When I was a kid in the 1970s, I witnessed the emerging private Christian school phenomenon up close and personal, because my parents sent me to one of them. In northern Alabama, living in a city with a large Black population, I attended a school with zero Black students.

Lots of people (including my father) said they just wanted their kids to have a Christian education. But historians tell us that the genesis of the Evangelical Christian school movement was racism, explicitly.

Until mandated desegregation came into being, Evangelical Christians were perfectly happy to send their kids to public schools. Private Christian schools were barely a blip on the educational scene before desegregation.

(And just for a bit of intersectionality here, these private schools nowadays focus very harshly on hurting LGBTQ students and staff.)

The drive toward charter schools a couple of decades later was another front in a war to continue segregation.

We need to end property-tax funding of school systems, and empower all schools to educate children equally. We need to stop taking money out of the public school system and make public school districts stronger instead.

Racism will always be a thing in public education until we disempower movements to defund public education, which should be equally excellent for all children.

And by that, of course, I mean for Black children, who have almost always experienced public education very differently from white students.