What would Martin say?

• Author: Williams, Yohuru
• Position: Martin Luther King Jr., public school privatization - Column

This year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in U. S. history. It also has marked a renewed push by the proponents of corporate education reform to dismantle public education in what they persist in referring to as the great "civil rights issue of our time." The leaders of this effort, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, are fond of appropriating the language of the civil rights movement to justify their anti-union, anti-teacher, pro-testing privatization agenda. But they are not social justice advocates. And Arne Duncan is no Reverend King.

In a 2010 speech observing the forty-fifth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March, Duncan boldly invoked the words of John Kennedy: "Simple justice requires that public funds ... not be spent in any fashion which encourages, subsidizes, or results in racial discrimination." Duncan enjoined those in attendance, "Let me repeat that, President Kennedy said that no taxpayer dollars should be spent if they subsidize or result in racial discrimination." Yet Duncan and the Obama Administration--through Race to the Top, a program similar to the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind--have pursued policies that exacerbate segregation and racial inequality.

In a 2010 interview with then-chancellor of the New York City Department of Education Joel Klein, Duncan went even further, invoking the name of Martin Luther King to justify attacks on public schools. Dr. King "explained in his powerful Letter from Birmingham Jail why the civil rights movement could not wait," said Duncan. "America today cannot wait to transform education. We've been far too complacent and too passive. We have perpetuated poverty and social failure for far too long. The need is urgent and the time for change is now."

But there is plenty of evidence that King would never have endorsed corporate education reform or privatization. Consider how King defined the role of education.

While still an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1947, King said: "I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education." They "think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses." He continued: "Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means...