Washington
DC Mayor Anthony A. Williams personifies the rot that masquerades
as New Black Leadership, corporate style. Defying the demonstrated
wishes of an overwhelming majority of DC voters, and in return
for nothing but a smile from George Bush's public school-hating
Black Education chief, Rod Paige, Mayor Williams crumbled
in a pitiful heap of quivering unmanliness before the administration's
school vouchers juggernaut, last week. He had managed to stand
like a human being for barely three months.
Back
in February, Williams pretended to have a spine and a decent
respect for his constituents, who only months before had polled
76 percent against private school vouchers. A whopping 85
percent of Black Washingtonians rejected vouchers. Anti-voucher
sentiment goes way back. In 1981, 90 percent of DC voters
turned down a scheme to fund vouchers through a tax credit.
But the White House is determined to make Washington a showcase
for school privatization. On February 6, the Bush men sent
Education Secretary Paige to lean on Williams.
Well-founded
suspicions
Following
a closed door meeting with Paige, a Williams spokesman emphatically
denied the spin circulated by the Secretary's office, that
Williams was "amenable" to finding ways to accept
$75 million in voucher money appropriated for DC by the GOP-controlled
Congress. "He is not in support of that at all,"
mayoral spokesman Tony Bullock told the Washington Post. In
an interview with the rival paper, Bullock expanded on Mayor
Williams' position. "We needed that face-to-face [meeting
with Mr. Paige] to agree to disagree," Bullock told the
Washington Times. "And we wanted to do so in ways that
didn't prevent us from accessing funding for other school-choice
programs offered. But you are not going to see our government
participate in a government-sponsored voucher program. Once
you have moved past that immovable position, we are really
flexible about school choice and have a proven track record
with it."
However,
the Bush men already had Williams pegged as an invertebrate,
and assigned Paige to keep up the pressure. It didn't take
long for Williams to swallow Bush's private education agenda,
whole. After a series of backroom meetings, Williams is now
receptive to the full range of "innovations" dancing
in the heads of the Bradley Foundation and its Republican
think tanks - George Bush's brains. "We're willing to
try an experiment," Williams said in an interview, last
week. "We need to be putting together more good schools
and shutting down bad schools, and to the extent we're doing
this - and I think this helps - it's a good thing," he
told the Washington
Post.
In
return, the DC public schools get - nothing. Williams threw
up a smokescreen to conceal his surrender, first mentioning
the District's crushing special education programs burden
- as if he had been privately assured of White House assistance
on that score - then admitting that the bargain included no
substantive quid pro quo. The May 2 Washington Post
reported:
He
also is seeking more federal funding for public and charter
schools and has asked federal officials to take responsibility
for $100 million of the city's burgeoning special education
costs each year to ease the burden on the 67,500-student
school system.
Williams
said that the new funds, if approved, would not come in
exchange for his support for vouchers, though in a statement
issued by his office last night, he said, "Let me be
very clear in saying that any federally funded program that
provides scholarships for private schools must be balanced
with direct assistance to DCPS and with additional funding
for charter schools in the District."
Williams'
statement is either a transparent attempt to cover his naked
cowardice in the face of power, or the dumbest deal ever made
by a Black adult. Just days before, Republicans in the House,
having failed to tack vouchers proposals onto funding for
special education, defeated a Democratic measure to phase
in increased funding over a six or seven year period. The
President's men in Congress have blocked increased special
education money at every turn. "There will be no debate
in the United States House of Representatives on the most
critical issue facing special education today," lamented
Democratic
Rep. James McGovern (MA), following the vote.
Yet
Williams hints that there is a reward, somewhere, for his
abject surrender to vouchers. He is like Judas, desperately
searching his pockets for the missing 30 pieces of silver.
Washington
Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton once described
Mayor Williams as "either naive or stupid." Confronted
with word of his latest, bare ass tail-turning, Norton was
furious. "He has not been candid with me, and he hasn't
been candid with other elected officials. I'm telling you
as a member of Congress, we can get that [new funding] without
selling out" home rule, she said.
A
no-win game
If
the White House somehow finagles a special dispensation for
DC schools, it will be a token gesture to save what's left
of Williams' face. The privatizers have no interest in enhancing
the quality of public education - quite the contrary. The
"experiment" that Mayor Williams has agreed to facilitate
in the nation's capital would be designed to prove the superiority
of private education. Himself a product of Catholic schools,
Williams reveals anti-public education sentiments similar
to those expressed by his co-conspirator, Education Secretary
Paige. ("In a religious environment the value system
is set. That's not the case in a public school, where there
are so many different kids with different kinds of values."
- Paige, 
The Issues
- April 24.) Mayor Williams is ready to throw out the
entire public edifice. "We've got a model we've been
using for 140 years," he told a reporter. "I think
it's time to try something else."
That's
exactly what rightwing Republicans say - only they don't hide
their contempt for public schools, or their intention to privatize
most of education, over time. Williams, like other gaseous
Democratic
Leadership Council Blacks, has nothing whatever to offer
his 
constituents,
yet trades away their public institutions in exchange for
face-time with Power, refusing to fight for anything of value.
Williams personifies the worthless vacuity of his hustling
class.
"Mayor
Anthony A. Williams, a so-called Democrat, is actually a Republican.
And much of this city, which is said to be overwhelmingly
Democratic, is in the closet with him," wrote Black Washington
Post columnist Courtney Malloy, on May
4.
Malloy
is a thoughtful professional, fed up with Williams' "Republicanesque
'pro-business' schemes." However, Malloy is too hard
on the masses, and should be blaming the pretentious upper
classes that dominate Black political discourse in the District.
Fancying themselves players based on their relative wealth
and vain titles, these men and women offer as public policy
self-serving schemes washed down with cocktails. Sure in the
belief that they are members of some talented fraction, they
eschew the element of responsibility that Dubois intended
the class to bear on behalf of the less mobile. They bargain
away the people's possessions like a rump faction of drunken
Indians wearing a dead chief's headdress to a meeting with
the whites.
Selling
the birthright
The
voucher game was practically invented by the Bradley Foundation,
of Milwaukee, authors of most of the Republican Party's social
policies. Finding that vouchers were a non-issue among African
Americans in the late Nineties, Bradley gave millions to a
Black educational hustler named Howard Fuller to establish
the Center for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette
University. Additional millions followed from a host of other
far-right funders, allowing the Center to field a cadre of
professional Black voucher shysters. Many of these mercenaries
are now headquartered in Washington awaiting the deluge of
Bush voucher dollars so that they can begin their "experiment"
with the DC schools.
They
are predators, hoping to profit from the failures of public
school systems that have been deliberately starved by the
privatizers' Republican paymasters. In our July 11, 2002 commentary,
"Voucher
Tricksters: The Hard-Right Enters Through the Schoolhouse
Door," we wrote:
The
logic of privatization of education is absurd, and an affront
to the dignity and history of Black people. If urban public
schools are so hopeless that they should be turned over
to private companies, then what about the rest of urban
America? If privatization is best suited to meeting the
needs of the poor, then democratic institutions are least
suitable to the inner city. Why not forget about school
boards and city councils, entirely, in such depressed places?
Since poverty persists despite Black voting rights, why
not trade the whole process in for a marketplace solution?
We
think that DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton meant much the
same thing when she accused Mayor Anthony Williams of "selling
out" home rule. He has exposed himself as just another
Voucher Trickster - albeit one lacking even minimal skills
at sleight of hand. He robs the office of all dignity, and
shames a Black city.
