I’d like to put a personal face on charter schools from the perspective of a retired public school teacher. I often felt like America wrongly blamed teachers for a slogging war on ignorance much like it unfairly blamed returning Vietnam War soldiers for losing an unwinnable war. The popular insinuation for many today is that teachers have somehow failed our country and the remedy is to bring in the mercenaries, private charter schools, to fight the education war the right way. To anyone who has ever been on the front lines in the war on poverty, the notion is ludicrous, and I’ve taken some solace in my retirement in thoughts that, eventually, just as we did with Vietnam, most Americans will come to the realization a lot of good people were mistreated by the country at large and will some day come to see the light of reason, painful as it may be.
I will have much to share about the “education reform” movement and people like Betsy DeVos as I weave my tapestry, but let’s take a brief look now at the general charter school concept.
Charters can vary from good to terrible, but I found most were no better than the public equivalent and research largely supports this contention. Most dangerously, the very existence of charter schools harms public schools by siphoning off finances and better students and encouraging instability and avoidance of true causes and subsequent implementation of logical solutions to academic and social problems.
In direct reaction to charter school competition, my former district emphasized the concept of customer service and encouraged all employees to think like a commercial model, but I beg to differ. My kids and their parents weren’t customers; they were much more than that and the relationship was far more complex. Making the customer happy wasn’t my core function as I saw it then and still see it now. My job by its very name was “teacher” and when one teaches sometimes being happy is at odds with what’s best educationally for the growth of the student, my primary concern.
But that’s not the worst of it. The more successful charters demand, as the public schools usually can’t, that students accepted into their charters and their families adhere to a higher standard not enforceable under mandate by public schools. Those who do not comply with increased standards, like longer school hours, are dropped from the program, and then bounce right back into the public system that is again blamed for the failure. Also very important, many severely challenged students who can never achieve to levels deemed necessary by the charter school evaluators and operators are excluded entirely or quickly dismissed.
My district, however, had to take all applicants and frequently addressed and helped severely damaged and dysfunctional kids at great expense that charters wouldn’t touch let alone even try to teach. On the other side of the equation, the more successful charter schools attracted better families who would have stayed with my district’s programs but moved their kids into charter schools seeking a better environment, and got it, because the local public schools were forced to contend with social situations beyond their ability to alter. Basically, we were forced into an inherently unfair competition. Times were hard enough when the district only lost good students and families when they moved to a more affluent area of the city or beyond it, but now charters operating within the district’s boundaries siphoned off both resources and more able students.
The charter schools deny the cream-skimming charge, but researcher Ed Fuller, an associate professor at Penn State University, concluded that Texas charter schools he studied over a nine-year period actually did bring in “a more advantaged set of students.” He reasoned this difference could largely explain the supposed success of charter schools. Also important to note, Fuller had been contracted to do his research by an independent group, the Texas Business and Education Coalition, and not some inherently biased teachers’ organization.
I’d like to propose two alternatives, one not even related to education but to health care to illustrate the warped thinking I see today with respect to public school improvement.
I propose we open up charter medical facilities where the doctors and nurses don’t need to be certified or licensed and then encourage their use by allowing more money to flow to them from public coffers like Medicare. Let’s also allow the charter hospitals to turn away terminally ill patients or those deemed too medically expensive to treat. Of course, the AARP and medical community would be all over “charter hospitals” like firemen at a refinery explosion, and both groups have the clout to kill such a notion quickly. Even though a good deal of medical practice probably could be done at much less expense by those with less training, both the medical profession and consumers would never tolerate it and have the political efficacy to keep it that way. Poor families and kids have no such authority and many lack the education to clearly see when they’re being used by the system or making uninformed choices because they’ve been sold an empty box containing false promises.
My second proposal is guaranteed to quickly improve any low performing urban public school system as much as it will never be attempted in America. Instead of creating more choice, I say we treat public education like another public system, the courts.
We have little or no choice in our legal system. We are summoned to it at a particular time and place and can be jailed if we don’t comply. While there are tiny cracks and a minute range of alternatives, like negotiating outside of the legal system, generally speaking, if we seek justice we must do as we’re told, and merely for the sake of argument I propose a similar lack of choice for primary schooling. Imagine what would happen if people had to send their kids to schools where they draw income.
Requiring parents to educate their children in public schools located in cities where they commute to work would force an enormous demographic shift overnight in my former inner city school district in particular where thousands of professionals (many teachers by the way) draw incomes from the urban environment only to take their money back to the suburbs where they place their own children for education. If the privileged and middle classes had to directly associate with the mostly poor people in our “low performing” schools, they wouldn’t be low performing for long. It simply wouldn’t be tolerated by people who know how to and have the means to change the system. But we allow, much more now than in the past, escape routes that leave behind only those with severely limited options, and then we heap blame on the suckers who try to rectify the inequity. This contention is easy to support by a simple study of the demographics of successful public school systems as opposed to those that are not viewed successful. Class, culture, and economics are the big determinants to school performance, but they’re off limits to change, but we keep trying to treat the symptoms instead of the disease.
My district’s leadership wasn’t blind or stupid, and launched an aggressive campaign to offer schools and opportunities it hopes will attract people who could counteract the constant loss of better students due to economic migration away from the inner city or to charter schools. Numerous other urban districts are also trying to do the same. Many of the programs deserve praise, but few are likely to draw from the cultural elite, or even a significant number of middle class families who fear the many real dangers of close existence with those who are far less fortunate, people who are unclean and unsafe in many minds.
Integrating my former school district and its residents into the true mainstream of American society would change outcomes quickly and for real without a single change in staff or program. But we really don’t want that to happen and find it much safer to keep our kids and money away. We often speak of integration as a success in America, but the reality is we still isolate and quarantine by economics if not race and aren’t likely to change soon. My former employer is one of the products. This is very real. Much of what we argue about in public venues today is just smoke and mirrors. Growing beyond this will take greater leadership and much sacrifice, and we often appear to lack the commitment to change and the leaders to help us do so. Instead we chant slogans and bang our drums.