The History of Private Schools Impacts Public Schools Presently

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Recently on Facebook, I shared The State article “SC Private Schools to get $32 million in Tuition Grants for Families During COVID-19.” I don’t want to shame anyone who is siding with McMaster’s decision to allocate funds from the discretionary fund to benefit private schools through tuition grants. I do have a few points to make, not as an invitation to argue but as an invitation for action on the part of those of us who are racially and economically privileged.

In The State article, Maayan Schechter and Joseph Bustos reported on ways the money could have been spent to assist public schools that desperately need the funding. Sherry East, head of the SCEA, said, “‘How many social workers could you have hired to knock on doors for non-respondent children with $32 million?’...referring to the several thousand children the state has lost touch with since the pandemic closed schools in March. ‘Yet we don’t put the money where we know we need it. What was the rationale for that?’”

In the WYFF article “Groups Share Strong Opposition to SC Governor's Use of CARES Act Funds for Private Schooling,” Stephanie Towers wrote, “John Eby, spokesman for the Pickens County School District also shared his disappointment. ‘It's hard to interpret what the Gov. did today as anything other than retaliation against districts for trying to speak up for the safety of their teachers and their students,’ he said, referring to some districts voicing opinions against Gov. McMaster's hope to have schools return to in-person class in the fall. Eby said enrollment for Pickens County School District is about 16,300 students. He said the district's CARES Act allocation is $2,757,516, which, he said equates to about $169 per student. ‘We were very surprised and very disappointed in the Gov.'s announcement...what the Gov. proposed this morning is splitting $32 million between 5,000 students.’" This equates to $6,400 per student. $169/student vs. $6,400/student. Let that sink in.

Further, as Ariel Gilreath explained in the Greenville News article “Gov. McMaster to Allocate $32 Million for Grants to Pay for Private School Tuition,” “The money will only go to families within 300% of the federal poverty line, he said. That means a family of four would need to make $78,600 or less to qualify for a grant...McMaster said the money will go to private schools to distribute, and it is intended for current private school students as well as students who wish to transfer to a private school for the year...McMaster said private schools will not be required to offer full in-person learning this fall in order to receive the grant...The first 2,500 scholarships will be awarded on a first-come-first-serve basis, and the rest of the grants will be awarded based on a lottery. McMaster's funding is in addition to CARES Act money private schools in the state are already set to receive.”

After announcing his desire for public schools to reopen five days a week, McMaster doesn’t require the same for private schools to receive the funding. Further, these funds will only benefit 5,000 students. If the money was solely intended to assist students who would be transferring from public schools, that would mean 5,000 students out of 787,069, which would be .6% of the public school student population, which is a paltry percentage to say the least. [District Headcount by Grade 2019-20] But the money isn’t solely intended to assist students who are transferring from public to private schools, which means it assists an even more meager percentage of school age children in SC.

Private education is expensive, and it is a choice. Our public schools across this state are underfunded, and there isn’t a choice for many families. Our state’s most vulnerable children need as much financial aid directed to their schools for their safety and education as possible.

Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone. Honestly, it isn’t that long ago when I probably would have been aligned with those who support McMaster in this matter. However, I now understand more about the historical narrative surrounding education in this nation. 

In the Almost Heretical podcast episode “Good News and Bad News,” Lisa Sharon Harper delineates the commitment of white people to maintaining white spaces, with the schools being one of those places. She said, “I understand that the one thing that threads all of this together is not Roe v. Wade; it’s actually Brown v. Board of Education - that in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruled that all people in the United States are deserving of equal protection of the law and that separate is not equal, and so therefore integration was mandated, especially in school systems. So that is actually when the culture wars began, that the culture wars erupted… Because what happened was that Brown v. Board of Education was a threat to white supremacy, and not just white supremacy but white space. It was a threat to whites-only spaces in Jim Crow America and white supremacy in terms of the vote… So there’s always a push back, and that was the actual culture war. What the people who were pushing back on the side of segregation said is, they said they were fighting to maintain their way of life. That is a culture war. But then what you had was you had the passage of civil rights acts, the Voting Rights Act of ‘65, the Immigration Act of ‘65, Housing Rights Act, or Housing Act, rather. And all of the legislation that passed in the War on Poverty. And white folks got scared, particularly in the South, and in particular Dixiecrats. And they moved over to the Republican party—they were wooed to the Republican party by Nixon. And then you had this really critical moment [in 1976] when Bob Jones University receives a piece of mail from the IRS saying, ‘You are no longer eligible for tax exemption because you are in violation of a new code in the tax code that says you must be in compliance with the Civil Rights Act,’ which is founded on what? Brown v. Board of Education! So they fight. They fight all the way to 1983. They fight in order to win the ability to hold white space on their Christian college campus.” 

Historian Jemar Tisby expounded on this in his book The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. Tisby wrote, “When most people think about the Religious Right, the matter of abortion comes to mind. Like no other issue, the rejection of legalized abortion has come to define the Religious Right. Repealing Roe v. Wade stands as a perennial high-priority issue for conservative Christian voters, so much so that today it is hard to imagine a time when that was not the case. But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed. Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools...The IRS's guidelines about racial integration in 1978 sparked national outrage among many Christian conservatives. Department officials as well as members of Congress received tens of thousands of messages in protest. In an interview [Paul] Weyrich explained, ‘What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the [Equal Rights Amendment)...What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation'" (Tisby, 2019, p. 161,165). 

We have to know our roots. If we don't know where our beliefs stem from, we can't eradicate that which is damaging. Far too often, Christians who are privileged racially and economically continue to perpetuate harm against those who are not privileged because we’ve failed to know our history, learn from it, and change course. We have claimed to love God while not walking in love toward our marginalized neighbors. We know from 1 John 4:20, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” Historically, we have not acted in love toward our neighbors who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian American, and Pacific Islander People of Color. Today, in our response to COVID-19, which is disproportionately impacting communities of color, we are not acting in love when we refuse to wear a mask to protect others, expect essential workers to continue endangering themselves for our comfort, and approve of the violation of ARTICLE XI, SECTION 4 of the South Carolina Constitution, which states, “Direct aid to religious or other private educational institutions prohibited. No money shall be paid from public funds nor shall the credit of the State or any of its political subdivisions be used for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution. (1972 (57) 3193; 1973 (58) 44.)”   

It is the epitome of privilege to state that the public schools won’t miss $32 million. It is the epitome of privilege to have the choice before this time to send your kids to private schools. It's still the epitome of privilege to have the option to send them to private schools now. My goal in highlighting privilege is not to contribute to feelings of guilt for having privilege because feeling guilty does nothing to change systems. Guilt won’t get us anywhere. Guilt only serves to stall progress. Rather, I want those with privilege, myself included, to work under the leadership of the marginalized to dismantle systems of privilege in order to usher in a truly just and equitable society where people and groups are not privileged over one another but instead have equal access and opportunity in education and every other institution in our system.  

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