The Bangor Daily News in Maine reports that Trump’s push for school choice in Maine would be a disaster for rural schools. This article helps to explain why rural legislators are not enthusiastic about school choice. It would destroy the schools they have and leave everyone worse off.
Mt. Abram Regional High School, north of Farmington, is a small school, with only around 150 students. But the teenagers who step off the bus each morning come from dozens of towns, some 50 or 60 miles away. That can mean a long bus ride for some.
Senior Olivia Scott says it has created a tight knit community.
“Here, you get a really strong sense of who you are individually,” she says. “You get to know all of your classmates and all of your peers and all of your teachers, even.”
“Everything happens there, town meetings happen there,” says Susan Pratt, the superintendent of MSAD 58, which contains Mt. Abram. In an area that’s been hard-hit by a loss of jobs and people, she says the schools are much more than a place to hold classes.
“They’re the center of the community,” she says. “It’s really the only gathering place for some of these little towns.”
And that has Pratt worried about a new push for school choice in the president’s budget proposal.
While it’s still unclear what exactly school choice would mean, a common approach is to give families vouchers for a certain amount of money and let them choose where they want their kids to go to school. It has been tried in places such as Wisconsin and Florida, to mixed results.
Pratt says in rural western Maine, where schools are hours away from each other, getting students to another destination would be close to impossible. Experts say that means the law would likely benefit more affluent students who could supply their own transportation.
“There aren’t a lot of options for many of the school systems,” she says. “Your options are limited. And so their choices are limited for folks, just because of the distance, as much as anything else.”
But for many educators, the bigger worry is what happens if students do leave their current public school district. Tina Meserve, the superintendent of RSU 16 in Poland, says she’s concerned it would leave schools without enough students and revenue to provide a quality education.
“You’ve got to have a certain student population to offer AP chemistry, AP physics, AP calculus. Plus your regular algebra and geometry class,” she says. “So again, you run into that problem of needing to have a certain student population to provide a well rounded education for kids.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When people make policy and they have lived a privileged life, they are making policy in a vacuum. In addition, their elite position(s) in life make(s) it most difficult for them to see beyond themselves. We have a HUGE PROBLEM in this country with privilege making policies which enrich them with little if any regard for others.
I am just so disappointed in this country. Guess the elite are just following inthe footsteps of their ancestors. At least it seems this way to me. I have been wrong before and many disagree with me. Could it be that we are looking through different lenses?
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I read a lot in ed reform and there is absolutely no concern or even discussion of the harm to public schools as a result of vouchers. None. They simply don’t care what happens to these kids or their schools. The one and only thing they offer is “choice” and it’s assumed that “choice” will magically improve all schools.
I think they’re really complacent about political support from public school kids and parents. They take us for granted.
You see it in the Trump/DeVos budget. They weren’t concerned at all about offering a proposed budget that harms public schools and benefits private schools. They bragged about it. Public schools were the designated losers and they didn’t expect anyone to object to that.
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As I have said before, the privateers have no more concern for public schools than a parasite has for its host. Charters are a drain, and vouchers, which make no academic sense at all, are even worse. Vouchers will turn school budgets into ATMs for schools of questionable value. If we want policymakers to care about public schools, we have to start actively campaigning against complicit representatives and put them on shaky ground. Unless people unite and use the power they still have, policymakers have no interest in hearing us. We don’t have the money to buy their vote.
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“Vouchers will turn school budgets into ATMs for schools of questionable value.”
Very strong image and easy to grasp.
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I’m with speduktr. One of the best, most illuminating sentences on education I’ve read in some time. Will archive in my files in order to plagiarize in the future.
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That’s fine, the more it is repeated the more likely it is to catch on. I already stole “questionable value” from another article I read, but the ATM metaphor is from me.
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Even in urban areas where poverty dominates, public schools often are an oasis of safety in a barrio/ghetto of street gangs, drugs, and violence. Those public schools are also one of two options to escape poverty through education and in every public school that serves the children of the poor there are families living in poverty often working more than one job for poverty wages that see education as a ticket out and those parents/guardians do support their children in the classroom so they can escape. The other option is the military but that means earning a high school diploma. Today’s U.S. military is the most educated military in U.S. history.
I can say this because that’s where I taught for thirty years, in schools where 70 to 100 percent of the children lived in poverty and the streets outside the public school’s fence were dominated by violent street gangs and drugs. Every class I taught for thirty years had some parents that supported education and their children worked hard to learn. Learning is a choice. That’s the real choice. If a child doesn’t learn, that was also a choice often made by parents who didn’t think about the importance of education.
Instead of blaming public school teachers and teachers’ unions for several decades, all that money that paid for all that misleading propaganda could have been focused on teaching families living in poverty the importance of education and the role parents/guardians play in their children learning from their teachers.
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Yet, these urban schools where teachers struggle against unbelievable odds are the ones that are the most maligned. Teachers in these types of schools that deal with so much neglect and lack of resources are urban heroes. Scores are the preferred vehicle to privatization, and that is why minority students have a target on their backs. I applaud the many black groups that have caught on to the hidden racist agenda of privatization. Once they dominate the urban schools, they are coming for the rest. Marketeers always hunt for new markets when there is money to be made.
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The effects of the Wisconsin voucher program on smaller public school districts are just showing up now. Vouchers are harming public school kids in those districts. No one in ed reform cares. It isn’t studied or even discussed. Those kids were simply sacrificed without a second thought in pursuit of this ideology.
The entire focus is on the (potential) benefits to the “choice” students. If public school kids are harmed, well, who cares? They can always “vote with their feet”, right?
I’m continually amazed at how little thought is given to existing public schools when these schemes are hatched. Ohio put in a giant “cyber charter” sector that immediately affected every public school in the state. Our superintendent lists “cybercharter” students cycling in and out of our schools as one of her top three problems. They land back in public schools and they’re years behind. No one in ed reform even considered that there would be ANY downside of privatization and they ignore the problems when they show up.
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I thought the charter campaign in MA was a perfect example of ed reform blindness. They offered absolutely nothing to parents and kids in public schools. The BEST they could offer was public school kids would not be HARMED by opening more and more charters. They expected people to support this? “Vote for us and we promise not to harm your kid’s school”?
This is a “movement’ that takes public school kids and parents for granted. We’re in the “default” system so it’s assumed we’re not demanding and will go along with anything.
They don’t value existing public schools so they assume public school kids and parents don’t value public schools either.
This is what leads DeVos and Trump to believe they can float a budget that harms public school kids while benefiting private school kids. It’s the norm in ed reform. There’s NEVER any consideration of public schools.
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I spent the weekend with my daughter, who was singing in a public school choir. They had assembled voices from across the state in a beautiful choir performance. We stayed at a swanky hotel where the performance was. After it was over, we barreled over to the science center just in time to,join her class on a field trip. Public school in action. Service with a smile on a dime. A taxpayer’s bargain.
While I was at the hotel, I forgot all about the real world, surrounded as I was by people who were like me. It struck me that some people in the world live like that, surrounded by their vision of the world, untouched by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which the Bard referred. Perhaps that is why we get people, Diane calls the the billionaire boys club, would seem not to understand. Maybe they get to live in their enclave all the time, applauded by the seekers of some of their monetary magic, insulated from the fates themselves.
While we were in that world, someone threw a bomb or two in Egypt, reminding us that the world is dangerous in a way. One of the songs she sang was a requiem for the children that were killed in1995 or so at Oklahoma City. It was beautiful. May we all remember what violence and discord brings to our world.
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