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Origins: Milwaukee, 1998

The history of the Black Alliance for Educational Options of New York, BAEO-NY, begins not in New York but in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in March 1998. Dr. Howard Fuller — anti-poverty activist, Black Power activist, former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, and founder of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University — convened a meeting of approximately a dozen African American school choice advocates from across the country on March 7, 1998. Dr. Gail Foster of the Toussaint Institute Fund was among those he invited. It was her friend and colleague, Lawrence Patrick Jr., Esq., former President of the Detroit Board of Education, who introduced Foster to Fuller and made her presence at that historic gathering possible.

 

At that time, African Americans active in the school choice movement were rare; in New York, they could be counted on fewer than one hand. Most of those gathered in Milwaukee were, like Foster, working virtually alone in their home states. The camaraderie and shared vision of that 1998 meeting led directly to the organizing of the first national conference of African American school choice advocates: the Symposium on Educational Options for African Americans, held March 4–7, 1999, in Milwaukee. That Symposium would become the annual convening of the national organization that grew out of it.

The National Founding and the New York Connection

Dr. Foster brought Selina Wellington — a parent whose son was enrolled in Toussaint Institute Fund's Early Intervention Scholarship Program — to the 1999 Symposium. Wellington would later become co-founder and co-chair of the New York chapter of BAEO.

 

Foster, Wellington, and three Toussaint staff were among the approximately 70 individuals who founded BAEO National in December 1999 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., completing the founding work on March 5, 2000, in Milwaukee. Toussaint staffer, Elizabeth Baptiste contributed significantly at that meeting to the naming of the national organization, and later became a founding board member of BAEO-NY.

 

In the spring of 2000, Dr. Fuller — having been elected Chair of the new national organization — invited both Selina Wellington and Gail Foster to serve on BAEO's national Board of Directors. Colleagues, Larry Patrick and Virginia Walden-Ford were also among the founding board members. Fuller made clear that national board members were expected to return to their home states and establish local chapters. Wellington referred to it as “one of my greatest honors and opportunities as a parent leader.” She had an immediate vision of the New York chapter becoming “the largest most active chapter in the country.”

 

BAEO, the national organization, received major funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, among others. These philanthropic funders wanted to improve schools by bringing market forces to bear on the educational system. They were tapping into the existing movement among Black educators and parent advocates already working to help parents escape failing schools. For BAEO’s founders, well-aware of the scope of interests in the matter, this strategic alliance had the potential to deliver real educational options for low-income Black families trapped in failed schools on a timeline that could work for a growing child. 

Many African Americans outside of BAEO were puzzled as to why leaders with established activists’ credentials in their communities, would work with conservatives on a school choice agenda. For BAEO members, the answer was clear: forty years after Brown v. Board, and thirty years after the War on Poverty, Black parents and children were still desperate for educational options. Young children on a trajectory for life-long poverty or prison, couldn’t wait for a system failing them to be further studied and tweaked. They needed out of their schools now. See Foster’s 2000 congressional testimony. Having observed that all else had failed, a strategic alliance with conservatives and billionaires was one, as yet, untried path to securing a different trajectory for these children.

Founding BAEO-NY: 2000–2001

Wellington and Foster met for their first planning meeting on November 5, 2000 — the founding date of BAEO-NY. They received the formal charge to begin chapter-building from the national board on December 2, 2000. That same day, in Milwaukee, Foster drafted and submitted to Fuller a letter formally requesting permission to establish a New York chapter, signed by herself and Wellington.

 

The Black Alliance for Educational Options of New York was incorporated on February 26, 2001.

 

The first outreach meeting was held in January 2001 at the Time Café in Manhattan, convened by Wellington. Subsequent meetings in February and March 2001 were held at the offices of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, hosted by Alonzo Knox. An Interim Board was established on February 10, 2001. On October 6, 2001, board members unanimously elected Dr. Foster as Chairperson. Under her leadership the organization transitioned to an Inaugural Board in December 2001, and achieved recognition as an official BAEO chapter in March 2002.

The Toussaint Institute Fund as Incubator

Some BAEO chapters were built from the ground up by school choice advocates responding to Fuller’s national organizing call. BAEO-NY grew from the well-established Toussaint Institute Fund. Toussaint took pride in its self-help approach to intervening on behalf of Black children in crisis in schools. It was sustained by Black community resources. And it built its work on an almost ancient community response: Historically, a crisis of schooling in America for Black children in any given era, led the Black community to enterprise - establishing its own low-or-no-tuition private schools with high expectations and rigorous curriculum. Activism on behalf of educational options for Black children is the actual story of Black educational opportunity in America. This persistent thread predated the national school choice movement by centuries.

 

The Toussaint Institute Fund was founded by Dr. Foster in 1988 to help Black boys escape the special education-to-prison trajectories that far too many were on. Her scholarship fund placed such children in Historically Black Independent Schools (HBI/HBIS) founded and funded by local Black teachers and churches. Foster called them “Historically Black Independent Schools,” in part because many had been around for decades — and also because the tradition of Black New Yorkers establishing their own schools to assure the education of their children goes back to 1704.1 African Americans building their own educational institutions because the existing system would not serve them — is as old as the city itself.

 

In 2000 Foster documented 70 such schools in New York City serving approximately 12,000 students — all founded and sustained by African American educators or religious organizations. She found that they outperformed public schools in their districts on state examinations. Students who acted disruptively in public school classrooms, demonstrated a marked improvement in behavior in these schools. See “Historically Black Independent Schools,” in City Schools: Lessons from New York, Ravitch and Viteritti, eds., Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.) Toussaint published a popular directory of these schools for Black parents — a resource in high demand among families looking for alternatives to failing zoned public schools. Toussaint’s annual Education Expo conferences connected thousands of Black parents to a wide range of good public and private school options in and out of the Black community, and showed parents how to navigate public and private school systems to gain access to good schools for their children.

 

The well-established Toussaint Institute Fund served as BAEO-NY’s incubator for 32 months, providing office space, staff, volunteers, computers, fax machines, mailing lists, media contacts, and name recognition. BAEO-NY had no funds for an Executive Director; Foster served in the dual capacity of Chair and uncompensated administrator throughout the organization’s formative period. She modeled BAEO-NY’s board operations on the national organization and its programmatic activities on Toussaint. She led the board to create a Self-Sufficiency Fund, with a standing policy requiring that 5% of all BAEO-NY income be deposited toward future real estate purchase or an endowment.

The Supreme Court, February 2002

Among BAEO-NY’s most significant civic actions was its organization of a trip of 66 parents to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on February 20, 2002 for the closing arguments in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris — the Cleveland voucher case that would become the most consequential school choice decision in American legal history. The trip was organized with critical support from Black independent school principals in New York City who also served on the board. The Court upheld the Cleveland voucher program in its June 2002 ruling.

 

This case mattered deeply to the Historically Black Independent School community (parents, children, and educators). Although these schools charged a small fraction of the tuition found at the elite private schools of New York City, many working families still struggled to meet the cost — and the schools, precisely because of the communities they served, struggled financially as a result. Vouchers offered a potential path forward: if Black parents could access public dollars to make this choice, more families could enroll, and schools that were financially strained because of their commitment to low-income communities could become more stable.

 

But realizing that potential required two steps: First, the Supreme Court had to establish that publicly funded vouchers were constitutionally permissible. Then, Black legislators would have to be at the table in each state as the implementing legislation was written — to ensure the law targeted low-income families and included existing HBI schools alongside other private schools. With parents in control of the dollars, and HBI schools already operating as self-sufficient educational institutions, there was a clear path for African American families to enroll their children in schools that shared their values, were rooted in their communities, and had demonstrated academic success.

Organizational Growth and Achievements

From its earliest days, BAEO-NY was, in the co-founders’ own words, “one of the top performing chapters in the country in organizational growth.” The organization took documentation seriously, maintaining written quarterly and annual reports, committee reports, and board materials from 2001 onward. By September 2003 it had:

 

•Recruited 133 dues-paying members

•Built a board of 15 resourceful individuals with clearly defined performance expectations and a history of accountability

•Operated working board committees and generated monthly financial statements through a CPA

•Maintained a Finance Committee overseen by a professional Treasurer, and initiated a financial audit

•Established a Self-Sufficiency Fund with a 5% income deposit policy

•Operated a functioning Parent Help Line

•Secured $41,000 from BAEO National (2002), $50,000 from the Achelis Bodman Foundation plus a $25,000 pledge (2003), and $30,000 in in-kind services from Toussaint

•Submitted a $700,000 proposal to the U.S. Department of Education to operate a Parent Resource Center (2003)

•Achieved mainstream media coverage (February and May 2003)

•Hired its first CEO, Lesley Esters (July 2003)

•Seeded the establishment of the BAEO chapter in Buffalo

The Board and Its Community Roots

BAEO-NY’s inaugural board was comprised primarily of New York City’s established advocates on behalf of parental options for Black children. These included founders of Black independent schools in the city, each with over a decade of active service to parents:

 

•Nicole Bailey, founder of the Learning Tree Multicultural School in Queens

•Lois Gregory, founder of the Learning Tree School in the Bronx

•Sheree Palmer, founder of the Cambria Center for the Gifted in Queens

 

Also serving were Jacqueline Pelzer, founder of Early Steps, which helped open elite private school admissions to Black children; Robert Bowen, a grassroots education reform activist; and Omar Wasow, Executive Director of BlackPlanet.com, who had worked to support passage of New York’s 1999 charter school law. Nancy Lucas, executive of New York’s A Better Chance program, served until her untimely passing.

Seeding the Buffalo Chapter

In 2001, while in Buffalo on Toussaint business, Foster met Uchenna Smith — then a young math teacher. Foster recognized Smith as a powerful emerging leader, introduced her to the school choice movement, and secured her a sponsorship to the 2002 BAEO Symposium. Smith went on to found New York State’s second BAEO chapter in Buffalo. Through contacts made at the 2002 Symposium, she also founded KIPP Sankofa charter school in Buffalo. In summer 2003, the New York and Buffalo chapters collaborated on a U.S. Department of Education proposal to establish a statewide parent initiative.

The Organization’s Close

On September 16, 2003, having built and stabilized the organization, expanded the board to 15 members, and hired the organization’s first CEO, Gail Foster resigned as Chair and from the Board. In her resignation she wrote that she had fulfilled her commitment to Dr. Fuller — to establish a chapter of BAEO in New York and to generate the resources necessary to hire an executive. Selina Wellington assumed the position of Acting Chair. Wellington characterized Foster’s tenure as a period in which “the organization set clear goals and we achieved them.”

 

With Foster’s resignation, the HBI school principals and most other founding board members departed as well. Foster departed having secured for the organization a grant  that covered the salary of her successor for one year. 

There is no record of the organization’s activity after 2004. 

Foster’s activism in the school choice arena also waned. She described her frustration as being with the overwhelming obstacles to creating bi-partisan change, more than with the movement itself.

A Specific Frustration: The Charter School Law and What Was Lost

Foster cited specific frustrations. The core problem was partisan rigidity: Leaders were unable to cross a party line (some for political reasons, others on principle) even when crossing was strategically in the interest of children and community institutions. She knew good people on the left and had come to know good people on the right. She could not bring them together to act collaboratively on behalf of the community. Party loyalty came first. 

Regrettably, the window of opportunity to secure a place for HBIS in our communities passed. The point of our involvement was to get NY Black leadership to the table on our behalf when the law was being written, so they would carve out a space where Historically Black Independent Schools could continue to thrive even as the education sector was moving toward privatization. But unlike the charter school law in Michigan, the law in New York was written to exclude private school conversions. There was no Larry Patrick at the table to negotiate a New York law that would allow the rich tradition of HBIS to thrive even as the privatization movement would take hold. As a result, these successful schools which served parents desperate to escape failed neighborhood public schools — have been unable to compete with the better funded charter schools, resulting in a quiet institutional loss in Black communities across New York City.

 

Historically Black Independent Schools have been closing, one by one, not because they failed — but because they charged tuition and charter schools did not. Charters arrived promising exactly what HBIS had long delivered: rigorous academics, strong culture, community. For parents struggling with even modest HBIS tuition, free was decisive. Some charters, like the KIPP schools, made good on their promise. Too many did not. But by the time the disappointment set in, the damage was done. The institutions that had actually been delivering — Historically Black Independent Schools (and the low-tuition Catholic schools serving the same neighborhoods) — had already lost enrollment, and in too many cases, closed. New York State’s charter school legislation could have been written to strengthen what was already there. Instead, it served to displace it.

Looking Forward  

But there is still hope. The window of opportunity for Black community input into charter school legislation has passed. Charter schools continue to open, and the sector continues to grow — but the laws that govern them, state by state, have largely been written. That said, while the moment when Black advocates could have shaped those laws on behalf of HBIS and the families they served has closed, the school choice movement itself has shifted its primary focus. Federal vouchers — long a secondary agenda item while charters dominated — are now the movement’s top priority. 

They arrived in full force with the passage of the Educational Choice for Children Act in 2025. Where charter schools redirected public dollars to publicly chartered institutions, vouchers redirect public dollars directly to private ones — including, potentially, those Historically Black Independent Schools and low-tuition Catholic Schools that have survived. This is the privatization movement in its most expansive form yet. When the agenda is fully unfolded, it is expected that parents (from all income brackets) will have a say in where their child’s allocated education dollars are spent. 

This presents both risks and an opening that goes far beyond what the charter era ever offered. It will be a seismic shift in our state and nation’s educational system. The question is, will Black children have anyone representing their best interest at the table? Will there be anyone representing the interests of well-established HBI schools. Will educational entrepreneurs in the Black community with well-established successful track records in the arena of starting and operating schools, have a significant role in designing the rules of the game?

 

 

As the system moves in a radical way toward vouchers and privatization, African American leadership should voice their opinion on principle, one way or another about the changes that are coming. But this is critical — they should also be sure they are sitting at the table when the new rules are being written regardless of their opinion or party. And those sitting at the table, should be familiar with the long history of educational enterprise in the Black communities of New York City, and with the HBIS institutions that are still standing.

 

 

Notes

1 The tradition of Black New Yorkers founding their own schools dates to 1704. See the History of Black Independent Schools, Association of Historically Black Independent Schools (ahbis.org), which documents this history from 1704 through the present.

 

2 On the displacement of Black independent schools in the South following desegregation, and on the history of the NYC Board of Education absorbing Black-run private schools in the mid-1800s, see the History of Black Independent Schools, 

Sources and Further Reading

Foster, Gail E. “Historically Black Independent Schools.” In Ravitch, Diane and Viteritti, Joseph P. (eds.), City Schools: Lessons from New York. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Available at: press.jhu.edu/books/title/1305/city-schools

 

Hill, Paul T., Foster, Gail E., and Gendler, Tamar. High Schools with Character. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1990. Available at: rand.org/pubs/reports/R3944.html

 

Foster, Gail E. “New York City’s Wealth of Historically Black Independent Schools.” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 61, No. 2, 1992.

 

Association of Historically Black Independent Schools. “History of Black Independent Schools.” ahbis.org/copy-of-history and ahbis.org/research

 

Foster, Gail E. and Wellington, Selina. “History of the Black Alliance for Educational Options of New York, BAEO-NY, November 5, 2000 – September 16, 2003.” Primary document, February 12, 2004.