Vicki Cobb, noted author of science books for children, here reviews the powerful video “Education, Inc.”
She writes:
“The American Revolution ultimately came together with the widespread distribution of a pamphlet that spoke truth about power. [Now] is the start of a public awareness campaign to take a close look at the school reform movement through a modern day equivalent of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense — an hour-long documentary called Education, Inc. It is not something that the billionaires behind the so-called reform movement want you to see.
“The brilliant award-winning film-makers, Brian and Cindy Malone, navigate their way through a complex and seemingly diabolical scheme to “reinvent” education where school reform is sold through a sophisticated advertising smoke screen touting “choice” for children. How do they expose what’s really happening? The premise of Education, Inc. is simple: Follow the money.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The school choice movement began with good hearted people who recognized the problems with uniform and bureaucratically controlled schools. They were concerned about children. If the movement has been co-opted as a “money maker”, that is a sad thing.
However, lets not throw out the good with the bad. It is still valuable to the public and to families that children be allowed (through some means of school choice) to attend schools that are philosophically rich and diverse, that reflect strong community values, where teachers have greater freedoms to teach, and where the wisdom of one generation can be passed to the next.
School choice should support the public’s concern that every child receives a good education. But we must shape it so as to remove our children’s schooling from being a political game piece, or the home of every academic fad, or a financial grand prize.
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Huh, good hearted people?
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Yvonne
Why question their motives? Parents have called for school choice for over a hundred years… and it wasn’t to make money. They were concern about getting the “best” education for their children. And best was defined variously – sometimes prejudicially – but most parents wanted an education that reflected their values and beliefs. The modern school choice movement had its roots in school secularization (especially when prayer and bible reading were banned in the 1960’s).
In the 1970’s parents wanted religious school choice, but the Court’s interpretation of church state relations wouldn’t hear of it. It is a shame that the only idea supportive of school choice that gained traction was “competition.” Once education became defined with economic words, it wasn’t long that it became associated with greed and the most common schools related to Choice were secular Charters!
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An awful lot of people wanting school choice want to get their kid away from “bad influences”. Which either means “those kids” (racial minorities especially) or the “godless libruls” who allegedly run schools. Teach your kid your religion at home or else pay for their religious education. It’s not the government’s job to pay for that.
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How do you define a religious education? Is it one where kids learn about acceptable morality, the origin of life, how we should relate to others, the meaning of life, God’s relation to history, what language is acceptable, the arts, etc.??? I think public schools are religious schools… they teach from a secular world view and promote secularism. You may prefer that religious view, but your view should not be preferentially funded by taxpayers.
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Sigh. Lack of religion is not religion. Everyone has the right to believe in a different God, different ideas of morality, different meaning of life, etc. These things cannot be “taught” (discussed, yes, taught, no) in a public school. Public schools do not teach against religion, they simply don’t teach religion.
Since you’re arguing for religion in schools, how about Islam? It’s practiced by more people world-wide than Christianity. I think Buddhism is too. Shall we teach that?
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Dienne
(Good talking with you!) The postmodern lesson is that everyone speaks from a worldview… there is no “neutral” position. Many individual things can be taught in a “non-religious” way – how to fix a car for example – but public schools that teach as broadly as they do and teach children for as many hours as they do – must be considered religious. Religions don’t need deities, nor must they be formal, nor must they be believed by their practitioners. I maintain that the same laws that limit the religious expression of public schools, force public schools to a nontraditional religious expression. Children in public schools learn that God is irrelevant to virtually every academic subject, morality, sports, discipline, etc. They learn that the naturalistic scientific method is the best source of truth, that values are subjective, that the individual is the author of their own destiny, etc.
The absence of positive teaching about a deity creates a tacit teaching towards the deity’s nonexistence. And by avoiding explanations relying on that god, a vacuum is created for alternate explanations and rationales which fill in a world view.
Do I support Muslim and Buddhist schools to receive public money – yes – if they support good civic behaviors and understanding. In fact I believe the best way to de-escalate radicalization is to help religious groups engage the tenets of a liberal education within the context of their faith. America now separates the two so that we tacitly teach that to be a good American, you must separate from your faith school and go to a secular one. No, the answer is to allow Believers to use public money to attend their faith schools that engage the basic concerns of a good civic education.
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Craig Engelhard, Public schools do not teach God is irrelevant, they just do not teach about God. There is a difference and conservatives have a difficult time understanding that. Public schools are not “godless”, rather they allow individuals to choose how to worship God, if at all. If anything, public schools, by action, practice an inclusive, humanitarian philosophy at the core of many religion teachings. The irony is that public schools, by not forcing thought on God, do a better job allowing people the freedom to find God. I cannot say that about too many “religious” schools that talk about loving thy neighbor, but in practice exclude those different from themselves or struggling with life’s challenges, or demand adherence to dogma.
Scientific method and enlightened thought do not portray God in a negative light. Scientific thought with conjecture/proof simply do not attempt to explain religion (ontological proofs aside). They cannot, just as religion cannot explain science. Not all scientists are atheist, not all atheist are scientists.
But our country was founded on ensuring one religion does not impinge on other’s freedom. Choice through a representative democracy was seen as giving people a voice in how public institutions are run. If a private school takes public money, they must agree to live under the rules of a democracy. Taxation with representation. The public should have a say in what those private schools do with public money.
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Craig, re: your 3rd post in this mini-thread. I’m sorry but that’s just crap– at least according to my own public ed in the ’50’s-,60’s (upstate NY). We still had ‘under God’ in the daily pledge of allegiance, but there was absolutely no religion taught– nor the sort of aetheistic anti-religious secularism you suggest. It was a college town w/many int’l’s, so perhaps curriculum shied away from specific religious teaching more than many in that era.
Meanwhile I was intensely interested in religion. The learning I got on that score was from peers. I was a hybrid (Mom 1/2-Cathlolic & pushing that; Dad midwestern anti-Catholic; we kids often attended both on Sundays). I was fascinated by close friends’ viewpoints; they included a fundamentalist musician who wouldn’t dance or play cards, a boyfriend headed for the seminary, observant & non-observant Jews. We were bonded as h.s.colleagues & choir/ band participants. What we got from our public ed was vigorous schooling in debate & critical thinking– an open, fearless interest in ideas/ philosophy.
My experience tells me it’s quite possible for public school to provide an environment that exposes all students to many belief-systems and encourages them to consider all and choose their own. The school need only teach open-mindedness and critical thinking.
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Bethree5
People are most often blind to their own world views when they are surrounded by people who agree with them. You are surrounded by public education supporters and find it easy to consider secular education beneficial and non-offensive. But actually, you make my point very well – what you take as mild and normal, I (as a traditional educated Christian) see as destructive. In other words, we have clashing world views related to the education day. The root of secularism (as a belief system) is that Truth and value are easily accessible to every person. All that is necessary to make a person good, is to teach them “critical thinking and to be open minded.” Most traditional religions don’t believe things are this simple. We believe people are so influenced by selfish desires and patterns of ignorance that Truth must be filtered and presented by adults who have a lifetime of experience – i.e. there is a student teacher relationship not only for math, but for faith.
Sure, kids may and will make the final choice of their own faith, but with the minimal critical thinking resources secular schools provide, they undermine the process by depriving children of religious possibilities – as well as undermining the concerns of children’s loving parents. Secular school are great for those that have a generally secular perspective of the world, but for families who want for their children something like, “Art is an amazing expression of the beauty and love of the Creator, lets explore it!” Secular schools are rather shallow.
I know that parents are not the only one’s investing in education, the public is. I believe the public’s interest is not that children are taught academics and influenced toward secularism, but that they have the opportunity to receive a good education that nurtures them toward good citizenship. Religious schools can do this at least as well as the government, so why fund only the secular perspective?
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Craig,
May I assume that you are willing to fund all religious schools with public money? Muslim schools? Zoroastrian schools? Wiccan schools? Scientology schools?
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Diane?
Yes, of course. Religious liberty demands it; the state does not have the right to filter religious preferences. However, the state does have the right to only support schools in line with its educational commitments toward preparation for life and citizenship within the US. Thus, it would not be obligated to support religious or secular schools whose aim was to undermine these concerns such as: communist, anarchist, radical Islamic, “get rich and teach nothing” schools, White Supremacist, “school to abuse children”, etc. Each of these would undermine the public’s educational interest in different ways. (P.S. A fellow “replier” corrected me when I expressed doubt that you were the sole contributor to your blog. I doubted this because, having followed some of your books and articles, I couldn’t see how a woman of your stature would have time for all this productivity. Are you the only contributor or do you work with a team of others to glean and respond to education news? Thank you very much. Though I disagree with some of your positions, I highly respect others.) >
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This is in response to Craig’s posts above.
There is simply not enough money in our (or any) society for more than one public school system. The idea is that rich, middle, & poor pool their $ & make the system accessible to all. It will be average. It will produce a spectrum of grads from minimum-wage-earners to Ivy-Leaguers. In international test comparisons, the US fair-to-middling scores (consistent, since internat’l test-comparisons began in early ’60’s) reflects that we test everybody, & we have a spectrum of communities from poverty-stricken to flush.
Even in my upper-mid NJ community, true [Shanker-style] public charters have failed for lack of sufficient enrollment to break even with the costs of additional space/ maint & specialized teaching.
It’s not a lot different from consumer economics. When the economy was flush, my town had diverse boutiquey shops, anchored by one national [pricey] chain dept store. During economic contractions in late ’80’s, plus ’90’s tech-bubble-burst, plus 2008 crash, we lost Mom-&-Pop establishments first, then most of the pricey boutiques. Today our anchor store [L&T] hangs on by virtue of deep discounts & sales [propped up by many outlets in cheaper areas], supported by a string of ever-changing mall outlets.
Meanwhile over the same period, rural outposts have lost all but a few far-flung big-box stores; the rest are somewhere in between. And then there are the teeny towns spread across upstate-NY which have nothing but a few one-man startups supported by locals.
These are the options. There is only so much $ to go around. If you want school choice, here are your options.
>In a cushy suburb like mine, you’ll have the pricey anchor-store [L&T as it once was, i.e., public school], plus pricey boutique stores [the privates, paid entirely by those who choose them], plus a few small grant-supported preK’s & maybe one Catholic school. This will hang on, status-quo, with plenty of opt-outs by parents who pay too much in RE tax to allow their ‘anchor store’ to be diluted by state-mandated CCSS/PARCC.
>In middle>working-class towns like the 2 next to me: they lost the ‘Mom-&-Pops’ (local publics) 15-20 yrs ago. Their local primaries are in trouble; high school is regional which means already ‘dumbed-down’ by combining w/more urban [poorer] populations. Some of these parents pony up for Catholic schools, others go the extra mile for privates.
>Poor [urban] schools for me means Newark SD, taken over by the state 20 yrs ago, now subjected to the state-mandated ‘One Newark’ system, more than halfway to an all-charter system. Many publics have been closed, many charters opened. ‘School choice’ for these folks means being assigned to the available seats. In many if not most cases this has meant 3 siblings assigned to 3 far-flung schools– transportation not included.
> 100% ‘school-choice’ areas such as NOLA RSD. This is most akin to the tiny towns whose commercial areas consist of a handful of one-man start-ups frequented only by locals. RSD not only does not do financial/ academic oversight on its charters, it does not even keep track of its school-age students.
The bottom line: as stated at the top, there is simply not enough money in our (or any) society for more than one public school system. Charters and vouchers are a temporary band-aid which may help some to escape a bad urban school for a smaller-classes charter, for now– but the ‘cure’ may mean changing schools every year due to the volatility of market-based consumer outlets. Which does not bode well for academic outcomes.
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Bethree5
Thank you for your thoughts. They are well taken. I would support a single system (made up of public and public magnet schools) that allowed some room to select schools that best matched their child… except for one big thing. I believe that the school day significantly shapes the child’s beliefs and values. As long as secular schools are preferentially funded by the government, low income families especially are forced toward developing a secular mindset.
Impoverished communities have had their ideological resources depleted and need to have them restored – something secular public schools are barred from doing. Even if it is more costly (though I still don’t understand why the per capita funding need change), I still believe parents, for the public’s good, need to be able to freely choose to attend religious schools. I wish the private sector could just scholarship all kids… but obviously, as you said, there is not enough money for that! >
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” I wish the private sector could just scholarship all kids… ”
There is plenty of money for that. Religious schools and private schools do not WANT all kids. They want the kids who will do what is asked of them and they want the rest to disappear.
And that, in a nutshell, is why they are not PUBLIC schools and never will be. You don’t get to get rid of the kids you don’t want because they don’t “fit” without a huge amount of oversight. Didn’t New Orleans show you anything?
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NYC Parent
I think you are applying certain ideas too broadly. Even public schools separate students for many reasons… my son (in a public school) was just told he couldn’t be in an Advanced Placement class because his grades weren’t good enough. Is this “discrimination?” Also, the school’s attendance policy requires children to go to an alternative school if they are tardy too much (or misbehave too badly), and magnet schools only accept certain numbers of students, etc. Every school that is concerned for the welfare of all students, must limit some students to insure that others can learn. Ultimately this can be good for all. I have looked at several college prep private schools for kids and decided it wouldn’t be good for my kids – I want them to have more of a “life” than the school would allow them. I’m happy for kids that value and could handle the work load to go there.
There is plenty of internal academic and behavioral “segregation” in large public schools (I’m sure you have read articles on “schools within schools), why should not small private schools be allowed to specialize as well? As long as racism isn’t the issue, do you not think behavior and ability are legitimate filters for all schools?
If private schools had no concern for children from troubled backgrounds, who got grades lower than a B, or who had special learning needs, this would in deed be a problem and a concern. However, as I said in a previous comment, the current funding system has created these specialized schools that target the wealthy. Since much of our nation’s compassion resides within our religious communities, I believe that leveled funding of all schools will create many new religious schools who will not only bring their compassion to address the needs of the neediest, but who will be able to do it without the cold, bureaucratic restrictions of government run schools (ps, my wife was a special ed teacher in a public school, she was given little room to be compassionate). >
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Rampant and warped corporatization. It screws up everything, yet PR, hired guns, talking/selling points, campaigns and thinly disguised groups of all kinds are part and parcel of it.
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So true!
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Wow! The Washington State Supreme Court just struck down the state charter law in its entirety. Hurrah!
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/state-supreme-court-charter-schools-are-unconstitutional/
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