> > Let's imagine neighborhood school, run by the same people who think the post > office is the model of efficiency. Charter school opens down the street. > Local family has to decide where to send bright little Johnny. Humor me and > agree that little Johnny will get a better education and thrive at charter > school as opposed to neighborhood school. The consequence is that > neighborhood school will have one less quality student, which will reduce > revenues and, to humor you, I agree that the absence of little Johnny will > somehow cause the other students to do less well than they would if little > Johnny was in the classroom. > > You characterized this as a negative -- the existence of the charter school > "drains students from public schools." The fact that the alternative is > better for little Johnny and his parents is of less concern to you than the > consequence on the neighborhood school. I am reading you fairly and > objectively -- you think the consequence for the school is more important > than the consequence for the child. In context, you think bright little > Johnny exists to improve the neighborhood school, and not that the school > exists to educate little Johnny, and if it can't, he should go elsewhere. > Call me names, but I am right about what you wrote. >
I think you're missing the point: the goal is not to increase the choice of the individual schoolchild: it is to increase the quality of schooling for all school children. The innovations of some charters might help to do this, but the way it is set up, it basically takes money from the system that is required to serve everyone equally and funnels it into the system with no such mandates. The problem of charters starting and then getting scratched--creative destruction style--is possibly interesting in the long run, but in the long run it is the students who get screwed in the scorched earth campaign robbing the public system to set up for-profit ed businesses. As Max points out, despite the successes in DC's system, this is a very real possibility that manic voucher nuts seem unable to contemplate through their slathering disdain for anything public. Likewise, the two tiered system that supposedly promotes competition in the public sector is basically just a government sanctioning of the already extant system--i.e. where supposedly better private education is available to more people. How this system actually works is overlooked by boosters who have virtually no background in education as such--but assume that it must work pretty much like any other consumer good, i.e. if it is a more expensive good, it must be better. Since private ed is already sorted by class, it is difficult to ferret out whether rich kids do better at private schools because they get better educations or because they are rich kids who have handy things like books, clothes, stable housing and the ample satisfaction of their daily caloric needs. On the flip side, the absence of standards like ADA in that system make it much more likely that the private system's elective education of the already elect is anything more than a self reinforcing prophecy. And, as Jim point out, growing that model would mostly have the effect of taking vital resources from the public system that is required to serve everyone. The same could be said of the violently idiotic mandates being placed on the public system through NTLB, which, likewise, has decided to run these systems like businesses--but with virtually no consciousness of how the basic function of those businesses, i.e. education, is achieved. Arbitrary "accountability" stands in for actual professionalization or consciousness of the process in question. Here, actually creative programs--like the coalition for essential schools--or other small schools networks which are focused on learning and how to best accomplish this--bypass this moronic debate about whether Johnny gets a choice (the phrasing of which is embedded in the same permanent adolescence of libertarianism that most certainly signals what MLK called our "spiritual death") and focus on making education work for everyone, through PUBLIC charters, sustained by community and family involvement, privileging issues of integration, diversity, institutional scale, experience-based teaching and alternative learning styles--all of which are not only supported by research but which are mirrored in much more successful education systems such as Finland and Japan. These should be widespread, teachers trained, well paid, and respected as professionals rather than treated as underpaid babysitters or Sylvan center learning delivery and test prep modules. The systems should be supported at a much higher level and seen as an actually important civic service rather than a fourth tier branch of the national infrastructure below finance, communications, and anything else that directly or indirectly makes money for corporate shareholders. In other words, the problem isn't that education hasn't been subjected to the purile logic of the market: the problem is that it--and the entire society in which US education exists--has been subjected to this logic. The currently decrepit state of affairs is the result of this degraded understanding of human and social development being the primary reflex of every policy maker able to get their grubby hands on the tax money in that chest. Advising them to head further down this path--and advising citizens to follow them with vouchers in hand--is, frankly, something only wingnuts can get behind. It substitutes the entire process of developing a viable, alternative method of education--which involves deep community involvement and a level of family committment that is equally contingent on innumerable factors of health, job security, housing, nutrition, etc. all of which the same corporate culture has corrupted beyond a level sustainable to human habitation--for some abstract market transaction. I believe you are a smart guy, David, but it is obvious you are churning the problem of education through the apparatus of a libertarian bankruptcy attorney and I'm afraid that is the wrong tool for the job. s _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
