Edward Johnson is an advocate for high quality public schools for all children. He lives in Atlanta. He has studied the works of G. Edwards Deming, who understood that you don’t blame frontline workers for problems with the system. If things go wrong, fix the system.
He wrote the following letter to Rev. Diane Daugherty about the absurdity of “choice” as a fix for the system (see her letter after his). In fact, “choice” is an abdication of responsibility by those who have the power to fix the system. They turn problems over to the market and hope for the best, ignoring the well-documented fact that the market deepens pre-existing inequities.
Of course, anyone who thinks that the Walton family, the DeVos family, Trump, ALEC, and other plutocrats are committed to civil rights and equity is either hopelessly naive or on their payroll.
He writes:
Rev. Diane Daugherty,
Thank you for lending your voice to the matter. Interestingly, one may take your understanding as a key aspect of the law research paper Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination, by Osamudia R. James, currently Vice Dean, University of Miami School of Law.
Atlanta superintendent Meria Carstarphen, Atlanta school board members, and BOOK, including especially its supporters UNCF and Andrew Young Foundation, would do well to learn from Vice Dean James’ paper.
But it may be unreasonable to expect any of them would. For example, this AJC article makes clear the superintendent, arguably Atlanta school choice proponents’ leader, holds an unshakable mindset fixated on commercializing public education in Atlanta by transforming it from a systemic public good into disparate private consumer goods, à la KIPP and others. So transformed, and unlikely to have resulted in improved schools, parents as consumers may then choose a school for their child just as they would choose a McDonald’s Happy Meal for the child. So goes the superintendent’s reasoning.
The pushback that arose in response to the superintendent’s profane conflation of consumerism and public education prompted school choice advocate Robert Holland to rise in her defense, with an attempt to say what the superintendent really meant to say. Holland, at the conservative and libertarian public policy think tank The Heartland Institute, blogged “The School Choice Generation Wants a Full Educational Menu.”
The Atlanta superintendent, school board, and BOOK would also do well to take from their partner and supporter, Walton Family Foundation, a lesson about how consumerism’s choice really works. Last week, the AJC and other media reported that, “based on a number of factors, including financial performance,” the Waltons made the decision to close their Lithonia Sam’s Club at Stonecrest. Was the store’s consumer community consulted or otherwise involved beforehand? Nope. Did the store’s consumer community have a choice? Nope. Now that once consumer community fears the Waltons have put upon it more problematic, if not new, food desert they did not “choose.”
The lesson, then, is who, in consumerism’s commercialized world, truly has choice and who truly does not.
Diane Ravitch offers an excerpt from Vice Dean James’ paper that amplifies the lesson (my emphases):
“James advocates for limitations on school choice ‘to prevent the disastrous social consequences–the abandonment of the public school system, to particularly deleterious consequence for poor and minority schoolchildren and their families–that occur as the collective result of individual, albeit rational, decisions. I also advocate for limitations on school choice in an attempt to encourage individuals to consider their obligations to children not their own, but part of their community all the same….The actual impact of school choice cannot be ignored. Given the radicalized realities of the current education system, choice is not ultimately used to broaden options or agency for minority parents. Rather, school choice is used to sanitize inequality in the school system; given sufficient choices, the state and its residents are exempted from addressing the sources of unequal educational opportunities for poor and minority students. States promote agency even as the subjects supposedly exercising that agency are disabled. Experience makes clear that school choice simply should not form an integral or foundational aspect of education reform policy. Rather, the focus should be on improving public schooling for all students such that all members of society can exercise genuine agency, initially facilitated by quality primary and secondary education. Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.’”
This is Dr. Daugherty’s letter to the Atlanta Board of Education:
From: Diane Dougherty [mailto:doughertyadd@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2018 8:01 PM
To: EdJohnsonAfQPE <edwjohnson@aol.com>
Cc: AfQPE@aol.com; bamos@atlantapublicschools.us; cbriscoe_brown@atlanta.k12.ga.us; epcollins@atlantapublicschools.us; jesteves@atlantapublicschools.us; lgrant@atlantapublicschools.us; nmeister@atlantapublicschools.us; pierre.gaither@atlanta.k12.ga.us; mjcarstarphen@atlanta.k12.ga.us; annwcramer@gmail.com; Erika Y. Mitchell <eymitchell@gmail.com>; Kandis Wood <kandiswood@gmail.com>; Michelle Olympiadis <michelle.olympiadis@gmail.com>; education@naacpatlanta.org; president@naacpatlanta.org; info@bookatl.org; david.mitchell@bookatl.org; Naomi.Shelton@uncf.org; sekou.biddle@uncf.org; cmeadows@morehouse.edu; mbinderman@geears.org
Subject: Re: BOOK and newly installed Atlanta Board of Education Members
BOOK seems to promote better outcomes outside any effort to make existing public education better. Their methodology seems to create parallel academic structures diminishing schools that need an infusion of structures and funds. To me their short term efforts will not evolve into a sustainable plan 30 years from now. Without any data that supports their perceived “Better Outcomes, BOOK’S emphasis on School Choice has proven a poor strategy in decimated African American schools in Tennessee, Michigan and Louisiana….in spite of billions spent…why would there be improved outcomes here if it has not worked there? Rev. Diane Dougherty
Diane Dougherty, ARCWP
Avondale Estates, GA 30002
678-918-1945
doughertyadd@gmail.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 
People are always confusing con artists with hypocrites.
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yes.
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“Choice” is presented as the superior model for education despite all the evidence to the contrary, and that assumption is presented as fact. I recently read an article that starts out explaining how language is shaped by politics, and it goes on to show how education “reformers” have used language to usurp the public institution of of education. This is an interesting article and worth reading.https://thecrucialvoice.com/2018/01/21/political-conformity/
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“Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.”
Yes. That’s it.
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Love W. Edwards Deming’s work. He’s right. ALL the DEFORMS go against Deming’s research.
Deming Principles: https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points
I hope you are able to open the link above and read Deming’s Principles.
One is: DRIVE OUT FEAR. Bingo, yes indeed: DRIVE OUT FEAR.
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On a different note, Diane, thank you for those pics of the common grave in Cambodia. SAD.
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Agreed. The photos are a stark reminder of the horrors committed by Cambodia’s dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/07/why-the-world-should-not-forget-khmer-rouge-and-the-killing-fields-of-cambodia/?utm_term=.8cc451a24c1e
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Of course, we should never forget the Cambodian holocaust. When Hitler was planning the “final solution” has asked his inner circle (rhetorically): “Who remembers the Armenians?”. In 1915, 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks. Most people (today) have no idea about this slaughter. Ironically, it was a German cameraman, who documented the killings.
I feel like the 20th century was a continuous holocaust.
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It’s odd and disturbing to me that no one ever challenges the slogans. It isn’t true that vouchers allow parents to choose any school, like Betsy DeVos parrots. The schools that accept vouchers are the least expensive private schools. Most of them are religious (partly) because a 5k voucher doesn’t cover costs without a subsidy from a church.
There are tiers of private schools and ed reformers know this. Yet they insist that they want to offer parents every school. No they don’t. They want to send them to the cheapest private schools, because the voucher is too low to go anywhere else.
Sometimes it’s amusing. “Failing public schools” is such a stock phrase in ed reform marketing it’s become a cliche. Have you ever once heard any of these people mention a bad private school? There are plenty of them! The Catholic school here is generally considered a “worse” school in terms of test scores than the public schools. Parents send their children there because they went there or they’re religious or they want to keep their children away from the public school children, who they believe are poorly behaved. They say this themselves- it isn’t that it’s a “better” school, it’s that there are no “bad influences” and by that they mean public school students.
I would really appreciate if some reality entered this debate. These marketing slogans are stale and worse, they’re not TRUE.
Won’t it be a bit of a shocker to the public if ed reformers get their way and eradicate public schools and it isn’t the shangri la of wonderfulness they sell? Because it won’t be. Half this nonsense isn’t even true on its face.
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Challenge slogans? Good one, Chiara. Slogans are everywhere and no one is teaching propaganda techniques. Sew up the curriculum with common gore stuff so the young don’t question the status quo and authority. Heck many adults don’t question the slogans.
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How often do we hear the champions of “reform” ever mention all the scandals, waste and fraud in the charter industry? They turn a blind eye to all the problems and stay on message despite evidence to the contrary.
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One of the primary motivating factors for the DeVos crowd is to drive people into Christian religious schools since she views them, with the same mile thick rose colored glasses that she sees her own agenda through, as a cure for the “moral decline” she is sure that the USA is suffering under. In a sense, DeVos is right, she being the exact same person as the money changers that Jesus threw out of the temple, she is at the core of the moral failure imposed via the power of money and influence on the nation by the plutocrats.
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This is very important – the reformers have A LOT of Americans convinced that “failing schools” are the fault of the teacher unions, bad teachers, or somehow, the “schools” themselves.
But even when people fall for this “fake news”, the reformers never propose fixing the problem or addressing the underlying reasons, their solution is to divert tax dollars to a new non-union school with instruction that focuses on bubble testing.
We must ask people to understand the story of Charlie the Corrupt Bridge Builder. Whenever a town has a bridge in need of repair, he proposes a new bridge down the street, without considering repairs on the old one. When Charlie is asked why not repair the old bridge, or at least close it down so no one gets hurt, he draws on his cigar and explains that although some people might get hurt, the old unsafe bridge is the best advertisement for his business.
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I appreciated this mans letter and summary of charters…and some of your comments. I have advocated against charters and used many common reasons found in this blog for a long time. It is difficult when my conservative friends are against it but…and I am not trying to be argumentative…we have had successful home schooling and parochial schools for decades in this country and those parents have paid into a public school system that they, for the most part, never use. They have complained about staffing, discipline, curriculum, moral issues etc in the public school systems. I do not see them going ballistic over the fact that public schools have quite willingly taken their tax money while they must buy books, pay tuition and volunteer in the private school to afford to keep their children there. In this state there are just a handful of charters and a majority of students go to public schools. How can I rationalize this bit of hypocrisy to them and myself? Please no DJT or Betsy bashing. Convince me, please.
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We as a nation in our foundational documents have made a commitment to the education of our citizenry necessary to the functioning of a democratic government. We have also through our founding documents stressed the separation of church and state, having separated from a nation ruled by a king supposedly chosen by God who exercised control over how people worshiped.
As a society dedicated to educating its children we all pay taxes to support a system of public schooling for the common good of our society. Everyone and anyone can attend public schools. We all can choose to educate our own children through private means but as members /citizens of this society/country we have all committed to the idea of public schooling. We don’t get to pick and choose what parts of our system of governance we will support by withholding taxes from those government supported programs we do not choose to endorse. I am free to pay for an education provided by a religious sect, but should not expect those who do not endorse my faith to pay for it through their tax monies. There are services that I may never use in my life time. I still pay for them through my taxes so everyone has access to them.
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Q We as a nation in our foundational documents have made a commitment to the education of our citizenry END Q
Excuse me, where is this stated in the Declaration of Independence and/or the US Constitution? Publicly-financed education is mentioned in some (not all) state constitutions. No federal foundational document sets forth any mandate for publicly-financed education.
Q We have also through our founding documents stressed the separation of church and state END Q
Again, where, and in which document is this stated? The 1st amendment bans establishment of religion, and guarantees the free exercise of religion. Nowhere, in any founding document is the “separation of church from state” mentioned. Our congress is opened with prayer, by a chaplain paid for with public funds. Our president swears his oath on a Holy Bible. Our military has paid chaplains. Our currency says “In God we Trust”. Government and religion are not separated in this nation. We have national prayer week. Etc, etc.
Q we have all committed to the idea of public schooling. END Q . Not at all. In Indiana, and about 30 or so states, parents have the ability to opt-out of government-run publicly-operated schools, and seek alternate education for their children, and receive public funds to pay the costs of these choices. I have no children, but I am NOT committed to publicly-operated schooling for America’s children. I am forced to pay for public schools, on pain of violation of law, but I am NOT committed to these government-run schools.
Q but should not expect those who do not endorse my faith to pay for it through their tax monies. END Q
In about 30 states, parents who send their children to religiously-operated schools, can expect exactly that. Parents in school-choice states, send their children to faith-based schools, and the public pays tuition through vouchers/ESAs, etc.
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“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”
— John Adams, U.S. President, 1785[48]
You have a very narrow view of what constitutes a foundational document. No the idea of our modern system of public education did not pop into existence overnight, but the necessity for a well educated citizenry has early roots.
Click to access ED564952.pdf
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/view/10859/15427
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