Step back from the furor over Trent Lott's recent statement and observe how the episode itself opens a window onto the legacy of distrust that has characterized African-American views of conservatives and Republicans since the civil rights era.
This distrust has shaped public policy on many fronts but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as in K-12 education. Here, African-American mistrust of conservatives, combined with the left's embrace of civil rights legislation and affirmative action, led to a longstanding alliance between black Americans and the teacher unions and public-school establishment. The result has been a tacit agreement in which the left avoids blaming schools for education problems, promotes bureaucracy and teacher protections as a response to failing urban schools, and cloaks the educational status quo in the rhetoric of civil rights.
This tendency has been especially visible in debates over school vouchers and charter schooling. While one can reasonably oppose choice-based education reforms, much of the opposition has traded on hysterical and race-conscious assertions about the motives of proponents.
The problem for those who are serious about improving American education is that this distrust is not wholly unwarranted. The legislation and court decisions of the civil rights era culminated more than a century of strenuous African-American efforts to widen their children's educational opportunities. During that time, black Americans had few allies and what little support they did receive came mainly from the left. In the years that followed Brown (1954) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), it was mostly the left that evinced continuing interest in African-Americans' concerns about the education of their children - even though, as Abigail Thernstrom reminds us, four fifths of Congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [see "Trent Lott's Blow to Civil Rights," The New York Times, December 18, 2002].
In the 1980s, as the African-American community began to enjoy the fruits of its long struggle to gain full access to the public schools, the country began to awaken to the disastrous condition of those schools - especially in the cities. This awakening, spurred by the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, prompted divergent calls for improvement. The unions and their allies embraced prescriptions focused on teacher pay, participatory governance, teacher professionalism, and investments in curricular and pedagogical reform.
The conservative response featured choice-based reforms. In waving the banner of school choice, however, conservatives endorsed policies that would, among other things, make it easier for families to exit the schools to which African-Americans had only recently gained access. This was understandably troubling to black leaders, even as they, too, grew disenchanted with mediocre schools and with the failure of the reform agenda endorsed by unions and educators.
It remains troubling today. When one interviews urban African-American parents and leaders about education, suspicion of conservative motives is palpable. As one NAACP leader in Milwaukee remarked to me regarding the city's voucher program, "These Republican types, the ones in business and the suburbs, never used to care about black children. Now they do? I don't buy it. They're after something." There is suspicion among the older generation of black leaders that today's charter schools and vouchers are Trojan horses, designed to attract African-American support for programs that may later be rewritten in ways that advantage white, suburban families and corporate interests.
This distrust helps to explain what otherwise seems a political puzzle. While surveys show widespread African-American support for school choice, groups like the Congressional Black Caucus remain solidly opposed to vouchers and African-American voters continue overwhelmingly to support liberal Democrats.
Although the African-American community is by now fed up with failing urban schools, its leaders are reluctant to abandon their traditional allies to align with market-oriented, generally conservative voucher proponents.
Perplexed choice advocates respond that their proposals primarily benefit minority children trapped in poor urban schools, indeed that white suburbanites are none too enthusiastic about such reforms. Yet it's not that simple. Today's voucher and charter programs do indeed promote equity and integration, but that is in large part because they were specifically designed that way: to bar discriminatory practices and advantage poor children. One who is wary of proponents' motives may still fear that this is merely a tactic of the moment, and that the choice crowd secretly itches to discard redistributive rules and equity enforcements once the programs are up and running.
These concerns are coupled with other attachments that the African-American community has forged to public schools. In urban centers, the school system, even if it's not providing a lot of education, is a source of jobs, political power, and community pride. Black community leaders are reluctant to weaken their hard-won influence over such benefits.
But that's not the whole story. Shared interests also draw the African-American community toward more radical school reformers, perhaps even conservatives. Whereas teacher unions and education schools have reason to oppose school vouchers and powerful accountability systems, a new generation of African-American leaders wants to embrace such proposals. Moreover, that new generation is less concerned about traditional issues of access and integration and more interested in school quality and effectiveness. These leaders have come to suspect that their alliance with the unions and the traditional Democratic education constituencies is a bad deal - that access doesn't do much for black children so long as the schools themselves are dysfunctional. They are open to new reforms - so long as they can trust the reformers.
"Trust us" is not, however, a sufficient answer to such concerns. Reformers who would persuade African-Americans to foreswear old alliances must first address fears that conservatives are opportunists who don't really care about black children and will eventually exploit or abandon their new allies. Responding authoritatively to Senator Lott's unfortunate remarks, as President Bush and many conservatives have already done, seems like a pretty good place to start.
Frederick M. Hess is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.