Steven Singer writes that at the heart of the school choice is selfishness: me first, and to heck with everybody else.
The public schools were created for everyone in the community. They are subject to democratic control. They are free. If you don’t want to go to the public school, you can go to a private or religious school, but your family must pay tuition.
The school choice movement wants everyone to choose among public schools, charter schools, and voucher schools. Whenever children leave the public school, the public money follows them. But the public school must still operate its facilities, and it must adapt to the loss of enrollment by laying off teachers, cutting programs, eliminating electives, and reducing the quality of education available to most children. School choice harms the majority of students, so that a few may leave for charters or voucher schools. As school choice grows, the public schools wither.
There is nothing so compelling in the research to show that this is a good tradeoff. Vouchers have a shoddy record. Charters are the luck of the draw; some get high scores by demanding strict discipline, some are no better than the local public schools, some are far worse. Why destroy the quality of the community’s public schools to open charters of dubious quality and to send children to religious schools at public expense?
Yet this is what Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump plan to do.
This is a risky scheme, that puts an essential democratic institution at risk.
Singer writes:
Though the media would have you believe otherwise, traditional public schools do a much better job of educating children than charter or voucher schools. Some choice schools have better outcomes, but the majority do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools. Moreover, children who continually move from school-to-school regardless of its type almost always suffer academically.
So when parents engage in these choice schemes, they often end up hurting their own children. The chances of children benefiting from charter or voucher schools is minimal.
It is worth noting that the world’s highest performing nations have strong and equitable public schools, not charters or vouchers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Choice” is the free market panacea that cuts across all their issues unless, of course, it applies to woman’s privacy rights and medical care. It is part of their holy trinity: choice, innovation and disruption. Patient “choice” of physicans is also a major part of the health care sleight of hand used to distract people from fundamental issues of access, quality and effectiveness.
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And “me first, and to heck with everyone else” should, if Trump’s vision becomes reality, replace E Pluribus Unum. William Burroughs had a much more succinct way of saying the same, but it’s a bit raw for this venue.
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Selfishness exemplified- Bill and Melinda Gates create P.R. to foist on the public, an image of great largesse. Yet, they never fall, even one rung, on the lists of the richest.
The Gates family lives and, has influence, in the state with the most regressive tax system in the country. The poor pay, a rate up to 7 times, the rich. Bill Gates expressed opposition to raising minimum wage and criticized public pensions. Then, he hawks privatized public education like it benefits the poor. Meanwhile, he, the man, not his foundation, is invested in the largest seller of the for-profit product, schools-in-a-box. And, Microsoft has a deal with Pearson to make products for Common Core, which Gates promoted with $1 bil.
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Yes. And even more dangerously, what Gates and so many other über-wealthy “philanthropic” capitalists have been strategically selling to the public is the idea that the poor are hopelessly stuck in a “blighted” situation and simply cannot help themselves. They teach the nation to think of “poor” schools as broken, failing and worthless–all pathetically waiting for the Rich Imperialist Savior to come along and “fix” the problem.
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This article is an excellent one to send to the great uninformed. It explains concretely and clearly how privatization improves outcomes for a few while it decreases opportunity and funding for everyone else. It is a total parasitic process that is reckless and harmful to the schools most students attend. Privatization is selfish and short sighted. This article would make great holiday gift to uninformed friends and family.
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Trump’s election has really emboldened ed reformers to launch attacks on public schools.
This is Richard Whitmire. He’s basically a professional charter school cheerleader. He’s revered in ed reform – they use their platforms to promote his work with no pushback and no opposing opinions ever permitted. It’s a steady diet of “charter schools are awesome and public schools suck”. Piece after piece after piece.
It’s stunning how hostile he is towards public schools. These are his (very fashionable) opinions on The White Working Class (he’s also peddling a book)..
Guess who the culprits are in the Decline of White Working Call Boys? If you said “public schools” you would be right.
As a public school parent who has had three boys thru a public school in a white working class area I reject his “solutions” for schools and people he knows NOTHING about.
Maybe ed reform could rustle up someone who isn’t part of this exclusive little clique to scold public schools? I tire of being lectured to by these people. I don’t accept them as leaders, no matter how much they may feel they are deserving of leading us.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/education/311321-schools-are-failing-our-boys-but-trump-dems-can-bridge-the-gap#.WFqpnAMcSE8.twitter
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Whitmire used to be the editor of USA Today.
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Most people want the best for their children. That’s why the Clintons and Obamas sent their children to a private school, instead of the dreadful Washington DC public schools.
If public schools were the best, there would be no demand for charter schools, vouchers, etc.
If some charter schools get good results, then why not demand that the public schools imitate their methods, and cut the ground out from under the charter schools and other alternatives to the public schools?
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Most parents do want what is best for their children. In the case of the Clintons and Obamas, they had the means to pay for private school. Sending a child to a private schools does not siphon funds from public schools. When public school parents are surveyed, most parents are happy with their children’s public school. The charter movement today is not led by disgruntled parents; it is led by billionaires and corporations that seek access to public money to make a profit. The problem with privatization is that as a charter opens, it diminishes the capacity of the public schools to serve everyone else. It is a parasitic relationship with the public schools as the host. Nobody claims public schools are perfect, but they are the most equitable and efficient solution for most students.
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I don’t care who leads the charter school movement. Ordinary people never lead anything. The movement for trade unions in the 30s was led by radical leftists … and good for them.
If fewer children attend state schools, then they need less money. I understand that there are certain costs which do not depend on how many children there are in a school … it’s mainly labour costs which are variable. If a school’s enrollment drops by half, its funding should not drop by half.
So what about this as a compromise: when the number of children going to state schools goes down, as a result of parents fleeing the state school system, keep the funding for building maintenance, etc. but only reduce the number of teachers, ideally, the worst first?
But the best solution would be: undercut the appeal of charter schools and private schools, by making the state schools as good as the best of the charters are: don’t exclude the less able students, but do exclude the wasters and disrupters who prevent the teachers from teaching and the other kids from learning.
The Clintons and Obamas didn’t send their children to the Washington DC schools because they, like everyone else, know that they’re no good. Lucky old them to have the money to allow their chldren to escape from them. So why can’t ordinary people have what the rich have?
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Doug,
You are so mistaken, I don’t know where to begin. First, charter schools make false promises. Few are “better” than public schools, and most are worse. They are sold to a gullible public with hype and lies.
Second, people who are rich spend $40,000-50,000 yearly for private schools. No voucher or charter will give non-rich kids the choice to go to those schools.
Third, offering the choice to go to a religious or charter school strips the public schools of resources, teachers, and programs. The public ends up with three inadequate school sectors, instead of great public schools. Want an example: check out Detroit, Milwaukee, and D.C.
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I think the problem is this: the people opposing allowing people to escape from bad public schools don’t seem to want to acknowledge that there is such a thing as bad public schools. Or, at most, they seem to believe that if we just raised taxes and put more money into these schools, they’d be better. Or, that there is nothing the schools can do, it’s general poverty that is the problem.
Of course, if any or all these views are correct, then you must carry on doing what you’re doing (which seems to me, as an ‘outsider’, is just talking to yourselves, which is the norm for American forums on both Left and Right).
However, I think you ought to give some thought to trying to address the issues that proponents of vouchers, charters, etc. claim are real: that at least some public schools are unreformably bad, and parents who have some ambition for their children should be allowed to escape from them. In other words, should have the same opportunities that the Clinton and Obama children had.
Or, if you agree that some public schools are bad, but not unreformably so, how can they be reformed?
It’s this that — again as an outsider — strikes me as your great weakness: you don’t seem to admit that there is a problem at all. Thus your quotes around “better” in your reply: you seem to dismiss good exam results that some charters get. Now, maybe you’re right about these results– I certainly have huge reservations about multiple-choice standardized tests. But you ought to make the case.
Py the way, I personally would prefer there to be a system of state schools that had high standards, and educated all children to the limits of their inherent capabilities, so that the issue of ‘charter schools’ and vouchers wouldn’t even arise.. I assume that such a system would cost substantially more than the current system, but that it would be well worth it. But we don’t seem to be allowed to have that choice.
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Doug1943,
What, exactly, is a “bad public school?” How does or can one know a particular public school is a “bad public school?” What are the criteria for knowing? Without being able to know, there cannot be common agreement, wouldn’t you say?
What, exactly, are the “issues that proponents of vouchers, charters, etc. claim are real?” You name only one issue you say they claim to be real. What other issues do they claim to be real? Besides, why “claim” issues are real, at all? In other words, what issues do proponents of vouchers, charters, etc. know to be real and that matter, if any?
Since you here cheerlead the singular claim “that at least some public schools are unreformably bad,” by what criteria must a merely “bad public school” cease being reformably bad, as you imply, to then become an “unreformably bad” public school? In other words, by what criteria does a merely bad public school go over the brink to become “unreformabely bad?” Criteria you stipulate will of course depend on what you mean by “unreformably bad.”
Does “unreformably bad” necessarily mean a “bad public school” that cannot be improved, when, in reality, it is possible to improve any public school no matter how currently “bad” or good?
So what do you mean by “unreformably bad?”
And are you capable to imagine and embrace a paradigm other than reform-mindedness?
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And did the rampant charter schools and testing make D.C.’s “dreadful” public schools better, Doug? Answer honestly.
And the “methods” that charter schools use? Kick out the lowest performing students. IF public schools pick up that idea, Doug, what do you propose we do with the struggling students? A permanent underclass is NEVER a good idea.
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“Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.”
Good advice from a very old and very dead and very Greek guy.
Homer. As in the ancient Greek bard, NOT Homer Simpson.
😎
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Columbus Dispatch- “More than 80% of (Ohio) charter high schools got an F on the most recent state report cards on their ability to graduate students within 4 years.” … Quoting the National Alliance FOR (my caps) Charter Schools, “Ohioans should be outraged…”
Unfortunately, billions have been made by the charter schools in Ohio, and they, in turn, fund the Republican state party, which has gerrymandered the state to eliminate democracy.
After the foremost cheerleading organization for charter schools in the state, which shaped charter schools policy for 10 years, lost funding from philanthro-barons like Gates and the Waltons, the group disbanded. Gates and the Walton’s pulled support but, Ohioans are left with the fleecing, uneducated students, and an alleged pay-to-play state government, with no end in sight.
Currently, the taxpayers are in court spending $500,000 to get $60,000,000 back from a school, deemed to have “mostly truant” students. In a prior court case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the assets that taxpayers bought for charter schools, belong, not to the taxpayer but, to the operators. It’s a Republican majority court.
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Selfishness is an aspect of “My Mental Model of Why Atlanta Public Schools Works the Way It Works,” at:
https://cloud.acrobat.com/file/206b9c00-6478-4509-b5fa-50d8c4fedc0f
It is a casual-loop kind of model, and has no beginning nor end. However, reading the model starting at “Self-Interests (Selfishness)” and assuming “the more Selfishness, then ” will take you through reinforcing vicious cycles of causality that tell a story of why we have come to have “school choice” and now Trump.
Some have asked that I put narrative to the model and others have said: “Don’t bother. I get it!”
If you wish, let me know your take by emailing me at edwjohnson@aol.com
In any case, wishing all Happy Holidays!
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This is how I felt when Raniero’s mom was talking. People ultimately only think about their own kids, especially already privileged people.
Sent from my iPhone
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