Jim Scheurich is a professor at Indiana University and a public education activist. He writes here about how School Choice is intended to destroy community.
Folks, the philosophy that charter and innovation schools are built on is that your children’s school should be individualized parental choice. This means parents individually search across the Indy area as to where to send their children, which often means leaving their neighborhood community. Each family or individual parent is thus on her, his, or their own and not engaged with their neighborhood community. Also, each family or individual parent is pitted against or in competition with other similar families and parents for the so-called “better” schools.
This individualistic orientation of charters and innovation schools undermines neighborhood communities and even the possibility of neighborhood communities. Undermining neighborhood communities, according to sociological research, increases violence, including murder. Other research shows that building community decreases violence, including murder.
This, therefore, means that charter and innovation schools are likely one of the causes of our high murder rate in Indianapolis as the individualized school choice model is broadly undermining neighborhood communities across our city.
Of course, building community in low income areas is not easy, but not impossible. However, many such communities have created positive community spaces. Given the difficulty of creating such communities, we certainly do not need more policies, like charter and innovation schools, that are threats to community and community building.
If you study the neoliberal political and economic “philosophy” behind the choice school movement, you will find a strong focus on individualism over community. If you want to understand this movement, which is driving the creation of individualistic “choice” schools, read Democracy in chains by Nancy MacLean, a Duke historian, and then read the award winningDark money by Jane Mayer, which analyzes who the Koch brothers are as they are primary supporters of neoliberalism. Indeed, overwhelmingly, the financial supporters of neoliberalism, the people behind the curtain, the people funding Stand for Children and the Mind Trust, are conservative to rightwing billionaires.
If you don’t believe me or think I am just some conspiracy nut, I dare you to read Democracy in chainsby the highly respected Duke historian, Nancy MacLean. I dare you.
My point is that charter and innovation schools help destroy community, which according to sociological research can lead to increased violence.
Jim Scheurich, Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition, a multi-racial, multi-class, citywide group of Indianapolis citizens working to reverse the takeover of our school district by those funded by white, conservative or rightwing, billionaire neoliberals. Also, an activist professor of Urban Education Studies at Indiana University – Indianapolis
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Anything that proves what is happening to education in Indiana is sent, along with my curt comments, to state Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN]. I do get replies back from Chyung’s secretary saying that my comments are given to him.
I get an automated reply from Niemeyer saying that he got my message. That’s the end of that.
Thanks for the information. Indiana, in my estimation, is a complete mess.
The Walton Education Program Officer is former TFA. She should read Dr. Keith Benson’s paper posted 2-16- 2019 at the Ravitch blog, “To the Black Education Reform Establishment: Be Real with Who You Are and Who’s Interest You Represent.”
In 2018, the current CEO of the Gates Foundation, speaking from her role as the lead independent Facebook board member, advocated for Z-berg as the man to rebuild trust in Facebook.
Consciences in short supply.
The murder rate in Chicago exploded after Rahm Emanuel closed fifty schools. Rather than attending local schools, students were shifted to schools all over the city. This type of disruption undermines stability and predictability in the lives of young people. Poor students do better in a stable environment, and many poor students live unstable lives full of dysfunction. The community school is often an anchor of stability. The school closings pulled the rug from under the feet of many poor students, many of whom were forced to cross paths with hostile gangs in other neighborhoods. The murder rate in the city spiked as a result.
As a general principle, I believe that ALL children do best in a stable environment. Disruption harms children, families, and communities.
I tend to stay away from generalities. There are numerous studies, that indicate that children in military families, who move frequently, are able to achieve excellent academic results. In fact, many military dependents score higher than public school students. Here is an article from the NY Times, which is certainly no fan of school choice:
I was in about 7 different public schools, from K-12, as my family had to move frequently, because of my father’s career. (He retired as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force).
“Disruption” does not always harm children. It is better to be “disrupted” out of a poorly-performing school, and into a quality school.
Most (not all) military families stress the value of academics. Parental involvement usually runs higher and stronger in military families. Military dependents usually have more discipline in the home, and the children are less likely to become involved in drugs and are less likely to have involvement in the criminal justice system.
The DOD Schools on military bases have long had high test scores. Most speculate that it is because of a controlled environment. Parents are there and students are not insubordinate. Discipline is strong. DOD schools are not like regular schools of any kind, where there is no controlled environment and some parents are absent or inattentive.
DOD schools aside, most parents don’t want their children’s Lives disrupted, their schools closed in mid-year, their children’s lives abruptly changed without their knowledge. That doesn’t happen in DOD schools. If you were a parent, you would know that.
The military provides a supportive atmosphere and system for families. When the military member of a family is deployed, the rest of his or her family has a phone number they can call for just about anything. Imagine a child not doing homework. Mom or dad makes a call and maybe the base’s first sergeant, or a colonel (or another officer) or a military chaplain shows up to talk to the children. And they are all family men with children of their own grown or not.
You were right. Military families often come with a lot of discipline that we won’t find in most civilian homes. Even former military members that are retired or served only one stint in the military raise their children in a disciplined environment.
““Disruption” does not always harm children. It is better to be “disrupted” out of a poorly-performing school, and into a quality school.
Most (not all) military families stress the value of academics. Parental involvement usually runs higher and stronger in military families. Military dependents usually have more discipline in the home, and the children are less likely to become involved in drugs and are less likely to have involvement in the criminal justice system.”
You just negated your theory. “Disruption” doesn’t harm military children BECAUSE parental involvement, discipline in the home, less likely to become involved in drugs and less likely to have been involved in the criminal justice system”.
How often to children in the deepest part of the numerous ghettos in the US come from families that offer that? Daily these kids see drug addicts, killings of their friends and relatives, brothers in jail, no food in the house because parents trade food stamps for drugs. [This was happening in one of the districts in which I worked in so I know it happens.] These children NEED stability in their community schools. They DO NOT need to walk through gang controlled areas to get to the next school a number of blocks away because their local school had closed.
Military are moving among different parts of the same large community. Those families who move together from one post to another expect regular changes, and find predictable elements wherever they go; it is a style of life. There is nothing in this that is similar to unpredictable relocations among school types/ cultures/ neighborhoods accompanied by transportation and schedule uncertainties, new applications, records-transfer snafus et al.
Q DOD schools aside, most parents don’t want their children’s Lives disrupted, their schools closed in mid-year, their children’s lives abruptly changed without their knowledge. That doesn’t happen in DOD schools. If you were a parent, you would know that. END Q
I can see that most parents do not want their children’s lives disrupted. As a son of a military officer, I can certainly see your point. I did not like the frequent moves, when I was a child. But I knew that it was part of the requirements of service members and their families.
I do not get your most of your comments about DOD schools. (For the record, I never attended a DOD school).
When a service member parent is on an unaccompanied overseas tour, the parent is absent, while the child(ren) are back in the USA. So parents are absent, sometimes. The majority of DOD dependent schools are located in foreign nations, where the USA has a military presence. The wide majority of military dependents in the USA, attend publicly-operated schools. The feds reimburse the local public school. Even so, it is shown that military children outperform their civilian counterparts, even when attending public schools in the community.
As to your comment about disruption not happening in DOD schools, you are wrong here. Military families transfer at all times of the year, and often on short notice.
Charles,
I was Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of Research during the George H.W. Bush administration. We studied the DOD schools. The students are in a controlled environment. The parents are members of the military. You cannot generalize from DOD schools to other schools.
This is a good point of comparison for what’s happening in Indianapolis, as our former Superintendent (who is now chancellor in DC) closed several high schools last year.
retired teacher,
So agree.
Rahm’s background does NOT impress me at all. He has NO CLUE and is really “all about himself”, like most politicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_Emanuel
I don’t know that I would say that the Chicago murder rate exploded after the schools were closed in 2013. Here is a study by the Tribune of 60 years of murders: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-history-of-chicago-homicides-htmlstory.html . If you scroll down to the graph of monthly homicides 2010 – 2017, there is not an obvious increase in 2013 or 2014, 2015 is higher, 2016 is much higher (and without much of the winter drop that usually happens) and 2017 is just a bit better than 2016.
More generally, this claim that higher rates of school choice leads to higher murder rates is something that could be tested using a difference in difference analysis. Compare the murder rates over time in cities with high levels of school choice to cities will low levels of school choice. Control for other things that we know are correlated with murder rates and see if murder rates in US cities have followed a different path in cities with high rates of school choice compared to similar cities with low rates of school choice.
I like your suggested approach to a study, TE. I was high-fiving the author until he jumped the shark to an unsupported correlation with murder rates. It’s a good subject for a study, though in a sense we don’t need it. There must be oodles of studies connecting various features of poverty to crime, and I know there are a few showing ed losses due to adjustment to school changes. It’s kind of a no-brainer to try to provide a port in the storm– i.e., stable school environment– to kids whose lives are full of uncertainty and disruption.
te-
Send future suggestions to your ideological twin- Steven Levitt.
TE has only one purpose in commenting here. To sneer at us. The snob at Kansas University.
What happens after mass characterization is the high school kids dumped or pushed out by charter operators are not reported to the district, and thus, you have tens of thousands of students, aged 13-17, who nobody has any clue what happened or what they’re up to.
Previously, when schools were under oversight of the school board, the information on those students was collected.
Not anymore in New Orleans, and to a lesser extent, D.C., Newark, and other cities.
What happens to those dropouts whom the system has totally lost track of?
Here’s an article about that phenomenon in New Orleans:
https://www.ibtimes.com/uncounted-2062614
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
“In relinquishing oversight to independent charter operators, former employees say, district authorities lost sight of at-risk students. Under stiff pressure to improve numbers or face closure, schools culled students and depressed dropout rates. And as families muddled through a complex and decentralized system, a sizable contingent of at-risk students may have left the system unrecorded.
“ ‘With an open system like that, it’s relatively easy to misreport information and fudge it,” says Clinton Baldwin, who coordinated the district’s student data from 2012 to 2014. “It was definitely something that was prevalent.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
It doesn’t take a genius sociologist to see that most or many of those kids will end up committing crimes, with the crime and murder rate going up as a result.
New students are often very disruptive. Job #1 when you get to a new school is gaining attention and thereby gaining friends. You do not do this by being flagrantly good. You do this by being flagrantly bad. This is a time-honored strategy for getting other kids (not all kids) to like you. My colleagues have coined a term for it: New Kid Syndrome. It’s almost impossible to get a kid with NKS to focus on academics; he or she is laser focused on establishing social standing. So any policy that increases the number of new kids inflicts this harm on schools.
I have seen this same syndrome in my ELLs. Some newcomers withdraw into a shell, and others act out because they have a need to be noticed. Newcomers are coping with lots of change, and it can be overwhelming. Some of these students also have emotional issues if they have faced trauma in their home country.
You sure do like to paint with a broad brush, and the contempt you have for your students (except for the apparently very few “good” ones) is what’s flagrant.
For the vast majority of new kids, Job #1 is getting through the day. This usually involves keeping your head down and trying not to get noticed except by people you might hope to be friends with. Usually that means hanging out in situations similar to where you might have thrived before – academically minded kids try to stick with the “honors” kids, theater kids with theater kids, band kids with band kids, behind-the-school smokers with behind-the-school smokers etc. The small but disproportionately noticeable group that come in like you’re talking about are probably kids who have suffered severe disruption and trauma in their lives and what they’re doing is calling for help (loudly). But to you they’re just “flagrantly bad”.
Please do yourself and your students a favor and transfer to some elite private school full of privileged “strivers” where most of the kids are “good”. You clearly think very little of the ghetto thugs you work with. (I know, I know, you’ve never used those exact words. But you don’t need to – your meaning is clear enough anyway.)
dienne77, have you ever taught in a more privileged school. I did for three years and before the second year was over, I thought about leaving teaching. Some children in “privileged schools” can also be difficult to work with. And some of their parents are impossible to deal with.
It was so horrible, that the new principal the second year I was there had a closed-door policy. He didn’t want to deal with the parents. He said if we had a problem, find a way to solve it without him. He’d already had one heart attack and wasn’t going to let any “privileged” parents drive him to another one.
The principal before “him” (my first year in that school) supported the teachers and he was pretty good at dealing with the “helicopter parents” that wanted their children to always have the highest grades even if they didn’t do anything to earn them so their “self-esteem” wouldn’t suffer.
At the end of year three, the second year with the closed door principal, half of the staff left: they transferred to other schools in the district, retired early or found jobs in other districts.
I transferred up from that middle school to one of the three high schools in that district. That high school had a child poverty rate of 70-percent and the minority was the white students. They only made up 8 percent of the student population. That high school was in a barrio with multi-generational street gangs. Those local streets were considered so dangerous the police wouldn’t patrol them at night.
And I stayed there for 16 more years to retire from teaching after thirty years. I started on that side of the freeway in 1975 and should have stayed there. Even with all the problems and challenges that come from working with so many children growing up in poverty surrounded by the violence of street gangs, they were easier to work with than the privileged snots on the west side of the freeway in the upper-middle-class side of that school district.
Dienne,
I work in a middle class school that is mostly white.
I never said “bad kids” –I said “being bad”. Do you see the difference? “Bad” is the word the kids themselves use. I like using colloquial English. Sorry.
Not all bad behavior stems from trauma.
Thank you, non-teacher, for mansplaining to this veteran teacher (23 years) what’s really going on at my school. If you read carefully you would have seen that I did not coin the term “New Kid Syndrome” –my colleagues did. So your disparagement extends to them. You did not just bash one teacher –you bashed 30.
I sometimes wonder why your responses to me are so vicious. I suspect you want to silence me and other teachers who might make similar empirical observations that deviate from your preferred conception of reality.
There’s a nugget of generalized truth explaining that particular (and other variations of) NKS. A wise K teacher tried to convince me to give my 5-1/2y.o. another year of PreK. She bade me to look at the other kids at K roundup who would be my youngest’s classmates: they were bigger and more mature. She predicted he would spend his year focused on a difficult social adjustment, and not be able to accomplish much academically [by then K’s were pushing early academics]. I remember considering it. He’d been a small baby who developed speech late; his two best friends were another small immature 5y.o. and a child a year younger. But ultimately I didn’t believe in her theory & anyway wasn’t K the place for social adaptation (not academics)? She was right: both my son & his best little buddy repeated K!
In 2004 humorist Garrison Keillor said wrote seriously, “When you wage war on the public schools, you attack the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”
The monster here is not just neo-liberalism. It is neoliberalism, neoconservatism and the De-Democratization of the United States.
And it is an American nightmare made a hundred times worse because of MAGA Man Donald Trump and his deplorable fascist-loving followers:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20452506?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
I taught in one of “those schools” in Indianapolis that has been affected by the disruption of school choice in the IPS system. School 105 on the east side of Indianapolis sits in the middle of the highest crime rate of the city, and it was often that we had current but mostly former students that had been murdered over some incident that involved people from surrounding neighborhoods. School 105 is a wonderful place that has over the top great teachers and staff: for anyone in Indianapolis that wants to attend Ms. Parker’s Poetry Slam, it will be held Wednesday the 24th at 6:30. Original poems written by kids from 7 to 12, kids in a neighborhood that deserves to have the best school they can have because these wonderful child poets deserve it.
Sadly, there will probably be another murder takes all of the attention away from Ms. Parker’s Poetry event. All because of the disruption and chaos in these kids lives, brought on by the uncertainty of the future of their school.
Teresa,
Thanks for adding your comment to the post.
The tech monopolists’ disruption must to be countered. Is there a group in Indiana you can inform about the Indiana state public employees of SETDA (the organization receives funding from Gates)?
SETDA’s state board of education employees foster public-private partnerships (“gold, silver, event and strategic partners”?) and, promote digital learning. IMO, the SETDA site looks like an industry or Gates- crafted operation, while the titular governing body is public employees.