Thursday, June 29, 2017

School Choice Opponents and the Status Quo

I was pleased when my recent post, School Choice: An Ugly Idea, attracted a Twitter response from choice advocate, Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is the executive director of Education Post and a former Assistant Secretary of Education under Arne Duncan. Education Post, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, was started 3 years ago to encourage a "better conversation" about education. With that list of pro-choice contributors, readers can infer what that better conversation was all about.

Cunningham's job is basically to use all the resources at his well-funded disposal to "swarm" back at anti-choice bloggers like Diane Ravitch, Peter Greene, and, apparently, little old me, to sell the corporate education reform line.

In his critique of my post, Cunningham raised arguments that I hear over and over from reformers and choice advocates and that I would like to address.


Those of us who continue to point out that poverty is the real issue in education are accused of using poverty as an excuse to do nothing. Right up front let me say I am against the status quo and I have spent a lifetime in education trying to improve teacher instruction and educational opportunities for the struggling readers and writers I have worked with. To point out the obvious, that poverty is the number one cause of educational inequity, does not make me a champion for the status quo. It simply means that I will not fall prey to the false promise of super-teachers, standardized test driven accountability, merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers, all of which are futile efforts to put a thumb in the overflowing dyke that is systematic discrimination, segregation, income inequity, and, yes, poverty.

Public schools, are, after all, reflections of their communities. If the communities are in crisis, the schools will be in crisis. You can't end the crisis by trying to fix the schools, you must take a whole community approach, and as the community improves, so, inevitably, will the schools. If corporate education reformers really wanted to help improve education, they would stop these charter school and voucher wars and spend their considerable resources on whole community improvement efforts. One way they could do this is to pay their taxes (rather than dodge them through spurious education donations) and support the intelligent use of their tax money for legislation leading to better jobs, better pay, better health care and better child care for communities under stress. Once these things begin to happen, good schools will follow.


I am very sympathetic to parents looking for good options for their children, when the local public school does not seem to be providing that good option. And it is a hollow argument to counsel patience to a parent of a 5 year-old entering school in September. Children only get one go-around at this. If a parent sees that a charter school appears to offer a safer environment, and surveys indicate that is the bottom line for most inner-city parents, safety, not educational quality, I cannot argue with them. In my book, A Parent's Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century, I put it this way:

I would argue that every local neighborhood school can and should be able to provide this kind of education for every child. I would also argue that parents should fight to make sure that their neighborhood school gets the resources to make it the kind of school all families want to send their child to. But when that school is not provided locally, it is reasonable to expect a parent to investigate charter schools.

When I say investigate charter schools, I mean exactly that. In the book I offer a list of questions parents should ask as they look into charter schools. Among those are questions about the number of certified teaching staff, the rate of teacher and administrator turnover, discipline policies in the schools, and services for special needs children in the school. Parents may often find that they are trading much of what they desire in an education for their child for the appearance of a safer environment.

I am very pleased to read that Cunningham opposes vouchers. To his credit he has written about this in Education Post. In the article Cunningham rightly points to the many issues related to vouchers, not the least of which is that they do not lead to educational improvement, but that they do very much drain monies from public schools that desperately need it. Now I would like to hear is a unified voice from the corporate education reformers who support Cunningham and his publications with millions of dollars rising up in opposition to the Trump/DeVos school choice agenda. Let's all work together to get the horror show of vouchers off the table and then go back to the good fight over whether charter schools do more good than harm. I am in the harm camp, but that is a conversation that should continue. The voucher argument should be dead. I invite responsible reformers into the fight to kill it.












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