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.

Competition Is Harming Our Schools

The predominant theme in our education system has been—and is—competition. Schools in one neighborhood are compared to schools in another, town against city, state against state, and our nation against all others. Often such comparisons are ill conceived and without merit. Nevertheless, the idea that competition is good is conventional wisdom. Policymakers at every level promote competition, embedding it in the very language of policy. “Race to the Top” is a prime example.

However, that phrase and the concept behind it are incompatible with a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats philosophy presumed to be foundational in American public education. Horace Mann, the “father of American education,” believed that the common school would be the “great equalizer.” That ideal has yet to be realized.

Politicians and policy leaders prize the sentiment. The titling of No Child Left Behind bears witness. But NCLB rhetoric rang hollow from the beginning. No broad-based, legitimate effort has been made over the past three decades and more to address affirmatively the fundamental public education goals of equality and equity, regardless of rhetorical pandering to these notions by pundits, politicians, and policymakers of every stripe. Public schools today are more poorly funded than ever, the gap between haves and have-nots has widened, many schools are experiencing resegregation, and the culture of competition ensures that the education playing field will never be level.

Technology is inextricably intertwined in today’s education. From the federal office to the local classroom, from attendance software to apps on students’ tablet computers, technology is integral to schooling at all levels. Technology proponents, echoing Horace Mann, have envisioned technology as the “great equalizer.” Often, to the contrary, education technology is being coopted to serve the national mania for competition. The use of technology to support testing based on the Common Core State Standards is an example.

Sarah Irvin Belson, dean of the American University School of Education, Teaching, and Health, recently commented, “If reformers were interested in making real change, they would address the real issues that underpin the school quality, such as increasing teachers’ professional authority and encouraging high quality curriculum and instruction (note that standards do not equal curriculum). Current school reformers (including the current secretary of education, Arne Duncan) are focused on a misguided principle that competition and disclosure can be a powerful tonic for school improvement.”*

All available evidence points in precisely the opposite direction. Unbridled competition is harming our schools and the children they serve.

(*Quoted in Valerie Strauss, “Is Competition in Education Killing Our Sense of Community?” Washington Post, June 17, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/17/will-competition-in-education-kill-our-sense-of-community/)