One of the most striking results of the vote on Amendment 1, which was approved by Georgia voters on Tuesday and creates an independent commission to authorize public charter schools in the state, is the absolutely extraordinary level of support received from African-American voters.

In the 20 Georgia counties where African-Americans make up half or more of the population, the amendment was approved by 61% of all voters and in 14 of those 20 counties. (In two of the other six counties, the amendment still got 49% of the vote; in the other four, support ranged from 42-44%).  In the 13 counties where more than half of Georgia’s three million black citizens live, the margin of support was even higher: 62% approval.

The bottom line: Georgia’s black counties overwhelmingly desire dramatic new alternatives to the conventional school systems that have failed them for more than a century. 

That level of support flatly contradicts one of the flimsiest canards used to criticize Amendment 1—and charter schools in general. That is: the idea that somehow charter schools end up hurting minority or poorer students while disproportionately helping white and middle class children. The actual performance of charter schools in Georgia has always defied such claims. African-American students and all children living in urban areas with failed conventional public schools, like Atlanta, have benefited far more from charters than any other groups.

That reality of the vote is even more remarkable when plotted across a map of Georgia. Amendment 1 was overwhelming approved in populous areas like Atlanta, Savannah and Macon—where a new generation of residents from all social and ethnic backgrounds want an eclectic, diverse, “city” life but where the archaic system of local school board control of public education has been a sustained failure for decades. The amendment also received huge support in places like Cherokee County, where the local school board in recent years has been perhaps the most hostile to all charter schools—and any kind of meaningful school reform—of any location in Georgia. The monopoly so long held by chronically failing institutions like those is what Amendment 1 will now challenge.

The support of Amendment 1 among African-Americans is also notable against the backdrop of the Georgia Supreme Court decision in May 2011 that struck down as unconstitutional a previous version of the state charter commission. That ruling on a lawsuit organized by school boards that oppose all charter schools led directly to the campaign for Amendment 1. In the 2011 ruling, the Supreme Court ignored some substantive issues around state funding that in truth needed judicial scrutiny, and instead struck down the old commission using a cruelly naïve logic that would have been comical if it had not been so nauseatingly ironic. The court reached all the way back to Georgia’s defunct constitution of 1877–a white supremacist document passed expressly to end the brief period of true citizenship enjoyed by formerly enslaved African-Americans after the Civil War–and cited as the basis of their ruling against the charter school commission the very constitutional article that first mandated racially segregated schools in Georgia.

How richly appropriate then, that African-American voters in Georgia used the ballot box to renounce the state Supreme Court’s absurdist logic. A total of more than 805,000 “yes” votes (out of a total of 2.1 million statewide in favor of the amendment) were cast in the counties with the largest number of black voters. That includes DeKalb (54% African-American), where the amendment passed with 64% of the vote; and Fulton (43% African-American), where it was approved by 66%. 

And where did Amendment 1 get the absolute highest level of support: in 66% black Clayton County, the poster child for abominable school boards, where the system lost its accreditation as a result of staggering dereliction by the elected board. African-American families in Clayton have been in open revolt—ousting some school officials at the polls, moving to nearby jurisdictions with better schools and mounting immense pressure for improvements.

Voters in Clayton gave the charter school amendment a stunning 71% approval.  That says it all.

For months, this race was described as a grueling duel between candidates who each were viewed less than enthusiastically by even their own base of supporters—a grinding battle of attrition by two flawed and not-so-inspiring men. Yet in the last days and hours of the campaign, something very different appeared to be happening. As Romney, Obama and their allies raced through a whirlwind of appearances across the key battleground states, the campaign transformed as they were by raucous crowds of often staggering size.

Romney closed his day in New Hampshire before more than 12,000 ecstatic supporters. Earlier, the Republican made a swift visit to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, part of a last ditch effort to put in play the 20 electoral votes held by a state long assumed to be solidly in the Democratic column. He was greeted by a crowd of 30,000, according to local reporters.

Obama finished the night in Iowa, in an emotional gathering before 20,000 during which, in the style of his late-campaign partner, former President Bill Clinton, he reportedly shed a single tear.  Earlier, the president spoke to 20,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin. That was on the heels of a Virginia rally late Saturday with a crowd of more than 24,000 people. (Notably, the other most recent ex-president, Republican George W. Bush, remained to the last hour as he has been throughout this election year—completely invisible.)

On both sides of the race, advocates for the candidates made dramatic claims that the huge gatherings of supporters and other signs demonstrated that the electorate was breaking their direction—that victory was certain.  Michael Barone, an editorial writer for the conservative Washington Examiner, pronounced that Romney was on his way to a stunning 315 electoral vote victory. That tally included a sweep of not just both Florida and Virginia (where polls have show the candidate with razor thin leads), but also in most states where surveys put him meaningfully behind—Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The president’s chief political advisor, David Axelrod, bluntly countered those and similar “weird theories” during a stop in Wisconsin.  “We’re going to win the electoral vote and we’re going to win the popular vote,” Axelrod said. “We’re very, very confident.”

The last final rounds of independent polling in the race continued to show an astonishingly close election, but also suggested that Romney in fact faced growing obstacles as election day arrived.  There was little movement in all late polls, but where there was any, nearly all of it shifted toward Obama—including a potentially decisive movement back toward the president by female voters.

Early Monday, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll put the president ahead in critical Ohio by a six-point margin, 51-45. A Washington Post daily tracking poll released later in the day gave Obama a two point edge, 50-48, in nationwide polling—a small but dramatic shift after weeks of surveys showing a virtual dead heat. The New York Times’ celebrated number cruncher, Nate Silver, calculated that based on his analysis of all polls, Obama’s likelihood of reelection was above 92%.

Republican groups—particular ones affiliated with some tea party organizations–arguably mounted the party’s most ambitious effort in decades to attract conservative black voters in 2012. The strategy was that in a tightly contested election, convincing even a sliver of African-American voters to return to the Republican coalition that virtually all black voters were a part of until the 1930s could potentially change the outcome of the race. A coalition of black pastors traveled the country calling on other minority clergymen to denounce Obama for his shift to support gay marriage—a position historically opposed by a large majority of black voters. FreedomWorks, one of the largest national organizations affiliated with the tea party movement, helped finance extensive outreach efforts aimed at socially conservative African-Americans, including production of a feature length film titled “Runaway Slave” that toured cineplexes across the U.S. in recent months.

But in the final stage of the campaign, there were growing signs that little erosion had occurred in black support for the president. After an initial dip in support for the president among African-Americans immediately after his gay marriage announcement, polls in critical states showed black support return to levels essentially equivalent to 2008. Surveys by Public Policy Polling in North Carolina found that over time, many more black voters shifted to support of gay marriage after the president changed his position than turned against Obama because of it. Many black voters also said they were infuriated by attacks by Congressional Republicans on Attorney General Eric Holder and comments in by Romney last summer to an NAACP national meeting.

In narrow margin states where a large population of African-American voters could be decisive to the outcome—Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio—the Obama campaign unleashed massive get out the vote efforts in recent days. Focused on predominantly black colleges and African-American barber and beauty shops, the push reached tens of thousands of voters. “We tell them their vote counts,” said Tiara Moore, a 23-year-old graduate student at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., after a day of canvassing on campus. “People fought for this. Died for it. And you’re just going to sit in your classroom.” Social issues like gay marriage, she said, were irrelevant. “We talk about healthcare and student loans.”

Across the country, huge numbers of Americans voted early—reaching more than 45 million, or a third of all votes likely to be cast. In Florida, 4.4 million had voted by Monday morning, slightly more of them Democrats than Republicans. In Ohio, the total number of early ballots reached 1.6 million, with long lines and record level voting in some counties right to the end. The campaigns quarreled through interviews and talk shows over whether those numbers worked to the advantage of Romney or Obama, but the numbers were indisputable that voter enthusiasm had not plummeted. In North Carolina, where Obama won the state by fewer than 15,000 votes in 2008, the number of early votes approached 3 million, with 48 percent of them coming from Democrats and 32 percent from registered Republicans. Obama partisans said tens of thousands more advance ballots had been cast in Ohio counties won by the president in 2008 than in counties carried that year by Sen. John McCain—and that large majorities of the early and late-registering voters were women, minorities and young people. Those are all groups in which late polling showed strong leads for the president. Advisors to Romney scoffed at those suggestions.

Both campaigns also appeared to be competing for “most-grueling” finale prize, as they and their surrogates appeared in a dizzying number of locations. Each candidate was said to have logged 6,000 or more miles of travel in the final episode of the race. An Obama insider circulated a data sheet that read like the racing sheets on a thoroughbred horse. The president had visited Ohio 22 times in 2012; Vice President Joe Biden 11 times; First Lady Michelle Obama 8 times; More than 21,000 volunteers had visited 828,000 voters over the past weekend.

In news stories Monday, Romney campaign officials said they had matched the president’s vaunted get out the vote machine step by step, sign by sign, and door knocker by door knocker.  Now let the votes be counted.

Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer Prize winning chair of the Miller Center Forum at the University of Virginia and a contributor to the Washington Post.

Our personal conclusion: We support Amendment 1.

We’ve heard good people—including friends and allies whose right to make their own decisions regarding this we respect 100 percent–say they support “some” charter schools but oppose Amendment 1 because it’s going “too far,” is “too corporate” or gives “too much power” to the state. We know those views are truly sincere and well-intentioned. We share some of the misgivings.

But we also believe that many people don’t realize how precarious all charter schools are in Georgia right now—and what a serious threat that is to all of us who believe in the importance of diverse public schools serving every family from every background.

The three biggest arguments we’ve heard against Amendment 1 are this: 

• First, that charter school proponents already have an “appeal” process to the state board of education if they are not given a fair hearing by a local school board;
• Second, that approving this amendment would mean less funding for conventional public schools;
• Third, that this gives the state “too much power” over public education and takes away the local control of local school boards. 

Based on our experience over the past decade, all three of those arguments appear flatly incorrect.

• First, under the “appeal” to the state board of education allowed under current law, the best that a charter school organizer can hope for is to be approved as a “special” school receiving just a fraction of the funding that conventional public schools receive. Schools like those are doomed to fail.
• Second, the only way that additional charter schools meaningfully divert funds from other schools is if they attract back to public education children who are not currently attending public schools. In a state where tens of thousands of children—more than 100,000 in Atlanta alone—have abandoned public schools, the idea of convincing a new generation of students and their families to return to public education is a GOOD thing. To argue otherwise is to accept all of the worst trends in public education over the past 50 years.
• Third, and finally, how can anyone argue that the system of local school boards has been a good thing? Over the last 20 years. Suburban school boards have openly encouraged white flight from the city and resisted reform ferociously. The city school system continues—despite the valiant efforts of some who have tried to turn things around—to post abysmal academic performance and graduation rates, and is today most famous for Atlanta’s ignominious cheating scandal. What could possibly be the argument for continuing to give that system of governance total control of all public schools?

In our minds, what is even more important than any of those arguments is this: A tremendous attack is already underway that threatens the existence of ALL charter schools. It began when the old state charter school commission was struck down by the state Supreme Court last year—proving that for charter schools to thrive they cannot exist purely on the whims of local school boards. This is why the education policy of President Barack Obama calls for the creation of “alternative authorizers”—like the one Amendment 1 would establish–of charters in every state. 

THE ATTACK ON CHARTER SCHOOLS:

The ruling against the commission was in response to a lawsuit initiated by a few school boards that oppose the existence of all charter schools. Since that decision, the state Department of Education and many local school districts have already been recalculating formulas for funding in ways that have slashed millions of dollars from charter schools. It isn’t just that the bad economy has hurt everyone. Instead, local school systems have attempted to balance their budgets by disproportionately cutting funding for charter schools, diverting that money to non-charter schools and to make up shortfalls stemming from the systems’ poor financial practices in the past. Already, charter schools have had to band together to hire lawyers to fight some of these clearly unfair efforts.

If Amendment 1 fails, these attacks will accelerate. It will become vastly more difficult for new charter schools to be created in Georgia. And all existing charter schools in the state almost certainly will face a new barrage of obstacles when it is time to renew their charters. During the campaign over Amendment 1, local school leaders have repeatedly made it clear that they don’t even view charter schools as being public schools. They want to see all independent charter schools disappear. Based on past history, that attack will ultimately include going after well-established, high-performing, beloved schools such as Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School. It will be up for renewal in just three years. 

To fully understand the importance of re-establishing the charter school commission, you have to look at the history of schools like the one we helped establish. It currently has generally good relations with Atlanta Public Schools, and there are many APS administrators who are committed to working in supportive ways with charter schools. We deeply respect those individuals and believe in them.

OUR EXPERIENCE BEFORE THERE WAS A COMMISSION:

But it wasn’t always that way. When we began working with a group of neighbors to create Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School back in the late 1990s, there was no charter school commission, and there were hardly any charter schools in Georgia. When we approached the administration of former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall with the idea of taking over the decrepit and underperforming elementary school in Grant Park that the system had announced they would soon abandon, she and others made it clear to us that our efforts were unwelcome. When we said we believed we could reconnect our neighborhood to the school and convince large numbers of families to reconsider public education, they blew us off. When we pressed ahead, APS fought our success tooth and nail—going to almost any length to prevent the creation of the school, and after it was established doing everything possible to shut us down. Administrators flagrantly denied funding the school was clearly entitled to. When our building burned catastrophically in 2003 during the first year of operation, APS illegally contracted for bulldozers to come in and remove what was left of the building (without even notifying us). APS lawyers worked bitterly to block us from receiving insurance funds we were entitled to get for reconstruction, and at the same time notified us that our charter was going to be terminated for failure to immediately rebuild. That’s no exaggeration. It was that bad.

We overcame those efforts at sabotage, miraculously. Our neighborhood banded together, rebuilt anyway and persevered. Dynamic and talented teachers began flocking to the school with their resumes, and our students began posting some of the highest scores in the city. (Without cheating.) As early charter schools like ours succeeded, though, metro Atlanta school districts still didn’t embrace them. Instead, they began adopting policies designed to make it virtually impossible for more charter schools to be established. There was no state charter commission then, so local school boards had complete control over the approval of new schools. By 2007, things were so bad that metro Atlanta school districts rejected almost every new charter school proposed that year—often on the most specious grounds. That wave of denials led directly to the state legislature voting to create a charter school commission in 2008 with the power to overrule rejections by local boards, and to fully fund those schools.

Only after that did the Atlanta board of education and other local school systems truly begin working in good faith with charter school groups. Soon APS had created a rigorous but completely professional system for considering applications. It accepted convincing proposals for high-quality new schools—such as Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School’s expansion into the middle school grades several years ago—and rejected applications that couldn’t make the grade. Serious charter school advocates like us applauded when the commission shot down inferior plans. Many other districts—though not all–took similar steps.

During the two years that the charter commission existed, there was no avalanche of poor performing new charter schools—as some opponents of Amendment 1 suggest would happen if it is approved on Tuesday. There was no syphoning off of hundreds of millions of dollars from starving conventional public schools. No attacks on teachers. No surge in social or racial stratification of schools.

Instead, with the charter commission keeping local school boards honest, the number of children attending independent charter schools in Georgia grew slowly and steadily. Gradually, the number of pupils rose by the end of 2011 to just under 60,000 in about 100 independent charter schools—or less than 4 percent of all public school students in Georgia. (That number excludes so called “charter systems,” which actually remain under the direct management of local school boards and differ very little from conventional public schools.)

In Atlanta during those years, the total number of students in charter schools grew to just under 4,000—including 637 students currently enrolled in kindergarten through 8^th grade on the two campuses of Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, where both our children have attended.

THE NEW ATTACK ON EDUCATION REFORM:

All that began changing when the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in May 2011 that the state legislature didn’t have the legal right to have ever created the old charter school commission. (Read Doug’s op-ed on the ruling at the time here: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/opinion/charter-ruling-flunks-history-ignores-roots-of-seg/nQtnm/) Since then, growth in independent charter schools has stalled—at just above 60,000 students statewide. Local school boards no longer have to worry about being overruled if they reject a proposed charter or a renewal for no good reason. The number of proposals for new charter schools has plummeted—chilled by the newly hostile environment. At the same time, the state Department of Education, under the new direction of a state superintendent who has made clear his previously stated support for charter schools was less than it appeared, has become increasingly difficult for all charter schools to work with. Our funds have been cut much more dramatically than conventional schools.

Why does this matter even beyond charter schools?  It matters because charters have become one of the very few remaining places in the world of education where there are still people working to foster racially and socially diverse schools, and trying to convince families to stay in public schools rather than flee to private ones. That goal is at the core of Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School.  The driving force to improve Maynard Jackson High School, the conventional APS school in Grant Park, is an inspiring group of parents whose kids were reconnected to public education through our neighborhood charter school. Without charters, that would never have happened.

Meanwhile, in APS overall, the student population plummeted during the time since our group began working to create a charter school. There were about 57,000 students in APS at the beginning of Dr. Hall’s tenure—a tenure during which APS genuinely improved in some respects. Nonetheless, even as the population of Atlanta grew rapidly and charters were adding thousands of students to the APS rolls, the total number of students in the system dwindled to less than 49,000 by the time she retired in the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal.

Charter schools are by no means a solution for every ill in public education. Just like the best conventional public schools, they are human endeavors, and like humans they are imperfect. Sometimes they fail. They should never replace all of traditional public education. But in the decade that charters have existed in Georgia, they have vastly more often provided quality education for tens of thousands of students who otherwise wouldn’t have had good schools to attend or would never have participated in public education at all. Far more important, charter schools in many areas have challenged the fossilized local school boards and education bureaucrats who long controlled public education across Georgia to finally wake up and get serious about meaningful reform. And charter schools—embraced nationally by Republicans and Democrats from Bill Clinton to George Bush to Barack Obama–have revitalized the idea that public schools should serve everyone, and not just those with no other options.

If Amendment 1 fails, it will be open season on all charter schools in Georgia, open season on the small number of conventional public school administrators who have been supportive of them, and open season on the only truly hopeful trend in Atlanta public education for a generation.

Vote yes for Amendment 1.

Doug and Michelle Blackmon 

Nov. 1, 2012

Unfortunately, there are also still many people who are desperate to contort every fragment of history that they find into a foundation for a particular political agenda.  In the terrain covered by my book and film, this is done often by both Democrats (who want to forget their ardent opposition to civil rights for African Americans a century ago) and more recently by Republican supporters (who want to claim credit for passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, even though the moderate wing of the party that cooperated with Lyndon Johnson in those votes has since been essentially obliterated).

Earlier today, I rejected a comment from one person because of the sweepingly inaccurate depiction it contained of what was and wasn’t in the film.  He submitted another post a short while later that was marginally different, which I approved mostly so that others can see a good demonstration of what I call “historical contortionism.”  It’s an impulse to twist history in ways that make it propagandistic, and that can see history only through a lens of the present.  It values history only to the degree that bits and pieces can be used as ammunition in some contemporary fight–usually in ways that are irrelevant and ultimately false.

People who are serious about history, serious about the truth, whether they are conservative or liberal, Democrats or Republicans, realize that that sort of history–the kind of thing that used to come from the “Ministry of Information” in other countries–is dangerous.  Slavery by Another Name is about America’s failures. No one group gets the blame. No one group gets to take credit. Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise. Don’t become an unwitting, or witless, co-conspirator in a new effort to pollute our understanding of the past. 

Here’s the response I gave to the historical contortionist, whose comment is on the blog as well.

So I want to thank everyone who has visited this site, shared their stories and reached out to me in other ways. I have learned so much from all of you.  I’m also gratified that the vast vast majority of the communication I’ve had has come from readers who wanted constructive dialogue with others about the complicated issues of race and the past that are still so much at the center of America’s national discourse.  Even people who wanted to disagree with me have often had good and admirable intentions.  But there have been other voices too, who remind us that there are still many people in our society whose goals are destructive or propagandistic.  They are the strongest argument for continuing to seek honest conversation, driven by facts and clinical observation.

In a few days, on Feb. 13, 2012, the documentary film based on my book will appear on PBS, at 9 p.m. EST.  Hopefully, it will stir an even larger conversation about these important questions in American life–and hopefully it will once again be a discussion marked by constructive goals.  Wherever it goes, I’ll  do a better job of sharing my thoughts on the blog from here on.

Thanks again to all of you who have joined in this dialogue. Please stay with me, and encourage others to join us.

9 p.m. Eastern Time (Check your local listings)

PBS broadcasts the 90-minute documentary Slavery by Another Name, based on Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book.  Directed by Sam Pollard. Produced by Catherine Allan and Douglas Blackmon. Written by Sheila Curran Bernard.  A tpt National Productions project.

You can also see the film online at http://video.pbs.org/video/2176766758

Or order the DVD at http://www.shoppbs.org/home/index.jsp

Watch the trailer.

Visit the Pulitzer Prize website.

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Presented by The Book Lady Bookstore and the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum
2009 Pulitzer Prize winning writer and journalist Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery By Another Name, will give a free lecture and sign books, lecture to begin at 7 pm.

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