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Rachel Levy: Why I Support Ralph Northam for Governor of Virginia

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2017 //
38

Rachel Levy is a blogger, a parent of children in Virginia public schools, and a public education activist, though not in that order.

In this post, she explains why she is supporting Lt. Governor Ralph Northam in the Democratic run-off for Governor on June 13.

Northam’s opponent Tom Periello is presenting himself as a progressive, and he has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But Levy points out that Periello was DFERs “Reformer of the Month” in 2010. Has he changed? He hast said so.

Levy writes:

“Almost every state-level office holder, Virginia’s senators, and most if not all of Virginia’s Democratic members of the U.S. House have endorsed Ralph Northam. The Perriello campaign tries to dismiss this as “back room establishment.” First of all, that’s dismissive of individual voters like me who support Northam and implies that we can’t think for ourselves. Second, um, those members of the “back room establishment” are the people who have actually done the nitty gritty (and super important) local- and state-level work that Perriello hasn’t and who are closest to constituents. You know who’s even more establishment and even more distant from Virginia voters? The Obama officials who all endorsed Perriello. It doesn’t get much more centrist establishment than John Podesta.”

Levy says she will vote for whichever Democrat wins the run-off.

Categories Education Reform

Steve Zimmer: The Case Against Myself

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2017 //
18

Los Angeles votes today on whether to re-elect Steve Zimmer to the board of education or to choose a man who is a puppet of billionaires who want to turn the schools over to unregulated private operators.

Steve deserves to be re-elected, and Imelda Padilla deserves to join him on the board.

Steve wrote a stunning article in Huffington Post, in which he offers four reasons why someone might decide to vote against him. He also refutes the outright lies on which Nick Melvin’s entire campaign is based.

He writes:

I want to present four legitimate arguments against me. These are good and fair reasons to vote against me on May 16th.

I know this is unusual, but because my opponent has lied so much about my record, I thought I would just go ahead and do this myself. I hope you will share this with your friends and family and explain to them that everything they are reading about me is a lie whether it is on the television, on the radio, or wrapped around their Sunday newspaper. Give them the real reasons to vote against me. Here they are:

1. I believe independent charter schools need to be regulated to ensure that they serve every student that comes to their school house door. I believe independent, privately operated charter schools must be accountable for all public funds they receive. I believe charter schools should operate in the district that authorizes them. If you believe independent charter schools should be completely de-regulated, you should vote against me.

2. I have moved resources to meet the needs of district students living in the highest concentrations of poverty, including thousands in my own district. In real and understandable ways, this has been difficult for certain schools in my district. But I believe it is the only moral way to do this job when 83% of students in the LAUSD live below the poverty line. Some voters may be concerned about these decisions and choose to support my opponent who has only focused his campaign in the more affluent areas of the district.

3. I have been endorsed by the teachers and school employees of our district. I work with our teachers and I work with their union. I vote against their recommendations when I think they are wrong. But it is a priority for me to build trust with the people who deliver education to our students, to be allies in our struggle for equity, to make significant improvement in LAUSD schools. If you don’t believe I should engage our teachers and their unions then I understand why you would vote against me.

4. I oppose the ranking of teachers, students, and schools. I oppose high stakes standardized testing. I believe that the things that are the most beautiful and wondrous about children can never be measured by a standardized test. If you believe we should be constantly testing and ranking students, teachers and schools then I understand why you wouldn’t support me.

This is what I have done. I understand some people can’t vote for someone who has done this.

But Nick Melvoin hasn’t used any of these reasons. Instead he has lied and he has distorted. I can’t stop someone from lying, but I can certainly tell you that this is not how you should win an election. Here are some of the lies he tells about me:

Nick’s Lie #1: The iPads were my program

The Actual Truth #1: The iPad program was started by Melvoin supporter John Deasy. I voted to end the program once it became clear that Deasy had lied to the school board and lied to the public.

Nick’s Lie #2: I created a $1.4 billion deficit.

The Actual Truth #2: The Board has balanced our budget every year. With the Governor’s latest announcement , we will have our budget balanced for 10 years straight.

Nick’s Lie #3: I lowered graduation standards

The Actual Truth #3: We raised the rigor for all students by ensuring that all students be enrolled in college preparatory courses. While we increased rigor, we have raised graduation rates to record levels, from 56% to over 75%

Nick’s Lie #4: I laid off teachers

The Actual Truth #4: I anchored the difficult negotiations that allowed us to save our schools and save thousands of jobs

Nick’s Lie #5: I cut arts education

The Actual Truth #5: I stopped the cuts to arts education and have added over 18 million dollars to the arts budget each year.

I respect the democratic process and I value debate about the important issues facing our public schools. But that’s not what’s happened in this election. I am not perfect and I try to be a better board member every day. If Nick and the California Charter Schools Association waged an honest campaign, I would not be writing this argument against myself. It terrifies me that such an important election could be determined solely on lies and distortions. It should scare us all.

There is much more than even the control of our public schools that is on the line this Tuesday.

Our democratic values and the value of truth itself seem to have worked their way into this moment. I am proud to stand for honesty and service. I hope we can set a better example for our kids.

Categories Education Reform

Florida: Chaos at Palm Beach Charter School

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2017 //
10

Florida is a welcoming state for charter school. It is easy to win approval to open, there is virtually no supervision or accountability, and public money flows freely based on enrollment.

In this environment, problems are inevitable.

The latest mess is the Eagle Arts Academy, a charter school in Palm Beach.

http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/post-investigation-eagle-arts-charter-chaos-are-kids-being-educated/MGH23lilkJ4eN5LRAM694L/

“Like hundreds of families before them, Jill Sheffield and her mother walked the halls of Eagle Arts Academy last summer with growing excitement.

“Touring the sprawling campus, the shy 11-year-old and her mother followed the school’s director across the dance studio’s shiny wood floors, through the guitar-filled music room, and into the gleaming computer lab, listening as he explained the school’s focus on arts and creativity.

“Everybody walking out of there was just like ‘Oh my God, this school is going to be amazing,’” Jill’s mother, Ashley, recalled later.

“But when school started in August, many classrooms had no textbooks. The principal resigned abruptly in the first week. The second principal was gone a few weeks later. The third one left two weeks after that.

“Soon, teachers were being fired or leaving in droves. Mothers complained that their children were not being enrolled in art classes. And then a fed-up parent put together an online petition to remove the school’s director, who responded by calling police.

“Before long, Jill and her mother realized that instead of signing up for an idealized education in academics and arts, they were watching a school be consumed by chaos, an unraveling that many parents say made it impossible for their children to learn and — in some cases — set their educations back by a year or more.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When it opened in 2014, Eagle Arts – blessed with a compelling arts-themed marketing pitch and an enviable location on the campus of a former private school – had the makings of a marquee school.

“But by the time classes started this year, educators say erratic leadership, financial mismanagement and constant staff turnover had left the publicly financed charter school — one of Palm Beach County’s largest — opening its doors with a D grade from the state, a trail of spending controversies and some of the lowest student achievement in the county.

“Since then, parents and former employees say the school has been shaken by even more upheaval as its quick-tempered founder, Gregory James Blount, assumed direct control and drove it into deeper crisis, engaging in repeated confrontations with teachers, parents and administrators, including shouting fits that happened, in some cases, within earshot of children.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, Hoax, Privatization

Susan Ochshorn: The Danger of Universal Pre-K

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2017 //
20

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s major initiative in education was implementation of universal pre-K for four-year-olds. Now he has announced his plan to provide universal pre-K for three-year-olds. The earlier initiative was popular, so what could go wrong?

The Mayor needs the state to fund it with $700 million, which is far from certain.

Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters, says there are too many overcrowded classrooms, and the Mayor should attend to them before launching a new initiative.

Susan Ochshorn of ECE Policyworks fears that the cost of the new grade will be other than financial. She worries that the addition will banish play from the lives of three-year-olds.

She writes:

“I was over the moon when de Blasio pioneered free preschool for four-year-olds. New York’s children and families had been waiting since 1997, when Republican Governor George Pataki first enacted legislation. The state’s movement toward universal access and adequate financing has been erratic, at best, and the mayor’s initiative was bold. But with kindergarten as the new first or second grade, expectations for preschoolers have increased. The pressure is on.

“The tradeoff for early education’s legitimacy and funding has been painful—a Faustian pact. The kind of playfulness that we see in the smartest mammals has lost its pride of place. Our littlest children have been abandoned, left to wander in the desert. We need to bring them to the oasis, before it’s too late.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Play

Hawaii: Why Import Corporate Reformers from the Mainland?

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2017 //
15

Andy Jones’s a high school teacher in Hawaii. He writes here with profound dismay about the search for a new superintendent for the schools of Hawaii.

He was not sorry to see the current superintendent go. She was an avid supporter of test-based accountability and data-data-data.

“This week we learned that the new superintendent will likely be one of two products of the current educational Big Box: a nationwide collection of individuals with graduate degrees from institutions (many of them recent startups) that support a transformation of public education according to post-traditional business models – what critics refer to as the “corporate educational reform movement.

“This model – one to which Matayoshi adhered and which was largely responsible for facilitating the national failure that was No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – is founded on the idea that, where public education is “broken,” it can be “fixed” through methods that emphasize top-down standardization and systemic compliance.

“That’s precisely the model the state is doing its best to move away from – a desire encapsulated in the Blueprint for Public Education drafted by Governor Ige’s ESSA Task Force, as well as in the Hawaii State Teacher Association’s Schools Our Keiki Deserve report.

“A quick Google search on the proposed candidates leaves little room for optimism that either candidate is prepared or likely to jump start Hawaii schools out of their post-NCLB limbo and into the brighter, more wholesome future envisioned by HSTA and the Governor’s Task Force.”

Jones finds reasons to avoid both candidates when he googles. Both have red flags in their history.

He adds:

“The local educational community has requested candidates with deep teaching experience, extensive personal knowledge of Hawaii and its public school system, a collaborative mindset, and a commitment to teacher empowerment. The board’s selections demonstrate failure to acknowledge the input they solicited on their own survey.

“It may seem hyperbolic to ask for some sort of an explicit mandate for board members to do what is right. But perhaps because board members are appointed rather than elected, they don’t appear to be particularly concerned about holding themselves accountable to community opinion.

“Through the various missteps reported in the media over the past months, it has become clear that an appointed Board is not serving the interests of Hawaii schools and the children they serve.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hawaii, Testing

William Mathis on the Illusory Graduation Rate of Students in D.C. Voucher Schools

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2017 //
36

Trump recently told a group of students attending voucher schools in D.C. that they were very lucky because the graduation rate of the voucher program was 98%. That was far more than the evaluation of the program, which claimed a rate of 82%. But when I re-read the final evaluation report on the program, I couldn’t understand how the evaluators arrived at 82%. Newspaper accounts regularly say that the D.C. voucher program had no effect on test scores but a higher graduation rate. But was it true? What was the attrition rate? How did the evaluators arrive at 82%?

So I asked William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center to explain what was behind the numbers. He very kindly untangled the data for me and wrote the following:


Donald Trump’s Phantom 98% Voucher Graduation Rate

William J. Mathis

​Education secretary Betsy DeVos joined Donald Trump at the White House to pitch school vouchers touting the “98% graduation rate” from the District of Columbia program. Now, a 98% graduation rate would be a superlative figure for any school but coming out of urban Washington, this would be nothing short of phenomenal. Some might claim divine intervention would be required.​​

Here’s why: For the baseline year of 2010, the federal government’s official, national, on-time graduation rate reached an “all-time high” of 80%. When the District of Columbia’s 2010 graduation rate was compared to the 50 states, it came in dead-last with 59%. It maintains the dubious last-place ranking. Thus, to reach 98%, the DC voucher program would have to leap over all 50 states including top-scoring Iowa (88%). Such a miraculous ascent rightly raises a skeptical eye.

To sort this out, inquiring minds would first go to the source of the numbers. The president’s remarks were based on a 2010 University of Arkansas study of Washington DC which estimated the actual graduation rate of 70% for traditional public schools and 82% for voucher schools. This would be pretty good given DC’s official rate of 59% for that year. But this is a long way from Trump’s imaginative 98%.

​So what’s the difference between the researchers’ rate and the real rate? The University of Arkansas’ numbers were based on a telephone survey of parents which had a response rate of only 63% despite some aggressive follow-up. For students who had not yet graduated, they asked the parents to forecast whether their student would, in fact, graduate. Since the control group had a response rate similar to the voucher students, the researchers concluded they could compare the groups. But this quickly runs into problems. The first of which is the low response rate to the telephone survey. It is reasonable to infer that respondents would differ from non-respondents. The second problem is relying on the parents’ forecast that their child would graduate rather than using the actual school district count of drop-outs and non-graduates. These errors would result in inflated numbers.​

​The third problem is selection effects. That is, the parents who elected to participate in the voucher program are parents who are more likely to be involved and motivated to advance their children’s education. As is clearly known, parental involvement is a key to educational success. Parents must register for the program and the on-line application program requires the parent to establish an account with email address and password. Then, social security numbers, date of birth, proof of income, proof of DC residence and tax ID numbers are required. This suggests a multitude of selection problems including non-computer literate parents, computer availability, privacy protection and any number of other reasons that people may not want to be in a government data base.

​Mystifying to the reader, only 351 out of 1293 students used their voucher for all years (27%). The remaining 73% dropped out of the program but whether they graduated is unclear. We just don’t know what happened to these students.
Trump and DeVos failed to mention that this same study showed test scores for the voucher students remained flat. They also overlooked a newer DC study with even less positive findings. In this federally sponsored 2017 study, test scores dropped for both experimental and control groups. But voucher program students dropped more than the traditional students in both reading and mathematics. Further, 82% of the voucher group changed schools after the first year. All in all, there are no transcendent intercessions here. It’s just a weak design garnished with exaggeration.

While Trump argues for billions in new tax breaks for voucher schemes, there is no evidence that they are an effective reform strategy. To the contrary, the segregative effects could be quite harmful. Large-scale voucher studies in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio also show negative numbers. So in light of these facts, what did the federal government do? They prohibited further studies of the program and called for greater federal support of voucher programs.

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Vouchers

Jeff Murray of Fordham Institute: Do English Teachers Have a Responsibility for Students’ Vocational Training?

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2017 //
15

Jeff Murray is the Ohio operations manager of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s offices in Columbus. He read an essay by a high school English teacher who was offended by Governor John Kasich’s proposal that teachers should be required to shadow business people if they wanted to be rectified. Murray was disturbed when a high school English teacher objected. The teacher wrote: “I believe, as a professional English teacher that vocational training is neither my role nor my responsibility to my students.” Murray wrote in reply: “But I want to tell him that he’s wrong.”

Murray says the high school teacher is wrong. Every course he took in high school, he says, taught him job skills. Is that the same as “vocational training”? I don’t think so.

Murray wrote:

Everything about my high school and college experiences helped me to become a successful employee. Math teachers gave me the skills to measure work areas and assist in computing price quotes. History professors helped me understand why a developer was converting this former manufacturing plant into apartments. Communications instruction helped me hone marketing pitches to boost business. And, yes, I used every ounce of wordcraft I had studied and obsessed over in Brit Lit and Sonnet Seminar to write newsletters, clarify job specs, and interact with customers. It wasn’t Fitzgerald, but it was clear and direct and helpful to business. They didn’t know they needed an English major until they got one.

Maybe he actually is agreeing with the high school teacher. Maybe he doesn’t think he is wrong, after all. Surely, Murray didn’t want vocational training in his English class instead of reading Fitzgerald or Ellison. I assume he would have preferred reading and writing about “The Great Gatsby” to learning how to write a business letter. He realizes now that studying literature and writing prepared him for whatever career he chose. Does he really think that his English teachers and his history teachers would have been better if they had been required to spend a week in a factory or a department store?

My most beloved teacher taught us adolescent ruffians to read and appreciate Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, and Blake. The only job skill I learned from her was the importance of accuracy.

A friend of mine, a lawyer who won a Supreme Court case knocking down voter suppression in Georgia in the 1970s, once told me that he met the Chancellor of the Exchequer in London, the highest financial official in the government. He told my friend that once a boy has mastered “the greats,” he can do anything.

Teachers do not need to shadow people in business. People in business need to shadow teachers. Kasich’s bill, by the way, was dead on arrival.

Categories Education Reform

Bianca Tanis: A Teacher Visits a Montessori Classroom and Loves It

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2017 //
5

Bianca Tanis teaches a combined kindergarten-first grade special education class in the Hudson Valley in New York. She is on the board of New York State Allies for Public Education, the group leading the campaign against high-stakes testing and privatization in the state.

She writes:

I had the opportunity to spend the day visiting a public Montessori school in Kingston yesterday. I have been considering this approach in my classroom and was able to tour the school along with my principal and one of our ENL teachers. I have not been this inspired in a long time.

Kingston is considered a small city school district and George Washington Elementary School is one of seven elementary schools in the Kingston City School district. Over 80% of the students receive free and reduced lunch, 17% are English Language Learners, and 26% are students with disabilities. When the principal first took over the school, they had 2,500 discipline referrals per year. They are not down to a handful and attendance has gone up exponentially. The lobby has couches for parents sit in and the principal’s dog roams the halls and often comforts anxious or upset students. The tables in the cafeteria have flowers on them and there is a library in the corner. The walls are covered with photographs of the students laughing and playing and student artwork. They are swapping out bench-style tables and replaced them with round,family style tables so that the students can converse with each other.

In every classroom students were engaged, working purposefully on self-selected tasks that are based on NYS curriculum. In the upper elementary classrooms each student has an individual work plan for their “independent period” of what tasks they must complete but within that period, they are free to work at their own pace and in the order they choose. During this independent period, teachers pull small groups or 3 to 4 students for lessons. Many of the classes are multi-age and students complete whole class science and social studies projects together. We saw older students helping younger students and children taking ownership over their learning. The teachers seemed relaxed, enthusiastic and HAPPY.

In the combined Pre-K-Kindergarten rooms the classes were very large, but you would never know it. The students were independently engaged in “tasks” and when they needed to speak with the teacher who was talking to me, the kids waited patiently and calmly, asking each other for help and then solving the issue themselves and walking away. If you work with 4 and 5 year olds, you know how amazing this is. The noise level was a productive hum…not silence, but not the cacophony you would expect from almost thirty 4 and 5 year olds. The children were independently drawing, making words with letter tiles, working on fine motor skills, counting beads, and pouring beans back and forth between two jars, etc.

There are about 320 students. The school has several inclusion classes, two self-contained special education classes and a dual language program. This a school that welcomes ALL children and provides them with a truly child-centered education. Their discipline policy is best described as a restorative justice model that does not focus on rewards, incentives, or punishments, believing that intrinsic motivation works. It was AMAZING.

These schools exists and are proof of what is possible when we look beyond test scores and look at what really matters. I just wanted to share because I think we can all use some good news 🙂

Categories Childhood, Education Reform, Real Education, Teachers and Teaching

Jan Resseger: A Tribute to Benjamin Barber, Philosopher of Democracy and the Common Good

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
17

Benjamin Barber was a political philosopher whose passion was the strengthening of civil society and democratic institutions. He died April 24.

Jan Resseger wrote a beautiful tribute to him, on the importance of public education and the danger of privatization. Her citations from his works are eloquent and powerful. Jan doesn’t mention that Barber criticized me in his 1992 book, which she quotes; I can tell you frankly, looking back, that he was on the right side of the culture wars of that era twenty-five years ago.

She writes, quoting his works:

“It is the peculiar toxicity of privatization ideology that it rationalizes corrosive private choosing as a surrogate for the public good. It enthuses about consumers as the new citizens who can do more with their dollars and euros and yen than they ever did with their votes. It associates the privileged market sector with liberty as private choice while it condemns democratic government as coercive.” (Consumed, p. 143)

“We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. We select menu items privately, but we can assure meaningful menu choices only through public decision-making.” (Consumed, p. 139)

“Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning. I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones. What do we get? The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector. As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it)….” (Consumed, p. 132)

“This book admits no dichotomy between democracy and excellence, for the true democratic premise encompasses excellence: the acquired virtues and skills necessary to living freely, living democratically, and living well. It assumes that every human being, given half a chance, is capable of the self-government that is his or her natural right, and thus capable of acquiring the judgment, foresight, and knowledge that self-government demands. Not everyone can master string physics or string quartets, but everyone can master the conduct of his or her own life. Everyone can become a free and self-governing adult… Education need not begin with equally adept students, because education is itself the equalizer. Equality is achieved not by handicapping the swiftest, but by assuring the less advantaged a comparable opportunity. ‘Comparable’ here does not mean identical… Schooling is what allows math washouts to appreciate the contributions of math whizzes—and may one day help persuade them to allocate tax revenues for basic scientific research… The fundamental assumption of democratic life is not that we are all automatically capable of living both freely and responsibly, but that we are all potentially susceptible to education for freedom and responsibility. Democracy is less the enabler of education than education is the enabler of democracy.” (An Aristocracy of Everyone, pp. 13-14)

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice

Frank Adamson: Is Education a Choice or a Right?

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2017 //
43

Frank Adamson of Stanford University wrote a marvelous article that lays out the issues with enormous clarity and insight. To read the references and links, open the article.

The United Nations has identified “free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education” by 2030 as a goal for sustainable development. This goal reaffirms the right to education guaranteed by countries in multiple U.N. declarations over the last half-century.[i] Although these treaties reflect a general consensus that everyone has a right to education, most countries do not actually deliver on this promise. To address the issue, different countries are organizing their education systems based on contrasting values. Some countries have placed the responsibility for choosing schools on families, while others have delivered the right to education at a system-level, with the latter approach correlating with better national outcomes.

Instead of countries delivering on their U.N. treaty commitments to the right to education, some have proposed that parental choice should drive the education “marketplace.” This approach varies across countries. In countries in the global south such as India and Uganda, families can “choose” to send their children to “low fee” private schools, or else their children will likely not receive an education. In countries in the global north like Sweden and the U.S., school “choice” usually happens when governments give parents the option to leave public schools. However, in both cases, governments place the responsibility on the family to figure out the best option for their child instead of fulfilling their child’s right to a free, equitable, high quality education.

Even more problematic is the reality that school “choice” does not guarantee a better education, for a variety of reasons. One issue is that, when a charter school or low-fee private school does provide a good education, everyone wants to go there and there are not enough spots for every student. And that’s the best-case scenario. The more common problem is that schools of choice do not provide higher quality education. In addition, they often exclude certain types of harder and/or more expensive-to-each students – those with disabilities, discipline histories, lower socio-economic status – as well as racial and ethnic minorities and second-language learners. These students may have lower scores on the tests used to judge schools or they may require extra attention from teachers, incentivizing these schools to choose their students, instead of students being able to choose their schools.[ii]

The results are not surprising because these schools compete with each other instead of providing education to everyone. School choice systems operate under a market-based rationale. In this marketplace, schools depend on competition to get students to enroll. This sounds like a great idea—the companies (schools) that produce the best product (education) have the most customers (students), while those that don’t will go out of business (closing the school). But market-based approaches require schools to seek a competitive advantage that leads to their exclusionary approaches. And when these schools exclude the more “expensive” students, these students end up in overcrowded and underperforming schools that lack basic services, or, even worse, without the opportunity for an education at all.

Countries seeking to provide a free, equitable, quality education aren’t trying to create competitive advantage within their systems. Instead, they fulfill their “education as a human right” imperative at the system level by investing in teachers and infrastructure. Their public investments produce some of the highest outcomes on international assessments, with smaller differences between students, meaning the systems function more equitably. These countries, including Finland, Singapore, Canada, Cuba, and others, have signed at least some of the U.N. treaties that declare the right to education, have opted for investing in their public education systems instead of pursuing market-based approaches that lead to inequity, and continually deliver high quality education to their citizens. Instead of forcing parents to choose schools, or even be chosen by schools, countries employing market-based approaches would do well to shift their focus towards ensuring the educational rights of their citizens on a proven pathway to better outcomes.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, International, Justice, Privatization, School Choice
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