Yesterday’s post on the Boston Globe’s suggestion of a future state takeover of the Boston Public Schools discussed Domingo Morel’s Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy. Morel’s research shows that state takeovers of school districts usually (not always) bring about the political dis-empowerment of communities of color. Unfortunately we’ve seen several attempts to restrict representation or suppress voting in Massachusetts these past few years.
None of these plans cast themselves as aiming to disenfranchise minority voters; they tend toward the “we’re doing this for your own good” vein. Nonetheless they all rob minority communities of representation, of control over their own communities, of managing the state resources being made available to ameliorate conditions in some of the state’s most impoverished communities. I’ve written about this a few times so let me put it all together.
In Pioneer Institute Introduces the Beamer vs. Beater Theory of Democracy I wrote about a scheme concocted by the conservative advocacy shop to punish poor communities that depend on state aid for education. Pioneer’s idea is for the state to “appoint local school committee members commensurate with the portion of school district funding it provides. For example, if the state provides 85 percent of the funding in a district with seven school committee seats, it should also appoint six school committee members.” If you are from a wealthy community needing little aid you get full elected representation. But if you are from a less well-off place you get only partial democracy. Pioneer’s plot doesn’t even wait for any results, it just effects a state takeover. This raises one of the factors Domingo Morel notes in Takeover. Conservatives are resentful of their tax dollars going to aid poorer communities and want to deny control of those resources.
State control of local districts was also at issue in last year’s school funding bill. I wrote about it several times including in Education Funding and the Wall Street/State Street Axis. The House version of the bill included so-called accountability provisions: “if communities fall short of certain benchmarks, the state can step in. This would likely fall most harshly on struggling communities, not on the Scituates and Dovers of the world. It isn’t that Holyoke or Lowell have less caring or competent representation than those places, just more challenges.” Once again representatives of minority and impoverished communities could have their powers restricted. This was a big deal for the Walton family’s political team in Massachusetts which includes Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, and Massachusetts Parents United.
Then there was the 2018 plot by dark money operation Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance to suppress minority votes in a lame attempt to elect MassFiscal founder Rick Green to Congress. Beyond the goal of helping Green, “As Nancy MacLean shows in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the wealthy individuals behind dark money organizations hold it an important goal to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising their right to vote, precisely because those voters will cast ballots to improve their own lives in ways that lead to taxation of the rich.”
Right wingers couch these ploys in terms such as “voter integrity project” or “education reform.” They’re really about dis-empowering poor people and people of color, the very people who need a robust and responsive government.
“Perhaps the takeover occurred not because people didn’t care—but precisely because they cared and demanded more.”—Domingo Morel, Takeover.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education. But as I’ve come to realize that reform proposals often seem to disenfranchise communities of color, sometimes I write about that too.]