While looking over my site, I came across this post written in 2014.
It is as timely now as it was then. Reformers worked with communications specialists to develop language that conceals its true meaning.
For example, reformers today don’t want to improve public schools. They want to defund them. Some want to destroy them. They think that public money should go to anyone, any organization that claims they are educating young people. They are fine with funding religious schools. No doubt, they would have no objection to funding Satanic schools, for fairness sake.
These reformers believe in tight accountability for public schools, their principal, their teachers, their students.
They believe in zero accountability for anyone taking public money for nonpublic schools. In most states with vouchers, voucher schools do not require students to take state tests. Students can’t be judged by test scores as public school students are; their teachers can’t be evaluated by test scores. Their schools can’t be closed because of test scores. There are no test scores.
Teachers in public schools must be college graduates who have studied education and who are certified. Teachers in voucher schools do not need to be college graduates or have certification.
Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, now fund homeschooling. With well-educated parents, home schooling may be okay, although the children do miss the positive aspects of meeting children from different backgrounds, working in teams, and learning how to get along with others. But let’s face it: not all home schoolers are well-educated. Poorly educated parents will teach their children misinformation and limit them to what they know, and no more.
Then there is the blessing that the US Supreme Court gave to public funding for religious schools. The purpose of most religious schools is to teach their religion. The long word for that is indoctrination. We have a long history of not funding religious schools. But now all of us are expected to foot the bill for children to learn the prayers and rituals of every religion. I don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s religion to be inculcated. I also don’t want to pay taxes to inculcate my own religion.
But the Supreme Court has step by step moved us to a point where the government’s refusal to pay for Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, and evangelical schools—with no regulation, no accountability, and no oversight—violates freedom of religion. That’s where we are going.
Ninety percent of the people in this country graduated from public schols. Those who sent their children to private or religious school paid their own tuition. That arrangement worked. Over time, we became the leading nation on earth in many fields of endeavor. Our education system surely had something to do with our national success.
I believe that people should have choices. Most public schools offer more curricular choices than charter schools, private schools, or religious schools. Anyone may choose to leave the public school to attend a nonpublic school, but they should not ask the taxpayers to underwrite their private choice.
The public pays for a police force, but it does not pay for private security guards. The public pays for firefighters, highways, beaches, parks, and many other public services. Why should the public pay for your decision to choose a private service?
Saddest of all, the current trend toward school choice will lower the overall quality of education. The children of the affluent who attend elite private schools will get a great education, although they will not get exposed to real life on their $60,000 a year campus. None of those campuses will get poor voucher kids because all they bring is a pittance.
We are now learning that most public schools are superior to most of the voucher schools. Many charter schools are low-performing.
On average, school choice will dumb down our rising generation. It will deepen social and religious divisions. It will not produce better education or a better-educated society. It will widen pre-existing inequalities.
Books have been and will be written about this fateful time, when we abandoned one of our most important, most democratic institutions. Libertarians and religious zealots have worked for years, decades, on this project. By convincing leaders of both parties to follow them, they have betrayed the rest of us. They have lost sight of the common good.
Those two words are key. The “common good.” With them, we as a society can conquer any goal, realize any ideal. Without them, we are reduced to squabbling tribes, cliques, factions. We are becoming what the Founding Fathers warned about.
If it’s not too late, that is the banner behind which we should rally: the common good. An understanding that we are all in the same boat, and we must take care of others.
Magnificent. And so prescient!
Educational “reform” has never meant “to improve” or “to enhance.” When anyone states they want to reform a system, they are merely saying they want to reshape that system. We always expect them to start explaining “why” after the need is stated. Only liberals assume reforms will include improvements. Unfortunately the history of educational reforms show it is a hit or miss process, mostly miss.
Steve,
I agree that so-called “reform” is hit or miss. Either way, students, teachers, and schools lose. Whether the reformers score a direct HIT or whether they waste billions on a bad idea.
Thank you for your keen insights that are always enlightening. Despite the poor track record of so-called reform, we continue down the slippery slope to even greater reckless, wasteful policy in education under the guise of choice. We are at the point extremists are calling for the demise of public education, which is an essential glue that helps hold the republic together. Any politician of any standing should be working to defend and fund our public system of education that used to be envy of the world. With the rise of militant extremists like The Proud Boys, The Oath Keepers and M4L, I believe well funded public education is a matter of national security. Public schools build stronger communities, states and a stronger, healthier nation.
What amazes me is that public education is so taken for granted that so many fail to understand the role it plays in uniting us as well as for being the foundation for so many competent people that have built and continue to build a cohesive, civil society.
So TRUE! Thank you, Diane, for this post.
Education reformers wrap their packaged lies in beautiful paper but inside the box are nothing but turds.
We struggle to come up with language to accurately describe privatization that somehow includes the incorrect word reform. Corporate reform. Deform. Reformster. Etc.
Reform is a dead word. It’s ruined. There is only one word that captures what they’re doing.
Segregation.
Bravo, LCT. Outstanding.