Parents, teachers, and citizens of Douglas County, Colorado, one of the wealthiest districts in the nation, shocked voucher advocates by voting to oust their choice-loving school board.
Here are two different perspectives.
Writing in the conservative journal Education Next, Max Eden of the rightwing Manhattan Institute tries to find a silver lining in the defeat of vouchers and choice.
Eden takes comfort in the fact that the new board is not anti-charter.
He writes:
“Taken together, these races should scramble the conventional political narrative about charter schooling. That narrative says that charters are really supposed to be for failing urban districts, that suburban parents don’t want or need them, and rather than expand charters to the suburbs to bolster Republican support, advocates should rather work on their rhetoric. But choice creates constituents who will defend their interests, and who will have a far easier time doing so when their neighbors are ideologically sympathetic. If the Douglas County school board moves to harm charters, there will be a significant political cost.
“The headlines suggest that the election was all about vouchers. But the deeper story here is that Douglas County is a compelling case study in the collapse of the traditional education reform agenda. That agenda was a philosophically uneasy fusion of bureaucrat-driven reform and parent-driven choice. Bureaucrat-driven reform wasn’t truly designed for places like Douglas County, but advocates push it there (and everywhere else) anyway. Parent-driven choice could take root anywhere, but advocates tended to view it as not really for a place like Douglas County. While district reform collapsed, and claimed the court case on the never-implemented voucher program as collateral, charter parents will ensure that school choice carries on in this Colorado suburban county.”
Edwin Rios, writing in left-leaning Mother Jones, says that the sweep of every seat on the board sends a clear message to Betsy DeVos. Not that she will care or listen.
“On Tuesday night, the longstanding fight over a controversial voucher program in Douglas County, Colorado, appeared to have come to an end. In a local school board election that has found its way into the national debate over voucher programs, four anti-voucher candidates—Chris Schor, Kevin Leung, Anthony Graziano, and Krista Holtzmann—defeated reform-supporting candidates in a landslide.
“The election was the culmination of a battle that goes back to 2009, when a group of conservative reform-minded candidates took full control of the school board in Douglas County—one of the wealthiest counties in the country, with a school district made up of 67,000 students. As Politico has put it, the county “has gone further than any district in the nation to reshape public education into a competitive, free-market enterprise.” Since 2009, the board has successfully ended a collective bargaining agreement with the local teachers union and enacted a “pay for performance” salary system for teachers.
“Its most controversial move, though, came in 2011, when it approved a sweeping school voucher program that aimed to give up to 500 students publicly-funded scholarships to attend participating private schools. The county’s voucher program was the first district-created program in the country. Ninety-three percent of the pilot class of scholarship recipients enrolled in religious schools, according to court documents. It sparked outcry from those who argued that it was a diversion of public money away from public schools. Over the next few years, the suburban district in many ways become a model for conservatives looking to reform education nationwide and the group of reform-minded board members received support from national right-wing groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.
“This backing helped those board members secure all seven seats for six years. But in 2015, frustrated by the board’s direction, challengers running against the reforms of then-superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen convincingly defeated three incumbents, resulting in a 4-3 split on the board. While conservative members remained in charge, their power over the board was significantly weakened.”
Then on election night, the pro-public school slate captured four seats, adding to the three pro-public school incumbents, to make a clean sweep of all seven seats.
In my experience, suburban parents are loyal to their local public schools (or the private/religious schools which their family has historically attended). I can’t see the reform movement sustaining charter schools or vouchers for any extended period of time since the adults in the room won’t stand for a reduction of services for their children in the public schools. They pay beaucoup taxes and would resent funding other people’s alternative choices.
Plus, when angered, these individuals vote.
It’s interesting to listen to the pro-voucher folks try to spin this.
Education Next (EdNext) is a right-wing, corporate ed. reform org out of the Hoover Instituted. For a detailed background on EdNext, read Mercedes Schneider’s report here:
Well, in this EdNext podcast, EdNext is spinning like a top trying to frame the Douglas County election as NOT being a defeat for or rejection of vouchers:
http://educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-election-setback-school-choice/
SUMMARY:
“Yes, the election was a setback, but not, per se, a rejection of school choice via vouchers … instead, it was a rejection of the non-voucher reform policies instituted in Douglas County, NOT A REJECTION OF VOUCHERS. These policies are great, but were meant for low-income, urban schools communities that are failing, so it was a bad fit for Douglas County, and that’s what led to the results of the election.”
As George Lakoff would say “As soon as you say Don’t think about rejection of vouchers people will think about rejection of vouchers.”
So yes, reformists are scrambling since usually they are well trained in using language to their advantage.
As for vouchers being a bad fit for Douglas County: vouchers don’t fit low income communities because low income people cannot afford private schools with or without vouchers.
Precisely, Mate, for if they do not work in poor places or rich places, there is no place for them to work, the economic middle being eviscerated by stagnant wages since the Seventies.
Vouchers are just a smoke screen for doing what reformers really support. What they really want is to only allow a few students to come out on top. That way, their vision that about ten percent of the population pulls the rest along will be validated by a system that “proves” them correct.
What vouchers really do is to keep per-pupil spending very low, keeping taxes low, and thus putting more money in the pockets of those who spend it on savings and investments. If voucher proponents were really serious, they would be advocating numbers like the $70,000 price tag on the school mentioned in the article above this one.
Eden makes a perfect case for the failure of so-called reform. He points to the failure of running off teachers and merit pay. He points to the support the Douglas County hard line approach and the support it got from conservative money bags. And of course, he points to the failure to produce test scores. At this point, any honest observer would concede the defeat he has fairly noted. But not Eden. One must assume that he is paid to spin truth rather than tell it, for he goes off on the tangent of charters having deep political support rather than stopping at truth. He chooses to use the “teachers union” phrase as a pejorative rather than suggesting that they were right all along. Thus Eden qualifies himself to be the next secretary of education, being capable of choosing wrong even as he has admitted right.
Interesting look at a peculiar area. Eden’s claim that 20% of this very wealthy district’s children attend charters seemed implausible & demanding explanation so I did some browsing. He’s probably exaggerating; most recent #’s (end 2015 sch yr) peg it at 13.6%. 30% growth in 2 yrs? (Altho their charter growth did in fact make news in ’14, having jumped 25% in one year). Regardless, even 13.6% is over twice the natl ave, worth a look-see.
What I found were a bunch of fancy-looking schools offering everything from for-lang immersion to performance arts to Montessori, STEM, you-name-it: a way for upper-middles to skim exclusive mini-schools off the tradl publics with a boost from taxpayers – & school blurbs making it clear that only very mild SpEd needs can be accommodated. No wonder they’re anti-voucher, they’ve got a nice racket going & don’t want the field [pocketbook] diluted by no-name religious privates & the like.
Eden’s ‘spin’ on failed ed-reforms 2009-2015 is notable. “In 2009, the county GOP decided to endorse a slate of school board candidates, who cruised to victory and felt a mandate for reform. So this Republican-backed board decided to push from the bottom up the same agenda the Obama administration was pushing from the top down: higher standards, test-based teacher evaluations, and more school choice… Former superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen viewed the Obama reform agenda as too timid… Her team would go above the “Common Floor” of the Common Core with their own “Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum” aligned to “World-Class Outcomes.” Dismissing Colorado’s assessment and teacher evaluation framework as insufficient, her team created their own assessments and a “Continuous Improvement of Teacher Effectiveness” evaluation system, which would be the basis for merit pay for teachers…”
(all of which resulted in massive staff defections & eventual rout of the entire board).
He’s clever to blame that accountability Armageddon on Obama (who after all was just ‘upgrading’ what Repubs started) – but – the truth hurts.
Douglas County is a hot bed of DARK MONEY. Glad vouchers were voted down. But, I am still wary.