White Conservatives Fund Black Voucher Movement
by George E. Curry
NNPA News Service Editor-in-Chief

When you see those slick television ads featuring African-
Americans
expressing support for school vouchers as a way of helping
poor
students, don't be fooled. The faces appearing on the
screen are Black,
but the money behind the ads is mostly from Right-wing
groups that are
actively trying to eliminate affirmative action around the
nation.

The People For the American Way Foundation recently issued
a report
detailing the money behind the pro-vouchers movement. The
group
sponsoring the television ads over the past nine months is
the newly
formed Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), an
obscure group
based in Milwaukee. Estimates are that the group has spent
as much $3
million on ads targeted to Blacks.

''BAEO bills itself as a coalition of up-and-coming leaders
working
within the African-American community,'' the report
notes. ''But a
closer look reveals that BAEO is bankrolled by a small
number of
right-wing foundations better known for supporting education
privatization and affirmative action rollbacks than
empowering
African-Americans or low-income families.''

The report, ''Community Voice or Captive of the Right? A
Closer Look at
the Black Alliance for Educational Options'' is available
on the Web at
www.pfaw.org/issues/education/vouchers/factsheets/BAEOReport
12_01.pdf. .

The pro-vouchers movement provides a textbook study of how
White
conservatives, having failed to achieve their goals through
state ballot
initiatives, are able to funnel millions of dollars into an
organization
of hand-picked Blacks-including conservative commentator
Armstrong
Williams, former New York Congressman Floyd Flake and Ohio
Secretary of
State J. Kenneth Blackwell and then retreat into the
background as their
Black allies make their cases for them.

Despite the earnest-looking faces that peer from the
television screens,
the wholesale use of vouchers would not improve public
education. In
fact, vouchers would harm public education by removing its
brightest and
most motivated students and diverting tax dollars from cash-
strapped
school districts to private and parochial schools.
Conservative
estimates place the cost of a national voucher program at
$73 billion,
about 25 percent more than the budget for all public
schooling.

To the consternation of conservatives, vouchers have been
voted on 10
times as a statewide referendum and they have failed 10
times, never
getting more than 36 percent of the vote. Last year, those
going to the
polls in Michigan and California rejected vouchers by more
than a 2-to-1
margin. Similar proposals were defeated in Oregon in 1990,
Colorado in
1992 and the state of Washington in 1996.

''With the voucher legislation and ballot initiatives of
the 1980s
failing, voucher proponents embraced a new strategy-
adopting the
language of the civil rights movement and targeting the
African-American
community,'' the report states. ''...The current public
relations and
legislative focus on poor children does not alter right-
wing voucher
proponents' long-term goal of broader-based voucher systems
that would
irreparably harm public education.''

The bulk of the Black Alliance for Educational Options'
money comes from
four Right-wing foundations: the Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation, the
Walton Family Foundation, the American Reform Council and
the Milton and
Rose D. Friedman Foundation, Inc.

The Bradley Foundation is typical of the group's funders.
It has
contributed more than $2 million to BAEO and its
president's think tank,
the Institute for the Transformation of Learning
headquartered at
Marquette University in Milwaukee. That's peanuts compared
to more than
$355 million the foundation has given between 1985 and 1999
to
Right-wing think tanks, anti-affirmative action projects
and movements
to privatize public education.

Among the groups funded by Bradley are the Heritage
Foundation, the
American Enterprise Institute and the Free Congress
Foundation, all
conservative groups located in Washington, D.C. It donated
nearly $4
million to David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular
Culture.
Horowitz raised a national stink earlier this year when he
called the
reparations movement racist and said African-Americans
should be
grateful for having been enslaved in America.

Also receiving money from the Bradley Foundation was Ward
Connerly's
American Civil Rights Institute and the Washington-based
Center for
Individual Rights, which led the fight to outlaw
affirmative action at
the University of Texas law school and has two anti-
affirmative action
suits pending against the University of Michigan. Another
recipient was
Charles Murray, co-author of ''The Bell Curve,'' the
controversial book
that argues that African-Americans are intellectually
inferior to
Whites.

''Whether its leaders recognize it or not, BAEO is serving
as a tool for
some very extreme groups that do not have the best
interests of
African-Americans at heart,'' says Rev. Timothy McDonald,
chair of the
African-American Ministers Leadership Council. ''Our
community deserves
to know the truth about the people who are funding BAEO and
the
destructive agenda they have for African-American
families.''


George E. Curry, editor-in-chief of NNPA News Service and
BlackPressUSA.com, is former editor of ''Emerge: Black
America's
Newsmagazine.''