Public Enemy

There is no question that today’s charter schools are not doing what charters originally, in the 1970s and 1980s, were intended to do. The original idea was that charter schools would be public schools but would not be subject to all of the rules and regulations of the traditional public school bureacracy and therefore free to experiment, hopefully to come up with more effective teaching and learning strategies. They would be generators of true education reform.

It is well known that this lofty goal has not been reached. Charter schools usually have proven to be no better than their public school counterparts, and some are considerably worse. Moreover, lack of accountability has made the charter movement suspect in terms of educational efficacy on any level. They have become, like vouchers, a way to move public money to private corporations. Rather than being a lever to improve public schools, they have become yet another tool with which rightwing conservatives can undermine public education across the nation.

The public schools themselves must share culpability for the movement to privatize public education. Part of the impetus for charters in the first place was the rigidity and unresponsiveness of many public schools to the people of the communities in which they operate. The notion that charters would be freer from bureaucratic constraints should have been a motivating factor for public schools to examine their own assumptions and operational structures. Instead, public school leaders opted out of self-examination and reflection.

No public school system is incapable of reforming itself, rather than turning to an “innovator”—in the case of most charters, at least nowadays—a private corporation that promises big results and delivers, at best, a trickle of difference, often in an elitist setting that ill serves the community public schools for which it purports to provide a model of innovation and educational success.

The issue is one of will. School leaders too often view themselves as vassals of the state rather than as servants of their local community, as cogs in the bureaucracy of government rather than elected local representatives. With many states shunting more and more public money to private enterprises, local school officials need to stop twiddling their collective thumbs and set about the difficult work of improving how local schools respond to local needs and interests.

Ignoring the frustrations of parents and hiding behind rules and regulations will continue to feed the radical conservative movement to privatize public education at the expense of the common good—at the expense, ultimately, of American democracy.