Peter Greene says that there are at least four good reasons why conservatives hold oppose school choice. Before I tell you what his four reasons are, I will tell you that there are even more reasons for conservatives to support public schools. Conservatives generally are not radicals or anarchists; they typically “conserve” traditional institutions, not blow hem up and start over. Conservatives usually defend local control, yet the far-right organization ALEC has model legislation to create a state commission to override local school boards that reject charter schools. How did conservatives get on the side that seeks to eliminate local control? The answer is that ALEC speaks for big corporations, not for small-government conservatives.
Peter Greene sees other reasons why conservatives should oppose school choice.
First, because it does not cut costs and is not efficient to replace one school with several schools, each with its own administrative overhead.
Second, because competition will not lead to domination of the “market” by big corporations and chains, replacing local oversight with corporate control.
To learn his other reasons, open the link.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Educators all over the US have learned there is not single best school for all students, families or educators themselves.
That’s why school districts all over the United States have created new options.
One of those new options is “teacher led” schools..which by the way often do not have principals because they truly are teacher led. Not every teacher wants to do this, but some definitely do.
http://www.teacherpowered.org/resources/white-paper.html
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“That’s why school districts all over the United States have created new options.”
Silly me. I thought districts had been coerced into creating new options by the US DOE who are acting on behalf of corporations.
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School districts have been creating options since at least the late 1960’s.
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Comparing the choice movement today to that of the 1960’s is laughable.
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ALEC wants to destroy public schools for the reasons you state, including destroying teacher unions which are traditionally “boots on the ground” for Democrats at election time. Although, with Dems joining forces with the GOP to attack public schools, I can’t imagine why they could count on teachers any longer for their support.
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Conservatives hear what they want to hear. Reason is usually lost on them. Try discussing schools and you’ll get a flurry of talking points from the same play book.
“Teachers are evil. Schools are Marxist (most have not read Marx or Smith). We need to fire our way to excellence. Cut pay. Schools are failing. I don’t believe in science (science is not based on belief). Run schools like a business. We need accountability. Competition is the answer.”
The decline in America is inversely proportional to the rise of modern conservatism. Still, conservatives boslter waning public support with gerrymandering and voter suppression. Big Money flows from outside to pollute even local elections. Rather than embrace freedom and excellence, conservatives favor obstruction and oppression.
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Mathvale understands Republican politicians. Conservatives, with few exceptions, don’t reason through issues. It’s naively idealistic and a waste of time to think or act, as if they do.
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I would say, MathVale, that your critique of conservatism is 180 degrees wrong, and actually describes the consequences of progressivism and liberalism in the country.
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The reason to be against geographic admission standards is that it creates a monoculture in education. The arbitrary nature of assigning students to school based on street address causes far more uniformity and regulatory interference in school buildings than the CCSS ever could.
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School choice advocates have made the same mistake for years of confusing the commons with markets. Markets do many things extraordinarily well, but selecting a school is not remotely the same as selecting a breakfast cereal, or a car or a computer, where it is possible for a large number of choices to be packed into a fairly small space.
You simply cannot construct enough schools in close enough proximity to students to have an actual marketplace where competitive pressures lead to improvement. NYC has had effective school choice since Bloomberg took over full control of the system in 2003, and everyone does NOT have a high quality school for their children. If it doesn’t work here with a dense population and pervasive public transportation, it doesn’t work anywhere
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School choice in private schools, charter schools, and magnet schools allows for schools to get out of the one size fits all nature of traditional zoned schools and provide students with schools that more closely fit their individual talents and aspirations.
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If it doesn’t scale up in NYC, it doesn’t scale up nationally.
Boutique sections of education have always existed. That observation was tired when Chubb and Moe made it in the 1980s.
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Why do you think it does not scale in NYC? There are a variety of specialized schools there.
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For the reasons that I already said.
And because the Bloomberg claims that their policies sharply narrowed the achievement gap in the city do not stand up to scrutiny:
http://eyeoned.org/content/the-emperors-new-close_313/
Meaning a decade of school choice failed to raise educational achievement as proponents have said it would.
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I suspect that giving students more choice actually increases the achievement gap. If NYC closed down their qualified admission high schools and gifted programs, those students who would have been in those programs would not become as academically advanced and the gap would narrow.
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You cannot lump private school programs in with public school programs when you are talking about school choice. Each district makes decisions about how best to serve all children within their district. Each district has governance over those choices through a democratic process through which they are responsible to their community. I may not always like their decisions, but they are agreed upon through a democratic process which is always open to revision through that democratic process. Charter schools simply isolate a more proactive group of students from the public school population and take funding with them on a bogus per student basis. (As each one of my children left home, the cost of maintaining our home did not go down by a set percentage of the total nor does it in a school .) With rather extensive testing data available, the conclusion seems to be that as a sector charters do not raise test scores. So by their chosen metric, they add no value but soak up public dollars that could just as well be spent in the public system. I favor looking at public options that are under full public control for allocating public dollars.
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2 old, charter laws are approved by democratically elected state legislatures. As noted earlier, I oppose laws that permit public funds to enrollment in private & parochial schools. But let’s be clear that local school boards are not the only institutions that are selected by voters. It’s state legislatures that create charters.
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Illinois pays for about 28% of educational costs. Most costs are covered by local property tax and a small percent by sales tax. When the state authorizes a charter over the objection of a local community, already strapped districts are forced to fund a program they did not support. The state’s lack of support of education makes their mandates particularly unpopular (especially since they are traditionally unfunded or underfunded). I am in support of any program that is developed in district and is subject to district oversight. I also support programs that are developed through cooperative agreements between districts. I am not even opposed to public-private partnerships where governance is not ceded to private entities, but I have a feeling that evaluation of such partnerships should be on a case by case basis rather than attempting to codify the procedure.
I will not even go to a discussion of what is happening in Chicago.
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If memory serves, Illinois has the highest level of local funding among all the states. Vermont, at the other end of the spectrum, has no local funding at all.
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Wealthier districts in Vermont have been supplementing through foundations. The state was requiring that they raise an equal amount to be given to the state if they assessed more than the state amount. I don’t know if the state has solved this problem, but I do know of communities who felt used by other districts who turned down levees because they knew they would be subsidized by districts that approved more.
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The American system of government involves, among other things, payment of taxes to state government. State government makes lots of decisions about how to spend money that local people don’t get to veto.
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Obviously, the same applies on the local level. I was explaining the anger that can be generated when people feel unjustly ignored. Need I bring up Chicago?
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Again, as noted, earlier, charters like district schools vary widely. We ought to be learning from the most effective district & charter schools serving similar populations.
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There may be places and times for those discussions. I doubt the place is on a blog for educators who have been adversely affected by or have seen the damage caused by indiscriminate charter expansion.
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An interesting description of this website.
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Too limited, I agree, but not to be ignored.
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My understanding is this blog is about a better education for all.
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I think that districts make decisions on how best to serve the majority of students in a district, not all students. If districts made the best decisions for all students, there would have been no need for the Brown decision or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. If a student is not in the majority and not protected by the courts or federal legislation, there is little alternative to finding the best education other than leaving the public system.
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You are right, TE. Even a district is too large to consider the individual needs of all students. That differentiation has to come at an even more “local” level that may be as nuanced as the choice of teacher(s) and peers in a particular classroom. As a special education teacher, I can take the differentiation of service even further, but you get the idea.
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It is often the case that the differentiated instruction requires class or school level integration. If a student would thrive with a Montessori approach to education, that student needs classmates and a school that is a Montessori school. If a student needs more advanced courses than are available in the traditional zoned school, that student also needs classmates to learn with and learn from. As many here point out, education is a social activity and requires peers.
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School choice advocate have always claimed that choice and competition for students would make the entire system improve achievement. That has not happened. Your speculation is based upon a boutique segment of the student population, and raises more serious questions about how a program to identify gifted children finds 2/3 of qualified Kindergarten children in only 2 school districts in the most highly income segregated areas of Manhattan.
A decade of school choice has not improved NYC’s schools.
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Mr. Katz, would you close the elite NYC “public schools” (like the one that the Mayor’s son attended, which use standardized tests to determine which students can attend?
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My argument is based on the idea that one size does not fit all when it comes to education. Just tonight I drove by the local Waldorf school. Do you think that a Waldorf education suites some students very well? Do you think that it is a traditional zoned public school?
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No, I would not. But I would not use boutique sectors as indicative of larger trends and I think the seriously needs to seriously investigate its selection process.
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The number of magnet schools is growing.
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A very interesting analysis of the analogy. The operative phrase is “where competitive pressures lead to improvement.” There is competition, but all that means is that some people can buy a Rolls Royce education and some people can’t afford any better than a Chevy Cobalt. It is worthwhile to consider that the idea that charters would improve public education is flawed at its beginning. All charters do, then, is enable some parents to get their kids out of a neighborhood, zoned public school.
Probably that is the case. The real question then would be, should parents be prevented from making those choices to escape.
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That would be at least an honest debate. The problem with the implementation of that proposal is that it is coupled with utterly punishing consequences for the schools that are left as zoned schools only with the most challenging students instead of investing in them.
Now I stake out the so-called “collectivist” stance here because I do not see public education as only serving individual student/family interests. We did not develop the common school movement solely to exalt individual accomplishments. We did it to be a cornerstone institution of a democratic society. It is as much a part of the Commons as our roads, our water infrastructure and our libraries and museums. It matters that people have skin in the game and we should do everything possible to revitalize that aspect of public education. Charters were conceived as ways to creatively feed ideas back to those common schools, not to siphon off interested families and then declare the remaining schools failures.
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There are no longer conservatives, only big money.
It is a wasted exercise and distraction,
while NGOs coop parent movements,
and foundations and banks push
society and the economy to the brink.
Left/Right discourse is a distraction from the past.
We are in a new world order and need to address
the situation locally, as desperate as it may seem.
This discourse will get us nowhere.
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He really doesn’t understand conservatism’s objections to the public schools. He is right that the ultimate conservative approach would be through locally elected school boards, but those boards don’t fully represent the conservative majority, but rather are dominated by progressives who walk hand in hand with the administrations and teachers.
School choice is popular among conservatives because it appeals to their sense of individualism and freedom, whereas they perceived public education as a creature of collectivism and socialism, and they don’t want their children contaminated by that. Peter Green in fact illustrates that mentality by making the absurd statement that conservatives really are against charters and choice but that they don’t know it. Conservative parents know exactly what they want, and education based on collectivism isn’t it.
What happened in NC is that the conservative grass roots trumped local school boards by taking over state government, which ultimately regulates education. There has been push back from local boards over tenure and vouchers, and they may actually succeed in the courts.
Regardless of what SHOULD be the case (equal, good education for all students) pragmatically speaking, kids can really only have what their daddies can pay for, whether in private schools or in the public systems (by real estate values). The failure to recognize that fundamental truth of life, or at least to accept it, is what has plagued progressivism and the public school systems for a century. Peter Greene is coated with that bitter, toxic honey, that some fathers have to pay for the education of kids they did not father, and conservatives will reject it.
At least I reject it. We should start from the basic assumption that it is unjust for any kid to expect more than his daddy can pay for, and work from there to figure out ways to educate the children of irresponsible fathers.
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