From the earliest days of corporate reform, which is now generally recognized to have been a failed effort to “reform” schools by privatizing them and by making standardized testing the focal point of education, we heard again and again that a child’s zip code should not be his or her destiny. Sometimes, in the evolving debates, I got the sense that some people thought that zip codes themselves were a problem. If only we eliminated zip codes! But the reality is that zip codes are a synonym for poverty. So what the reformers meant was that poverty should not be destiny.
Would it were so! If only it were true that a child raised in an impoverished home had the same life chances as children brought up in affluent homes, where food, medical care, and personal security are never in doubt.
But “reformers” insisted that they could overcome poverty by putting Teach for America inexperienced teachers in classrooms, because they (unlike teachers who had been professionally prepared) “believed” in their students and by opening charter schools staffed by TFA teachers. Some went further and said that vouchers would solve the problem of poverty. All of this was nonsense, and thirty years later, poverty and inequality remain persistent, unaffected by thousands of charter schools and TFA.
In effect, the reformers held out the illusion that testing, competition, and choice would level the playing field and life chances of rich and poor kids. After 30 or more years of corporate reform, it is clear that the reform message diverted our attention from the wealth gap and the income gap, which define the significant differences among children who have everything and children who have very little.
Imagine the cost of assuring that every school in the nation were equitably and adequately funded. Imagine if all students had small classes in a school with beautiful facilities, healthy play spaces, the best technology, and well-paid teachers. That would go a long way towards eliminating the differences between rich schools and poor schools, but our society has not taxed itself to make sure that all kids have great schools.
None of the promises of “reform” have been fulfilled. The cynical among us think that the beneficiaries of reform have been the billionaires, who were never willing to pay the taxes necessary to narrow income and wealth inequality or to fund good schools in every neighborhood. They gladly fund “reforms” that require chicken feed, as compared to the taxes necessary to truly make zip codes irrelevant.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Exactly. And the Color of Law is a great book for understanding why certain zip codes are mostly African American and poor.
Am reading this now. Definitely having an impact on how I view the residential geography of this nation.
“Reimagining the future of public education after covid” turns out to be the exact same agenda these people have been pushing for the last 20 years:
“While discussions around reopening schools seem centered on class size reduction and sanitation, we need to think bigger as a country. We now know education can be more flexible than we thought, and cater to different needs and preferences. For instance, charter schools have experienced enrollment increases because they adapted quickly to remote learning and offered a customized education that fit the needs of their students.”
Charters, vouchers and testing. Same old, same old.
I hope Biden looks outside the ed reform echo chamber for employees. Public school students shouldn’t have to put up with another lost decade under ed reform dogma and the same 15 DC lobbyists pushing an agenda.
The only reason to hire and pay these folks is to privatize and expand charters and vouchers. They offer nothing to public school students.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/542596-reimagining-the-future-of-public-education-after-covid
Chiara, you caught them up to their old tricks: “reimagining the future after COVID” is allegedly the same old same old, the same tired refrain of remote learning and charters and vouchers and testing and choice.
Don’t believe it.
Another one:
“To my knowledge, very few elementary schools can claim to exemplify such an approach, but the nonprofit network of Rocketship charter schools can at least make a strong case. As I wrote a few years ago, Rocketship schools use an elegant model that combines whole-class instruction, small groups, individual work, and an extended day, one that provides ample time for core academics, including STEM and humanities, plus social and emotional learning and enrichment activities. Rocketeers get more individualized instruction than most elementary students do—and it shows in their impressive results.”
Apparently ed reform’s “response” to the pandemic is to do the same promotion and marketing of charter schools they do every other year.
One big advertisement for charter chains, and thousands of full time, paid salespeople.
testing
charters and vouchers
That’s all they have.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/how-elementary-schools-can-address-unfinished-learning-through-personalization
Anytime you see the word “personalization,” think computers, technology, and depersonalization.
The zip code argument always was a red herring to distract from the real issue of systemic poverty. In order to become more equitable, we must find alternate ways of funding education other than property taxes. Funding through property taxes makes the rich schools richer and the poor schools poorer. Even Title 1 that helps to compensate for some of the disparities does not provide enough supplementary compensation as school buildings in poor urban areas are neglected due to lack of funds. We need to revise how we appropriate funds to public schools with a goal of providing greater equity.
So-called reform makes funding disparities worse. Most of the charter schools are in urban areas whose public schools are already under funded. As a result of privatization the poor schools must send more money to private charter schools. The outcome is larger classes and and diminished student services. Public schools are left with fixed stranded costs and lots of needy, vulnerable students. This is not equity. It is like “educational strip mining” that accentuates the existing inequities.
I have been wanting to write about the “zip code” myth for a long time. Someone was bugging me on Twitter to acknowledge that zip codes were more important than poverty. What? Zip codes are a proxy for poverty. But the reformers have been claiming for about two decades that they alone know how to make zip codes irrelevant: TFA and charter schools. Wrong answer.
This reads like an op-ed piece. Do you plan on submitting it to any publications? Also, in one paragraph you have “plating” instead of “playing”.
I write for this blog. Sometimes I send articles to Valerie Strauss and repost them here. I recently published an overview of the past 20 years in The Progressive and I published a review in The New Republic, of Berkshire and Schneider’s “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.” My longest articles are book review-essays, which I publish in the New York Review of Books. I love to publish in NYRB because it reaches people who don’t read the education blogs, and it has a huge audience. My most recent piece there was The Dark History of School Choice.
What you read here is unlikely to be published anywhere else. I am under a ban of some kind at the NY Times, so I don’t bother to submit anything there. Their op-ed editor doesn’t publish anti-choice pieces.
Beth,
I fixed the typo and added a new paragraph. Thanks.
Deformers act as though teachers are responsible for all those horrible zip codes along with all those “low expectations.” Part of the zip code argument is how privatizers try to assign blame to teachers in urban schools.
nice title for a book: educational strip mining
Zipcode
Zip means nadda
Just a code
For “just don’t bother”
“On this road”
Zip codes are zip lines to entrenched discrimination for a lot of people.
Zipline
Zip is line
To ghetto life
Doing time
And gun and knife
Change Zipcodes to eliminate poverty
We should change the codes
That would even score
Lead to nice abodes
And riches for the poor
For several years while I taught in New York, I also served as an Alumni Admissions Associate for my alma mater, Hampshire College. While at this, I learned that financial aid offices at post-secondary institutions use zip codes while tabulating aid packages for matriculating students. When I spoke to the students in my classes in Manhattan about college, or interviewed a prospective student for Hampshire, they often wondered how they could ever afford tuition at a school like Hampshire, one of the most expensive in the nation. I offered them, in this situation, the solace of need-blind financial aid and their own zip codes, which would make it possible for them to attend Hampshire. Happily, 26 years after I graduated, Hampshire has become a much more diverse institution because of its willingness, whenever able, to aid a student from a zip code that represents low per-capita incomes, high crime rates, and all the social pathology that attends those statistics.
So yeah, zip codes are important–vitally so, in every sense of the meaning of that adverb. And thanks again, Diane, for raising a very important issue.
Not understanding the colleges and universities charge students individualized prices is a barrier for first generation students. If they can reach out to knowledgeable people it does a lot of good.
Zip codes (or poverty) matter to most kids. But the fact is that it matters a lot more to some kids than others. It is not a myth – it is a reality – that some immigrant families were able to come to this country with almost nothing, live in one of those zip codes, and their kid can still thrive. That so-called “American Dream” isn’t a complete myth — if it was, we’d probably have different – and better – public policy.
The problem is that we have had too many decades of public policy where the kids for whom poverty matters the least are emphasized and held out as representative of all kids in poverty. The are representative of SOME kids in poverty. That’s it. (And I’m not even addressing the fact that their success usually requires a lot more work on their part than a child growing up in a much more affluent zip code.)
It is simply outrageous to me that ed reformers’ lucrative paid gigs are achieved by ignoring all the students for whom extreme poverty matters the most — pretending those students are to blame for their own failures — by pushing the false narrative that the supposed “success” of the students who attend their charters is due to their school.
And while I find it very Trump-like when I hear charter CEOs whose work is entirely about fulfilling their own ego bragging about how they are the personal saviors of the children in poverty who are affected the least by poverty, what I find most outrageous is that those ego-driven CEOs throw all the kids who are most affected by their poverty under the bus by blaming them because they are more impacted by poverty! Their answer is not to work to alleviate the poverty but to blame the kids and their parents by going out of their way – over and over again – to push their self-serving narrative that those kids need nothing but harsh discipline and humiliation to do well and if that doesn’t work blame the awful, terrible child. (Unless the child is in an underfunded public school, in which case blame the teacher).
I think many of the families who chose charters know that this false narrative isn’t true, but either they don’t realize that they are being used to justify the right wing doing nothing about poverty, or they are too scared to speak out knowing that the people who run their schools would throw their child under the bus just as they have seen them do to others who interfere with their main purpose. As I say, it is very Trump-like where Trump turns on anyone who doesn’t help him serve his ultimate goal – himself.
“Reform Schools?
“A reform school was a penal institution, generally for teenagers mainly operating between 1830 and 1900. In the United Kingdom and its colonies reformatories commonly called reform schools were set up from 1854 onwards for youngsters who were convicted of a crime as an alternative to an adult prison.”
I think Success Academy and many private sector publicly funded charter schools fit that definition with their harsh, no-nonsense policies to bully, abuse, and punish childre and teachers for the smallest things.
Yes, to the power of 10.
This wasALWAYS about pretending that poverty wasn’t a social problem. School reformers see schools as putting out a sort of helicopter ladder, dangling over the burning pit that is mediocrity and poverty, flying those who can scale that ladder to safety. That, by the way, for very many people, is what school feels like as well. The real question, of course, is – Why is the bloody place on fire?? Why is ordinary working- or middle-class life something that people need to escape from?
“In effect, the reformers held out the illusion that testing, competition, and choice would level the playing field and life chances of rich and poor kids.”
This was always a disingenuous position. It is no more than a PR selling point to fool rubes [voters]. masking govtl moves since late ‘70’s for deregulated capitalism to privatize public goods, promulgated in every public goods context (not just education). This was our govt’s pusillanimous response to the triple economic threats of automation, digital revolution, and global rise of 3rd world economies: deregulate and let the devil take the hindmost– shrinking pie? Let the $ trickle to the top & to hell with everybody else.
“They [the billionaires] gladly fund “reforms” that require chicken feed, as compared to the taxes necessary to truly make zip codes irrelevant.”
There would not even be multi-billionaires– & the obvious fallout, multi-billionaires dictating bottom-line for-profit govt policy– had our govt not taken the steps outlined above. The late ‘70’s were an economical watershed. It was a time for re-imagining the future of a country which could no longer count on mfg domination—which needed to think about steps forward that would assure a balanced economy that preserved the robust middle/ working classes necessary for a stable democracy. We flubbed it, an are living the consequences—our zip code issues merely mirror the results, spiraling inequality.