Some of us have spent years trying to explain to the public why school choice—charters and vouchers—is a bad idea. Samantha Bee does the job effectively in this video in seven minutes. She notes that school choice has had bipartisan support but that its enthusiastic advocates are people who hate public schools and want to turn them over to the free market or religious zealots , or both.
Samantha Bee has an excellent solution: Instead of using public money to drain the coffers of public schools, why not fund our public schools to be the best in the world?
Watch this and share it with your friends.
I’m not in favor of school choice, but I’m also skeptical that public schools have the willpower to become the best in the world. Money isn’t the main issue. Our public schools are burdened with social justice ideology and progressive pedagogy, both of which undermine student achievement. All the money in the world isn’t going to fix that.
Please define “student achievement.”
Please cite evidence that both social justice ideology and progressive pedagogy undermine student achievement.
And, the best schools in the word are, in fact, public schools. They are just found in other countries.
I do think you are onto something regarding willpower. But, let’s think about what systems are in place that minimize willpower to fight for what can be better for our children.
Greg. I am with LetThemLearn.
You are slinging around generalizations and judgments that have no basis in history or in fact. Aspiring to social justice is not an ideology or a specific curriculum. Social INjustice is exactly what Trump is promoting.
Progressive pedagogy has never been a single way of teaching, least of all at its height from the 1920s to early 1950s. The faux contemporary version of progressive thinking is being marketed as “personalized learning” when in fact that phrase usually refers to computer delivery of identical instructional content that thousands of students can see on a screen.
Thanks to Congressional legislation, measures of student achievement have been limited to dubious test scores on standardized tests and those scores are known to be directly related to parental/family wealth. MONEY MATTERS.
Public schools and the teachers that work in them absolutely have the willpower for Continuous Improvement, the only thing they lack, besides sufficient funding for smaller class sizes and repairs to dilapidated buildings is the end of the influence of those who are trying to make them fail by imposing irrational burdens on what they do. We would never put the people behind the reform movement in charge of the day to day combat operations or any other aspects of our military because the are not qualified for that, just as they are not qualified to in any way improve education in America.
Greg Esles: the “progressive pedagogy” part is way off the mark & shows you are not in the ed field & listen to misinformed pundits rather than educators. However I will say I hear a tiny bell ringing in the ‘social justice’ part. And I wouldn’t have said it a week ago—that was before I saw FLERP’s post reporting his middle-schooler was accosted with “The Unequal Opportunity Race” cartoon by AAPF on his first day of remote learning. There are going to be mistakes made in curricular choices, by individual teachers and in textbooks and by admin, in the search for a more balanced way of presenting our history and current politics re: race. But I see no more cause for alarm there, than in GAGA – “go-along-to-get-along”– indefinite pursuit of antique lopsided curriculum that ignores large chunks of our history and demographics.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
I don’t think one can get a job in education policy without adopting the “choice” dogma.
If we want policy that values public schools we’re going to have to find and hire people who value public schools and we aren’t going to find those people coming out of the echo chamber ed reform pipeline of TFA, Broad, Walton or Gates.
They all sound the same because they all come out of the same think tanks and university departments and lobbying groups. It’s a revolving door too- the Bush ed people all got jobs in ed reform orgs and so did the Obama people. The Trump people will too. Our public education policy is run by +/- 150 people of sometimes different parties but with the exact same plans who don’t support public schools. They don’t contribute anything to improve or support our schools because they don’t think our schools should exist.
This.
I would like to clarify one of the pieces of data mentioned regarding that one in six charters do better than public schools. While the numbers may indeed show this to be true, how many of these “better” charters have selective admissions policies that filter out low performing students which typically include larger percentages of English learners and those with disabilities. Many reports have also shown that many students who initially enroll in a charter are ultimately “counseled” out. These numbers show up when a comparison is made with the number of students who start at a charter, then drop out before graduation.
and what notable harm is done if one in six (or more) do a much worse job than public schools
“Fordham Institute OH
OhioGadfly
·16h
To deal with Covid-19’s effects on student learning, we need both diagnostic and state assessments. They provide different types of information to different groups of people and, when used in tandem, provide a much fuller picture of academic health.”
Public school policy in Ohio is run by people who don’t value public schools and spend careers lobbying to replace them.
Would charter and voucher supporters accept this in their schools? How is this fair to public school students? Shouldn’t they have people setting policy who support them and their schools? Not the schools they should be attending with vouchers, or the charter schools they should transfer to in a shiny new privatized system, but the schools they actually attend.
We haven’t seen any benefits from ed reform flow to the 90% of students who attend public schools because ed reformers aren’t interested in the public schools that exist- they’re interested in the privatized system they hope to create. Which is really a tough break if you happen be among the 90% who attend the schools they have already discarded as “factory schools” or “government schools” or “status quo schools” or any of the other wholly negative depictions of our schools and students they repeat like parrots over and over.
Chiara, re: the gadfly post. I assume it was this one? https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/deal-coronavirus-fallout-diagnostic-and-state-assessments-are-vital The argument there (dg vs summative tests) is OK in broad principles, but it evades the usual issue I have w/ed-reformers on summative tests: there’s no data showing that annual summatives for each grade-level are valid compared to the traditional design, i.e. periodic (say every 3 yrs)—and plenty of data showing they’re invalid as a basis for ‘grading’ individual schools, teachers (or students).
But more to your point: in Ohio, are they imposing the summative tests on charters and vouchers—or just public schools?
“WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will join Sen. Ted Cruz for a conversation titled “Exploring the Future of Education and Workforce Development” at the Council on Competitiveness’ National Competitiveness Forum.
Secretary DeVos and Sen. Cruz will discuss the future of workforce development and the critical role education freedom scholarships and other education reforms will play in preparing students for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century economy. Vice Chair of the Council on Competitiveness and President of Arizona State University Michael Crow will moderate the conversation.”
Every day in ed reform is like this. They simply don’t perform any work at all on behalf of students in public schools. You see where they put public school students, right? Under “other education reforms”, and after “choice”.
The single thing they have done for our schools in this pandemic is lobby to ensure our kids continue to take standardized tests. That’s the sum total contribution.
I’m tired of hearing the term “government schools”. It make it sound like they are schools behind the iron curtain during the cold war.
The truth is they aren’t government schools, they are community schools, run locally by locally elected school boards that make decisions based on the best interest of their community. Granted, since the war on public education began in the early 1980’s, the federal and state governments have imposed more and more regulations on local schools. But, they are still community schools.
YES. And thanks for the proper definition. The effort to diminish the role of government in a democracy is plainly part of the belief that anything “government-run” is bad. This awful mindset is a legacy of Ronald Reagan . promoted by republicans and has come home to roost in the irrationality of Trump.
Another item that supports the notion that Reagan was ultimate wellspring of our current catastrophe. From his inaugural speech: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
It depends on the issue. Some things can be solved by government, while some can’t. 😐
Eddie, personally I think Reagan’s statement sets up a straw man. Neither half of it can ever be true. Government is citizens’ only means to avoid chaos/ anarchy, & are responsible for using it properly. The statement is slippery: it seems to say, government is bad, or perhaps a necessary evil but the less, the better. That attracts ideologues of conflicting stripes and regular people exasperated for all different reasons: TP, limited-govt Constitutionalists, garden-variety conservatives, ppl just fed up w/ a jump in local sch taxes, or a bothersome new reg.
bethree5, I can agree with you. 🙂
I don’t see how the government can solve “everything”. 😐
Traffic lights are positive. Prohibition was negative. 😐
Here is another excellent examination of why ‘choice’ cannot work in any context, from small rural thru small town to large urban districts. School ‘choice’ is nothing more than one of corporate America/Wall Street’s hostile takeover, profit extraction methods disguised as a plan for education improvement. https://stephenpruis.wordpress.com/2020/10/08/the-limits-of-school-choice/
Really great link. I salted it away.
When has school choice not existed? Any search engine will show one public, private (i.e. Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, secular), home schools and more recently, online schools. Excluding online, these options have existed for decades and “nobody” complained. It’s really up to parents and guardians to decide what school choice is best for their kids. 🙂
There wasn’t too much “choice” when school was just for white children in this country. Then there seemed to be a whole lot more choice during and after desegregation efforts.
We Blacks always found some way to be educated, whether it was our own schools, church or reading a Bible with a candle. 🙂
My brothers and I all graduated from Austin High School (Chicago, IL). Despite the Chicago Board of Education and sadly, some Chicago Public Schools’ teachers who wanted Austin to die, we excelled. I graduated with two White guys. They and their families had no problems with Austin (community and high school) being mostly Black. 😐
My brothers and I could have traveled to Prosser, Taft, Steinmetz or anywhere else. We didn’t want to travel to a school, where we weren’t wanted, for over 2 hours on CTA. We had pride in our local school that we could walk to and parents could easily visit. 😐
Please note my views are strictly my own and aren’t a reply to anyone else’s. 🙂
Today, choice is quite different than what you described. 1st, parents have never had a seat at the table where the “choices” that would be made available to them are decided upon, though there are examples of parents being manipulated and used to create that impression. Next, the choices that are being foisted upon America’s parents are not being formulated by anyone with a deep and wide understanding of what education is and how it occurs within a child, a classroom or a school. The choices are designed to eliminate input or influence from parents and true education professionals without appearing to do so. Choice today as put forth by so-called reformers is all about maximizing profit via comprehensive corporate control of education.
I politely disagree, Jon. 😐
I don’t know about your area, but parents and guardians in Chicago generally choose public, private, home and online. 🙂
The question is, do we support the alternatives to the public schools with taxes.
Exactly. The difference between now and then is that we didn’t have the 1% lobbying the government to use taxpayer money to fund their pet project. In the past you had one stream of public schools and then private schools for which people paid separately. There is a reason why no one used to complain – it’s because public money was not being used to find a secondary school system.
I meant “fund”, not “find”.
The time for American schools came and left, way back in 1776 and 1789. Then, The 13 Colonies morphed into The 13 States, which became The United States of America to combine 13 militaries into one to defeat Great Britain (or England?) and have a single currency. Most other issues were left to states. 😐
Funny,terrifying, great (Bee) and rotten (DeVos).
Sort of like 2020, this whipsaw year, in a nutshell.
I’m catching up on yesterday….this morning.
Well worth watching (and putting off the work from yesterday or tomorrow or next week or whenever) that I really should be doing.
She explained the situation well. Explains why the Fordham Institute was quick to criticize her.
Just collecting some stats, spurred by several posts about school choice.
Our national stats say 6-7% K12 attend charters. I can’t find stats on how many attend vouchers schools [anybody know?]—but we know about 2% are homeschooled, so I’ll go w/ a conservative estimate of 1.5%. So totalled, that’s at least 8% K12 students doing tax-supported alternatives. The “backpack” per-pupil amount being pulled out of trad pubsch budget varies among states from 40%-90%– but 90% is an extreme seen only in [AZ? or 100% in NC?]: let’s call it 55%. So that’s 8% pulling 55% each of per-pupil funds out of pubsch budgets: = 4.4%. National ave per-pupil expenditure is $12k, so that’s, on average, $528 per-pupil lost to pubsch students. Doesn’t sound like much—until you think about tradl pubsch teachers spending at least that much (often double that) out of their take-home pay every year to provide kids with school supplies and snacks. There is no float in most of our nation’s pubsch budgets. What charter & voucher kids carry out of pubsch budgets is made up by [underpaid] teachers out of their take-home pay.
States with expanded charter systems, plus vouchers schools on top of that are worse off. These are mostly red states with underfunded pubschs & no teachers unions, with more like 12% of state schoolchildren taking more like 75% per-pupil allotment away in their backpacks—7.5%. So for a FL or a NC spending $9k per-pupil, nearly $700 per pubsch pupil is leached away into charters and vouchers—33% more than in the “average” state—and FL & NC pay their pubsch teachers about 15% less than the national median.
These places are all over the map, so let’s just take one red-state example: NC. The median home price there is $200k; median teacher salary is $54k. In NC, average per-pupil expenditure is $9300. They have 7% of students in voucher schools, and another 6% in charter schools – & funding for both [backpack spending] is 100% of average per-pupil expenditure. So NC has 13% of students leaching the full per-pupil expenditure out of traditional public schools into schools with (most likely) smaller class sizes, which don’t have to follow all pubsch regs, run by boards not accountable to local taxpayers, lightly-monitored (if at all) as to fiscal solvency or academic quality. And most likely these pubsch alternates are either all black or all white, exacerbating segregation.
Florida’s stats are similar, except they only grant 80% per-pupil expenditure to the “backpack.”
Compare to two rust-belt red states, OH and IN. Indiana has 6% total students in vouchers & charters, Ohio 10%. Median home prices in both states are considerably less than FL & NC [in the $150k’s], but teacher salaries are the same. However average per-pupil expenditures are higher [IN $10k, OH $12.4]. Both IN & OH voucher allotment is only about 50% of state per-pupil allotment.