Preaching Choice in Obama’s Hometown – WSJ
The speaker was the Rev. James Meeks, explaining black resistance to vouchers. The venue was a sold-out lunch put on by the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI). The result? Something new in Windy City politics: a powerful black Democrat reaching out to a free
By William McGurn
‘The voucher movement seems to have been born, or seems to have been started as a Republican idea. That’s the way Democrats look at it. That’s the way black lawmakers look at it. This is a Republican idea. This is what the Republicans want to push on us. . . . We don’t seem to see public schools not working in your area.”
The speaker was the Rev. James Meeks, explaining black resistance to vouchers. The venue was a sold-out lunch put on by the Illinois Policy Institute. The result? Something new in Windy City politics: a powerful black Democrat reaching out to a free-market think tank to force reform on the city’s most hidebound institution—the Chicago public schools.
James T. Meeks does not fit the usual stereotype of a voucher advocate. To begin with, he is founder and senior pastor of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, the largest African-American church in Illinois. He serves as executive vice-president for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Oh, yes: He is a Democratic state senator who chairs both his chamber’s education committee and the legislature’s Black Caucus.
A few years back, Barack Obama named him someone he looked to for “spiritual counsel.” Now the man they call “the Reverend Senator” has done the unthinkable: He’s introduced a bill to provide vouchers for as many as 42,000 students now languishing in Chicago’s worst public schools. He tells me he thinks he can get enough Democrats on his coalition to get it through.
“I’m banking on the difficulty Democrats will have telling these parents, ‘No, you’re not going to have choice. Your kids are locked into these failing schools.'”
Right now, national attention on Illinois is focused on the possibility that Republicans may take the U.S. Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama. But Collin Hitt, the IPI’s director of education, notes Mr. Meeks may have the more far-reaching narrative.
“There is an irony that the highest-profile push for vouchers in America today is in Illinois, while the highest-profile opposition to vouchers is also from Illinois,” says Mr. Hitt. The latter reference is to President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrats whose opposition pulled the plug on a popular, bipartisan voucher program in our nation’s capital.
As his remarks make clear, Mr. Meeks appreciates the disincentives that make vouchers such a political orphan. Pro-voucher Republicans open themselves to a double whammy: opposition from suburban voters who are happy with their kids’ public schools and equate vouchers with bringing blacks into those schools; and only tepid support from African-Americans who are wary of GOP intentions. Meanwhile, any Democrat who dares to back vouchers will immediately find himself at war with the most powerful and unforgiving special interest in his party: the teachers unions.
That’s what Mr. Meeks meant when he spoke to IPI of the difficulty of Republicans using “our statistics”—that is, failure rates for inner-city public schools—to promote “a Republican idea” for largely black schools. He’s also frank about why he’s embraced that idea after years of banging the drum for more money. As he recently told one local TV interviewer, the money isn’t there. With Illinois $13 billion in debt, parents do not have “ten years to wait for Democrats to fund schools.”
Certainly he’s not a man to hold his tongue. He speaks frankly about elected officials “owned by unions.” About politicians who send their own kids to private schools—while opposing the choice for the less fortunate. In 2006, he gained notoriety for language in a fiery sermon that appeared directed at Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.
“We don’t have slave masters,” he said. “We got mayors. But they still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able . . . to be educated.”
Whether this was fair to Mayor Daley, it’s hard to contest the point about the school system. Even conceding there was progress during the years Mr. Duncan served as CEO of the Chicago public schools—especially on charters—half the students who make it to ninth grade still won’t see a high school diploma. Mr. Meeks invokes an even more dispiriting statistic: Only eight out of 100 Chicago public school students will graduate from a four-year college.
“If the American Dream includes sending your kids to college,” he asks, “what is Chicago saying to these parents?” Good question.
In the last presidential campaign, Americans responded to a candidate who spoke of a new politics of hope and promised to reach across the aisle. It hasn’t turned out that way in Washington. But back in the city the president and his education secretary left behind, Mr. Meeks believes he has found a reform that will give Chicago school parents change they can believe in.