the superintendent of Milwaukee's vast and troubled school system. During his four years as superintendent, from 1991 to 1995, Milwaukee was the nation's epicenter of the school choice battle. Fuller fought tirelessly to expand the voucher program and other educational options, including charter schools and privatizing failed schools. Even after stepping down from the superintendent's job, Fuller has soldiered on in the choice wars, establishing the influential Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a national organization of African-American community activists who promote a wide range of schooling options for low-income children. Through all the battles, Fuller stubbornly clung to his 60s-era credo of "power to the people" as a guiding principle of policy. And through it all, the black power activist has been called every epithet in the left-wing armory by teacher union critics and anti-choice liberals. "I've been called a sell-out, an Uncle Tom, a right-wing opportunist, the white man's dupe, all kinds of names," says Fuller. "But you have a responsibility to stand up and fight for what you believe. And if you are not willing to take the weight, you can't exercise leadership."
For Fuller, vouchers had an obvious appeal. He believed the old adage that "money talks" and figured that vouchers would empower previously helpless families and kids. Once school officials realized they could lose not just a student but also the funding that came with that pupil, poor children suddenly had value. "I believed then, and I believe now, that if you have money in America, you have choice," says Fuller. "Vouchers are just another way to empower black people and give them more of the same educational options as other people."
When the 1990 Milwaukee Parental Choice program debuted, and in the decade that followed, as the program expanded to allow students to attend religious schools, anti-voucher spokesmen predicted all sorts of disaster. John Benson, the former Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction asked rhetorically whether a terrorist like "Timothy McVeigh will start the next church in Milwaukee and see this as a profit-making venture and solicit enrollment. That's going to happen. There will be some horror stories." Less extreme critics argued that vouchers would cause public schools to lose students, reduce spending per pupil, and lower achievement, as the most motivated students used vouchers to leave public schools behind. None of those predictions came true. From 1990 to 2003, MPS enrollment increased by more than 5,000 students (a rise of about 6 percent), real spending per pupil grew by almost 40 percent, and when the use of vouchers expanded dramatically in recent years, academic achievement of MPS students rose modestly and the dropout rate dipped. Most important, a series of now famous studies showed that black children who went to private schools on vouchers in Milwaukee did better academically than other blacks who stayed in public schools.
While vouchers were certainly an important innovation during Fuller's tenure as superintendent, they were only a part of his reform agenda. In effect, Fuller envisioned that schools should serve more as semi-autonomous units that competed for school children. He decentralized budget-allocation decision-making down to the individual schools, strengthened curriculum requirements and accountability measures, and worked imaginatively to broaden choice through other options, such as charter schools and African-immersion academies. Thanks to Fuller, all ninth graders in MPS schools now take algebra, and individual schools control most district operating funds.
Today, Fuller continues to stay in touch with schools, administrators, and teachers in the MPS. And since founding the Black Alliance for Educational Options in 1999, he has spread the choice message through BAEO's burgeoning grassroots network of African-American activists. From just 50 members in 1999, BAEO now has more than 2,000 members, and boasts 18 chapters in 13 states and the District of Columbia. It recently won a $4 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create 15 new high schools, and the organization has helped broaden the parental choice agenda to include not just means-tested vouchers but public-private partnerships, historic schools, cyberschools, charter schools, black independent schools, and home schooling. Its memorable ads in major newspapers and the Washington, D.C. television market feature young black students and their parents repeating Fuller's critique that "parental choice is widespread - unless you're poor."
Fuller, meanwhile, remains largely undeterred by criticisms from his former liberal allies, despite the patronizing insinuation that he has been "duped" by the white man. "I learned back in the 1960s that you have permanent interests but you don't have permanent friends,'' he says. "You don't have to share the same world view." Fuller's stubborn pursuit of choice and black empowerment is also due partly to his refusal to countenance the guilt-by-association tactics of his critics. "People on the left attack me because some foundations and individuals who support vouchers also oppose affirmative action and the minimum wage,'' says Fuller. "All I can say is that I support affirmative action. I support the minimum wage. And I support school choice."
About 15 years ago, Howard Fuller started spinning records and working as a DJ in his off hours for fun. Other men of Fuller's generation - and more than a few neo-conservatives - have bemoaned the development of rap music, but Fuller listened carefully to the messages of the young hip-hop artists. The mid-1990s group Arrested Development, with its Pan-African references, soon became one of Fuller's favorites. Their song "Pride" became a personal anthem of sorts for Fuller - and it's not hard to see why. In "Pride," the members of Arrested Development boisterously declare: "Whether it's in style to keep the fight/I tread these waters and makes waves God knows/and I will fight until my dying day/and even after that, my ghost resides with pride."
To read Howard L. Fuller's full biographical sketch and profile, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/template/page.cfm?id=272.