Everyone understands clearly that you are calling the Penn Alexander
School's catchment area "mud" Penn has thrown at "public education".
Public education, in general, was worse in Philadelphia before Penn
developed PAS. Now it is better in three schools, without being worse in
any other schools as a result. This is what you call "mud". I don't
agree with you. Making things better in some places is not a bad thing,
just because you can't make things better in all places at once.
All public schools in Philadelphia were not equal before Penn entered
the picture. At the ES/MS level, inequalities were caused by class
differences across a vast city's diverse real-estate market. Penn didn't
create that. Since a university is as natural and organic a part of city
life as any other institution, the wonder is that a university
neighborhood did not already have neighborhood schools that reflected
the university's presence. It was the old, pre-Penn-partnership model
that was abnormal and unhealthy.
And in fact, the School District's name was already mud. It had been
judged a failure. By the government. That's why the State took it over.
That's why the School Reform Commission was authorized to experiment in
a host of ways, to learn anything it could about making urban schools
work better. Thus PAS.
You are clearly confused about the current nature of public-school
competition. It is not primarily about "competing models" of ownership.
Each individual school must compete with all others to demonstrate
progress. Categories of schools are only incidentally competing. Winners
and losers in each category are competing with all other schools, and
each equally run the risk of failing to survive. That's what's just
happened to some outside-managed schools.
If schools prepare us for life, then one of the first lessons they can
teach us is by exposing us to competition in the classroom. I hope that
isn't the only lesson they teach. But I see no healthy way for them to
shirk their duty of teaching it. In the post-school marketplace,
graduates who can read and count will have an edge over graduates who
can't read and count.
-- Tony West
I don't think anyone reading what I wrote is confused by what I meant.
here is what I wrote:
in general, the idea behind markets is that not everyone
is equal, and in fact not everyone is supposed to be equal.
the idea of markets is to cast citizens into the role of
unequal competitors; the aim of markets is to preserve that
inequality.
that's the mud being thrown at public education.
make no mistake: what we're talking about here is the challenge of
delivering public education so that it's available to all, equally,
and where one's access to the best public education does not reduce
another's.
as you point out, schooling is indeed a public good, it must be
egalitarian, not a vegetable stand pitting consumers against one
another as unequal competitors for lettuce. and yet we've seen what
happens, for example, when penn subsidizes a public school and a
catchment area is drawn around it: the mud of a market-driven model
(in this case penn-assisted competition for real estate) is thrown at
public education.
meanwhile solutions for inequities in the system are sought, and you
point to markets as a self-correcting mechanism. but in your
marketplace, where models for delivering public education compete,
where you pit the performance of 'every for-profit or nonprofit school
manager' against 'every government school manager', and where you
define what the 'good stuff' is and what the 'bad stuff' is, you've
done little more than to describe another vegetable stand -- a
vegetable stand that depends upon and preserves the inequality of
competing models.
maybe it's time to start looking at public schools not as vegetable
stands, but as places that prepare us for life -- inside and outside
the marketplace.
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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