Gates Family Foundation

Black Alliance for Education Options

The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) is a nonprofit organization that describes its goal as “increas[ing] access to high-quality educational options for Black children by actively supporting parental choice policies and programs that empower low-income and working class Black families.”

BAEO believes that school choice may be widespread, but it’s not widely available to the poor. Affluent families have choice because they can move to different neighborhoods with better public schools, or send their children to private schools. The economically disadvantaged, on the other hand, are often trapped in failing public schools.

The Alliance supports a variety of choice options including publicly and privately financed scholarships to private schools, charter schools, and home schools.

Its leaders work closely with elected officials at the national and state level to implement choice programs. They publish studies, conduct polls, hold seminars, and stage rallies. BAEO describes its “Annual Symposium” as the largest convention of parental choice supporters in the nation.

BAEO is funded by a variety of corporate and philanthropic organizations including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Getting the Message Out

BAEO was officially launched in August 2000 after African-American educators and parents held a series of meetings in Milwaukee and Washington, DC. BAEO’s co-founder and chair is Howard Fuller, the former superintendent of the Milwaukee public schools and a Marquette University professor.

Fuller says school choice is the most important civil rights issue for African Americans today. “People always ask me, ‘Why are you so mad?’” Fuller told the Baton Rouge Advocate in 2007. “I’m mad because on average 17-year-old black and brown teenagers do math as well as a 13-year-old white child.”

BAEO made a dramatic impact in its very first year of operation, launching a $1.3 million television and radio ad campaign in Washington, D.C. aimed at influencing Congress. These ads featured minority parents supporting the ability to send their children to public, private, or parochial schools. By the end of 2002, BAEO had spent $4.3 million on such advocacy advertising.

In April 2001, President George W. Bush hosted a meeting of 135 education reformers at the White House. Fuller and other fellow Milwaukeeans met privately with the President to discuss his plans to promote charter schools and other choice initiatives.

Later that year, the National Center for Policy Analysis published a book by Fuller and BAEO president Kaleem Caire called Ten Myths About School Choice. Among the myths this book refuted is the claim that tax-funded voucher programs weaken public schools. In fact, where voucher programs have been implemented, public schools have improved.

School Reform in the Nation’s Capitol

In 2004, Congress established America’s first federally-funded voucher plan in the District of Columbia. The $40-million program allows at least 1,700 poor DC public-school students to receive vouchers worth as much as $7,500 to attend private schools.

A key vote occurred in September 2003 when the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the plan. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana abstained from voting, later Landrieu telling The Washington Post: “Education reform in America or in the District will not be achieved by giving a few children a choice.”

In response, the DC chapter of BAEO bought a full-page ad in a New Orleans newspaper accusing Landrieu of betraying African-Americans, and noting that her own two children attended the private Georgetown Day School.

In 2009, the Obama Administration decided not to re-authorize the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. BAEO partnered with several pro-school choice groups to conduct a poll that found DC residents overwhelmingly supported continuing the program. The poll of 1,000 residents showed that:

• 75 percent support the city’s school voucher program;

• 56 percent believe there should be more scholarships for low-income students; and

• 68 percent oppose Congress’s effort to end the program.

On September 30, 2009, BAEO organized a Capitol Hill demonstration in which more than 3,200 parents and students demanded that President Obama and Congress re-authorize their voucher program. The speakers included House Minority Leader John Boehner, Washington city councilman (and former mayor) Marion Barry, and Senator Joe Lieberman.

Fighting for Reform in the States

In 2008, BAEO worked closely with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and state legislators to successfully push for a $10 million private school scholarship program in New Orleans. Louisiana’s Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program provides state scholarships worth up to $7,138 to low-income families so they can move their children out of failing public schools.

On the first day that parents could apply for the scholarships, 700 were waiting in line for the doors to open at the registration site. More than 2,000 attended information sessions. In attendance to answer questions and assist parents was BAEO’s Louisiana state director. About 700 students were served by the program during the 2008-2009 school year. That number grew to more than 1,200 the following year.

Georgia enacted its first universal school choice program in May 2008, in which public school parents are eligible for $50 million in scholarships to send their children to private schools. Under this tuition tax credit program, people and businesses donate portions of their state taxes to nonprofit organizations offering K-12 scholarships. BAEO president Gerard Robinson spoke to the General Assembly before the legislation was passed.

Soon afterward, the state Board of Education appointed Robinson to the seven-member Georgia Charter Schools Commission. The commission is authorized to approve charter school applications that are rejected by local school boards.

In 2009, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland sought to cut funding for the state’s 330 charter schools by more than $200 million. BAEO joined with the “My School, My Choice” coalition of parents and teachers to mobilize opposition to the proposed budget cuts. They sponsored ads on radio stations in Columbus, Akron, and Cleveland accusing Governor Strickland of advocating “separate but unequal treatment” of schools serving a largely African-American student body.

“Most of us would like to believe those days are over, but are they?” asked a voice in the ads. “Here in Ohio, some politicians are trying to block the schoolhouse door for more than 80,000 public charter school students who are disproportionately African-American.”

The state legislature later restored the charter school funding and also wrote new rules to make charter schools stronger.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM)

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. PCRM is a fanatical animal rights group that seeks to remove eggs, milk, meat, and seafood from the American diet, and to eliminate the use of animals in scientific research. Despite its operational and financial ties to other animal activist groups and its close relationship with violent zealots, PCRM has successfully duped the media and much of the general public into believing that its pronouncements about the superiority of vegetarian-only diets represent the opinion of the medical community.

Powder River Basin Resource Council

If there’s a political issue affecting Wyoming food producers and consumers, you can bet that the Powder River Basin Resource Council (PRBRC) will be in the middle of it. The group’s news releases often say that it “represents family farmers, ranchers and other rural residents.” But somehow PRBRC always seems to weigh in against the folks who raise hogs and cattle (by supporting draconian government regulations), and against consumers (by advocating policies that result in higher prices).

In truth, the group really represents the narrow interests of its own small membership, as well as the interests of big-money foundations that fund its operations from the East and West coasts. As with all the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) groups, PRBRC justifies its activist pressure tactics by its supposed concern for “the environment.”

In 1997 PRBRC pressured the Wyoming legislature into passing a law that the Natural Resources Defense Council admitted was “aimed at” large-scale hog farms, by mandating that the facilities were a certain distance from residences, schools and towns. WORC’s recent annual reports confirm PRBRC’s prevailing attitude toward successful, large-scale farmers. “A local PRBRC chapter,” the group wrote in 2000, “gained a moratorium on new or expanded permits for hog factories in July and petitioned the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality to regulate odor from animal factories.”

Regarding PRBRC’s recent push to regulate odor controls, its activists are agitating for changes to the “ambient air standard” for certain hog feeding operations. In a nutshell, PRBRC’s master plan would require pigs not to stink.

In 2001, the PRBRC continued its anti-consumer barrage, mounting a campaign to lobby the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to multiply its rules regarding Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (usually called “CAFOs”). That’s bureaucratese for the safe, efficient, and already heavily environmentally regulated places where livestock are fed before they become part of our food chain. PRBRC’s news release said that it wanted the EPA to “crack down on the mega CAFO operations that are polluting the water and desecrating the land.”

As is so often the case with farm activists on the left, however, PRBRC wants to employ government regulators as a uniquely advantageous double-edged sword: one side to protect its own interests, and the other to cripple its competitors. That same PRBRC press release pleaded with the EPA to continue “protecting our family farms and ranches from over-regulation” (emphasis added). Having it both ways by regulating your competition to death while winning special exemptions for yourself may hardly seem fair, but PRBRC calls it “balance.”

The Powder River Basin Resource Council’s desire to cripple its competition — those large farming operations whose consistent success has allowed them to grow — appears to be all-consuming. Why else would its officers have thrown their support behind a radical group like the organic food lobby’s Center for Food Safety (CFS)? PRBRC recently joined CFS and a dozen other foundation-dependent groups in a legal action that suggested that eating mainstream U.S. beef has become risky business. The 2001 petition was an attempt to pressure Agriculture Secretary Veneman and Health and Human Services Secretary Thompson “to take immediate action to protect Americans from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or ‘mad cow disease.’”

Never mind that there has never been a single case of an American contracting the disease from eating U.S. beef. The Powder River Basin Resource Council was eager to step into CFS’s limelight in order to help create a crisis of confidence among consumers. PRBRC appears to be hoping that if Americans lose faith in mainstream beef producers, its membership — made up of fringe producers who raise “organic,” “free range,” and so-called “sustainable” livestock — will swoop in to fill the void. That’s just the sort of “balance” that could put huge numbers of people out of work and raise prices for consumers.