This is one of the best newspaper articles I have read about the damaging impact of vouchers and tax credits on small-town and rural America.
The big question is why so many conservatives want to destroy one of our nation’s most enduring and central institutions: our public schools. There is little or no evidence that “school choice” produces better academic results. It does, however, privatize education.
Since when do conservatives go around blowing up traditional institutions?
The tax credit program in Georgia isn’t supposed to help “poor kids in failing schools.” It is designed to provide money for any child in the state to go to private school. In short, it’s a voucher.
The article’s writer, Leon Galis, says:
“Meanwhile, there’s panic in the one- and no-stoplight towns below the gnat line. In Harry Crews country, small, isolated school districts serving only a few hundred students each, with so few teachers that it’s common for one teacher to cover several grades, face the prospect of somehow having to get along with even fewer teachers.
Superintendents in these districts don’t know how they’ll go from absolute bare bones to less than absolute bare bones and still offer anything remotely resembling education.
Another thing I don’t understand is why self-styled conservatives have so little interest in conserving anything. For many of these map-dot communities, the schools and the churches are the center of community life, the glue that holds these hardscrabble places together.
As Beverly Grant, a retired Quitman County teacher, told the Journal-Constitution, the school system is “the foundation of the community. Basically, it’s the only thing the community really has … .”
Anybody who’s ever been to Quitman County will know exactly what she’s talking about. Starve the schools and you fast-track these towns toward extinction. Why don’t conservatives get that?
And why don’t they get this?: If strewing vouchers around to give people more school choices makes any sense at all, it makes sense only in urban and suburban areas, like Cobb County where Ehrhart is from. In places like that, you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a school.
But in the sparsely populated areas of the state where schools are too far apart even to consolidate, the urban and suburban fascination with “school choice” is a cruel joke. For a voucher to be worth anything, people have to have options, which the residents of the “sparsity” grant districts don’t, unless you count moving away.
To a more jaundiced eye, though, maybe this situation isn’t a case of the right hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Maybe the right hand knows exactly what it’s doing. Because enough people in the “sparsity” districts are reliable Republican voters, the Republicans under the Gold Dome know they can jerk those constituencies around with impunity. And for exactly the same reason, Democrats ignore them. Both parties fish where the votes are. And they’re not in Harry Crews country.
This is all starting to make sense to me now.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It began when soi-disant conservatives and libertarians starting worshiping corporate CEOs as some kind of cowboy culture heroes. Ronnie Raygun — you remember, he sold America a lot of 20 Mule Team Borax as the host of Death Valley Days — was clearly a big part of that, but I’m sure the funda-mental illness must have its roots in our distant past.
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The Republicans are pro-business and anti-democratic: they don’t want school boards making decisions based on their knowledge of the community’s needs. They don’t want those pesky town zoning officials to forbid Walmart moving into town or to prevent fracking from taking place on farms. And they sure don’t want people gathering at the Post Office to pick up their mail and talk about Walmart coming to town or fracking taking place. They are destroying the sense of community and grassroots democracy. But… here’s the problem when it comes to the privatization of schools; are the Democrats any different?
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I am in one of these small town districts where the school is literally the backbone of the town. The building sits smack in the center of the bucolic 1200 population hamlet, and boasts an enrollment of 400 or so. That’s K-12. The administration are Republicans, and they are ruthless rule makers, and discipline seems to be the only education they are imparting on the students. I wish I had an alternative.
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In the SAME EXACT situation! To make matters worse for us, much of our district is covered in land owned by the State and the Federal Governments! We get a paltry $500,000 in PILOT money (payment in lieu of taxes) and that has remained unchanged for nearly 20 years. We have an enrollment of 320 PreK-12 and continue to tax ourselves just to KEEP OUR SCHOOL! There is no plan in NYS or even locally to do anything except apparently WAIT until there are NO KIDS or NO MONEY!
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Just think of the millions upon millions that are being funneled into charter owners hands instead of public schools. Also, I saw on tv where the gov’t had wasted 8 billion in the recent wars from fraud and waste. Think of what could have been done with that money. Do you feel ripped-off?
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DeeDee,
We spend over 600 billion dollars a year on public education. Millions are a a tiny fraction of total expenditure.
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One of the arguments for the electoral college is that in its absence, the bigger cities will overtake the elections, leaving smaller towns (or less populated states) as unheard voices at the whims of populated areas.
It seems that corporate reform venture philanthropy must destroy anything outside of its narrow dictums of educational policy– and it is the policy that these few mega-rich folks are purchasing– to the detriment of democracy.
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As a former out-and-out conservative, with still some conservative roots lingering, I can explain why conservatives like vouchers. They like vouchers because they disagree with the philosophy that public schools have embraced – one of acceptance regardless of sexual preference, BELIEF in evolutionary science, and what looks to them like a lack of discipline.
Thankfully I have disabandoned many of these philosophies, although not all. I guess teaching in a public school for so long has made me a liberal (or at least more liberal).
And that actually makes me happy. I am more willing now than ever to analyze data rather than believing in something because mommy and daddy told me so.
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While this post is not about the standardization of schools, I remember reading an article during my doctoral studies about the ethnic cleansing of American schools. Standards and in this case, vouchers, are not doing anything but systematically destroying our public education system. I believe this action cannot be placed solely upon one group or another’s shoulders. It is a united push by people who truly do not understand education.
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If we want to decrease our national debt and the federal government insist on dictating how public schools are being run, then how else can we do it? I totally understand that small districts cannot afford to pay a teacher to teach 2 students a foreign language or maybe an AP class. What’s the student supposed to do? In small schools, classes offered are at a bare minimum. What’s wrong with giving parents a choice? If for-profit schools is the concern, then what about paying public school administrators outrageous salaries, or bonuses like the one involved in the Atlanta public schools cheating incident? What’s the difference?
If we want what’s best for the students, then why not give them a choice?
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Where is the choice for those who do not want to pay for other peoples children to attend religious schools…possibly religions with which they do not agree?
What if some parents make a poor choice? Or other parents make no choice at all? What should happen to those kids? Shall we ask the tax payers to foot that bill?
Why should the child less pay for something that does not benefit them in any way?
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What’s the difference in vouchers, as you say support religion, and our government sending $200 million to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?
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Administrators are not overpaid in my state. They work their butts off, as all of us do.
The problem with “choice” is that K-12 education is not about market economics where some prosper and others don’t. That philosophy is sick by itself, let alone the unintended consequences of segregation and other factors.
Why do we want some schools to be better than others so SOME kids can attend while the others must attend a lower quality school. ALL schools should be quality schools for ALL kids. That should be our goal, and it should be our goal for all kids. I know some schools will wind up being better, but not necessarily by our own twisted design.
Anyways, most public schools in the U.S. are high quality. It is in the urban and rural sections where our schools struggle with high teacher attrition, low teacher quality, and other factors. Of course, even then I would argue its not so much the staff is it is the environment of the school given factors introduced by students coming from poverty stricken homes.
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The “choice” is really the “choice” to make money off of school children.
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Vicky, the people in the districts this article is talking about are (I gather from the article) not able to take advantage of such choices. They reach children throughout a wide area of their county in a rural area that has a relatively low population and a high level of poverty. Often several generations of a family have lived in the county over time, and most of the teachers are residents. I worked in a small school district where many teachers were teaching their third generation of students. The school is central to the community, These are areas where charter schools are unlikely to set up shop– there just isn’t the kind of population that can support them. Usually there aren’t any local options. The choice a family would have would almost always be either to move to a different school district or to homeschool. The district I worked in was actually one of the “doughnut counties” for our state capital, and had four districts– three tiny, rural ones, and one middling sized urban one (in the county seat). It was possible for the parents of students looking for something not offered by their current district to pay a small tuition fee to attend another school. That is not an unusual policy. Two high school students transferred from the urban district to ours because of the basketball program, for instance. But most rural areas don’t have these choices. As the article states, this program benefits families in urban and suburban families the most, and hurts these tiny districts by giving money that could help to build them up for these people who DON’T really have much choice.
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Kirsten,
The research suggests that charters do not benefit students in urban or suburban areas. But that is their primary market because that’s where the consumers are.
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I think the best answer to all of this is to abolish the ED and send those billions of dollars to the states to use at their own discretion. We don’t need those 5000 federal workers running the states’ education matters.
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Kirsten, I have been living in the same small rural county in Georgia all my life. I am 60 years old and have just retired as principal of a middle school. Previous to that, I was a teacher and counselor. I have seen first-hand how our rural kids get left out, especially when they get to high school. There is only one high school in our county, so our kids do not have a choice. They are not allowed to go over to the next county and enroll in a school that has much more to offer. We have a private school in town, but only a few choice kids can attend because of the costs. I don’t have the answers. I just know that what we are doing now is not working. How many HQ teachers do you think want to work in a place where there are very few resources? In fact, there is nowhere to dine out except at the DQ. A person can eat only so
many hamburgers. I’m looking for answers.
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V @ 2:04
Looking for answers?
Well, perhaps one answer is to not further drain public school resources that may be used to hire more AP teachers or build new buildings?
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You make some very good points. However, I still whole-heartedly believe that choice is always a good thing. It’s certainly not fair for my child to be stuck in a severely poor performing school and not have any other choice in the matter.
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Right, Vicky. You could always send your child to a no-excuses charter where he or she would be suspended or fined for minor infractions. You could be like the mom in Chicago charter (Noble) who owes $3,000 in fines.
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Perhaps Vicky would choose the Central Park East schools, a Montessori school, or perhaps if her children are older, a qualified admission high school like Thomas Jefferson.
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I think you have completely misunderstood me. Maybe I haven’t made myself clear. I live in one of the poorest counties in Southeast Georgia. Most people in this area don’t even know what a Montessori school is. I can only imagine what the Central Park East Schools are.
I just want our kids to have an equal opportunity to learn.
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Vicky,
I was just providing an alternative list of choice schools to the schools that Dr. Ravitch suggested.
Access to resources in rural school districts are a huge problem, especially for students that are out of the mainstream. I teach at a university in a big square state out on the plains and often have students whose high school graduating class was less than 100, sometimes less than 25. Even the very best students there have trouble adjusting to life at the university that is different from those who attended large resource rich suburban schools.
I think the online resources available now will be a huge help if students in the rural areas can get access.
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I spoke at an education forum in Louisiana last week where a pro-choice parent spoke of her support for choice because her child has special needs. I spoke to her privately afterward and told her to watch out: This “choice” model is corporate-driven, which means profit is above all. And doling out money for special needs is not “cost effective.” A school may not directly tell a parent, “Yor child costs too much,” but it could very well use subversive tactics to “get” the parent to remove the child, like highly-punitive discipline, or cutting services, or, as Diane mentioned, financial penalties.
In the end, what parents think they are getting by way of “choice” is something very state- or district-directed, something almost completely out of the parent’s control. For example, the parent can choose the school where he/she wants his/her child to attend, but slots are limited, and the school “creams” in its choices (i.e., by not openly advertising slots in order to select students deeemd best for school test scores). Or, the parent thinks a “choice” school is better but finds out that it is not and may not be allowed to send the child elsewhere, including back to the original school. Or, if the child is allowed to return to the original, public, school, he/she does so without the state-alloted funding, making the public school’s job more difficult for having to educate more students with less money.And in the case of Louisiana, the means of the state’s paying for this “choice” is illegal.
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@Vicky – you’re correct – your child should not be stuck in a severely poor performing school.
But you do have a choice. Become involved. Join the PTA. Fight for quality. Public schools must listen to you, charters don’t. Take advantage of the “public” in your public school and become active. Start pursuing matters at the county/district level.
You can make a difference.
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I think Vicky could be said to have been involved as a recently retired middle school principal.
A major problem seems to be that neighboring districts refuse to allow students from Vicky’s district to attend. Perhaps a state law could be used to allow students that choice?
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Are you saying no child graduates from this district and is ready for college because of what your school offers? Usually every school must follow state mandates and provide a required curriculum. There are states that have huge surpluses of teachers (MIch.) I think you should look there to recruit some teachers. You might have some luck. There are tons of teachers here who might be willing to work there for a while. I don’t see what choice you would get if you had a charter around. It would just provide less and drain your public school’s resources.
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DeeDee,
Would you allow students from Vicky’s school district to attend schools in the neighboring districts?
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I understand where you all are coming from, but I’m not sure you understand where I’m coming from. I am not necessarily an advocate of charter schools, but the condition of many public schools is very poor. What’s a parent to do? If I had my rathers, I’d rather we fix the public schools instead of vouchers, but reform efforts over the last 40 years have been futile.
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“Reform efforts over the last 40 years have been futile.”
Failure was the plan all along.
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1. Not all charters are profit driven. 2. I taught in a public school, that allowed kindergartens only 10 minutes of recess, no gym and worksheets and book work every day for 180 days. I would not allow my children to attend the school. I believe schools should be reformed, no problem. But, do I make my child the guinea pig, while fighting to change the system?
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One of the best ways to make individual profit is to run a non-profit organization. Additionally, there is nothing that prevents a non-profit from contracting with a for-profit service provider.
If profit as incentive is going to fix things, we should see great systemic improvements at any moment. Just wait. Any day, now.
Do you recall the great improvements in nutrition as McDonald’s became the favorite restaurant choice of diners all over America? Yeah, me neither.
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@ Vicky – “but the condition of many public schools is very poor.”
Not they are not. There only some that are poor and they are located in urban/rural areas. The vast majority of our public schools are great places to learn. When comparing our international scores on the 2009 PISA, our schools with low poverty performed at very high levels.
Whenever parents complain to me about their poor public school and they live in an urban/rural setting, the question must follow: Did you move to this area? How long have you lived here? Not that its an excuse, but anyone who moves to an area with poor schools should have known better in the first place.
And as a caveat – know that its not necessarily the school’s fault, or the principal’s, or the teacher’s – it may be that the school is so stricken with a population of kids exposed to poverty, that the school simply cannot overcome.
Instead of concentrating on fixing schools you are describing, we’d do better to aim our energy at providing good middle class jobs that will allow for people to escape poverty. That would go further than attempting to fight poverty by making a quality school, even though the latter is an option – it is hardly a highly successful venture.
Name one inter city school where more than 90% of kids are on free/reduced rates that continuously send kids to ivy league universities.
We should fight poverty, plain and simple. While providing a good, quality education can be part of that fight, it should not be the only, or even the majority, of our focus. It will not work.
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Come on, Dr. Ravitch!
The conservative/liberal dialectic is a joke. It’s ALL neo-liberal economics at this point. Partisanship is just there to support social wedge issues.
QUESTION: How can you tell if an establishment figure is a friend of comprehensive public education?
HINT: There aren’t any.
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Modern day school “reformers” are big businessmen who see the public funds going into education and want a piece of the pie. The “reformers” are nothing more than snake oil salesmen. They have bought the politicians with campaign contributions and power. The “think tanks” these so called education reformers and politicians belong to are no more than lobby groups who write the legislation that is being regurgitated in almost every state in the US. They and the politicians they have bought do not care about the fabric of America, its values, or its children. They care about money and power.
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Vouchers and charter schools are not destroy small town schools. I live in a large school district and can attest to you that due to open enrollment the surrounding small town schools have grown significantly. I know one small school that has gained 120 students just at one elementary, while the local Catholic school that accepts vouchers has lost 30 students.
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I love this blog. You all make such good points, coming from very diverse backgrounds. I enjoy hearing about education issues from different perspectives than my own. I appreciate your input.
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I agree, Vicky. It’s especially rewarding when we are having discussions and a few people mention that they now can understand a different viewpoint, and maybe that’s the correct one.
Then, by our discourse, we are able to solve some problems, or can help each other figure out solutions (such as in the case of new teacher, many posts back). It’s like the “Aha!” moment with the student who has just “gotten it.” Very rewarding. Thanks, Diane, that’s what it’s all about.
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When we moved we always considered the schools, unfortunately they were never what they were cracked up to be. Once the kids got in the problems or politics became apparent.
We moved to SC and put our children in the “best schools” in the state, award winning, they were beautiful, however the demands on the students were nonexistent. No student could fall, if they showed up they passed. With 3 weeks to summer break, I moved to GA. The kids could see where they would attend school the following year and possibly have friends over the summer.
It was a rural school, but there is a lot to be gained, in a rural area if you think about it. The most important thing a school should teach is phonics, and a good foundation in math and now computers.
Having worked in schools I have seen all the problems mentioned. I do not accept that the problems are all due to poverty. In these schools keep things basic. But it requires very good teachers that want to teach, to make a difference. A lot of teachers go “home”
to work, and they are not good teachers. The school is the largest employer, so they become teachers. Why should children be stuck with teachers that don’t want to teach?
Once, before moving to SC, I had volunteered to tutor children. One day a week I had a group of 15 very poor children that could spend their recess with me. Most of them had parents that could hardly read, so they had no help at home. After as little as 3 visits many of their test grades started going up to passing level after 2 months (8 visits) everyone was passing their tests and were excited about school.
I was furious when the assistant principle told me I should not be waisting my time with those kids that weren’t going to “make it.” I needed to be helping those that would pass, pass with higher grades. When the suggestion became a directive I stopped all together.
Another time I approached the superintendent to ask about an art program, not realizing I was also a parent, he commented, “They don’t need art, they’ll be working in a factory somewhere.” Needless to say, if there had been a voucher option to vote for I most certainly would have.
Educators like this should not have a job educating anyone. If a voucher system closes the school, let them find a job elsewhere!
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Stories like this, where public school management is unidealistic, multiplied 16 million times is why vouchers seem attractive. Poor districts have to keep the education basic, reading and math, with whatever else local talent can provide. That a school is “public” doesn’t prevent geography-nepotism (coming back to teach). It is sad that wealth is not equal so schooling can be, but it just MAY be that vouchers, and online schooling could partly compensate. Strange times we live it.
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Guess who received more stimulus funding with the president’s ESEA flexibility ruling. That’s right – Atlanta cheating schools because they do such a great job. As far as I know, all of this pot of money was allocated to schools in North Georgia. I don’t know of any South Georgia district that received a dime of that money. You see, South Georgia is like another country compared to metropolitan Atlanta where all the votes are.
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