Civil rights and school choice champion Howard Fuller today released a statement through the American Federation for Children supporting a proposal to expand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to other cities in Wisconsin.
In recent weeks, Fuller has reacted strongly against a plan from Gov. Scott Walker to eliminate the income threshold that regulates entry to the voucher program, but he called Walker's plan to expand the program to other cities one that gives poor and working-class families the education options they deserve.
His full statement reads as follows:
I believe that poor and working class families deserve to have options that allow them to seek better educational opportunities for their children. Programs like the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program are one of those options. I would strongly support any efforts by parents, elected representatives and concerned citizens from other cities in Wisconsin such as Green Bay and Racine to establish such a program in their communities. I recognize that both Racine and Green Bay have some good public schools but not every child has access to them. I want every child in these two communities to be able to go to a high quality school that will transform their lives whether that school is public or private.
The Detroit Free Press explores the ideas driving reforms in Detroit's academically and financially troubled school district, including a plan to charter up to 45 schools and close nearly two dozen more, and asks the difficult question: Is the school district, as we know it, worth saving:
Some families say, yes, even driving in from the suburbs for some DPS programs. They and others say charter schools, popular at the moment, offer no guarantee of academic success. Others say DPS, with a $327-million deficit, is beyond repair, and the district should convert fully to charters -- a type of taxpayer-funded school that is independently run. It's an important question crucial to the future of Detroit, which also is in debt and trouble, said Gary Miron, an education researcher at Western Michigan University.
"Is DPS worth saving? Certainly," he said. "The real question is, 'Are the odds of improving the situation going to be better with the alternative?' "
A Monday New York Times story headlined, “As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics,” suggested that as doctors increasingly abandon their private practices and become employees of large health care institutions, they are no longer thinking like Republican-learning owners and instead thinking like Democratic-leaning workers. “Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices,” the article states, “but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening.”
The parallels with public education are instructive. A primary rationale for government taking over public education in the mid-1800s was the need for universal access to quality education. Horace Mann and other state political leaders argued that too much decentralization was undermining quality and allowing too many children to go uneducated. Their answer was a more centralized, uniform public education system owned and managed by local governments under the guiding hand of state governments.
The industrial revolution that transformed our way of life in the 1800s also transformed how the government organized and managed public education. By the early 1900s public education had become a government-run factory with educators being assembly line workers. In the late 1950s and early 60s, teachers began organizing industrial-style unions to protect themselves from the abuses of these politically-run factories, and in doing so became a core constituency of organized labor and the Democratic Party, which is where they remain today.
According to the Times story, health care and doctors are beginning to follow a similar path. But, ironically, while doctors are abandoning their private practices to join large health care factories, teachers and parents are increasingly using charter schools, homeschooling cooperatives, dual enrollment programs, publicly-funded private school options and virtual schools to create smaller, decentralized teaching and learning options. Schools, or learning networks, with fewer than 50 students are still rare, but they're proliferating. Perhaps in a decade or two more teachers will own private practices than doctors. Then political debates over tenure, merit pay and employee evaluations will be more common in medicine than education.
Finding the proper balance between contradictory forces is a challenge we all face in our daily lives, so it’s not surprising to see doctors and educators struggling to balance big versus small, centralized versus decentralized, and government-owned versus practitioner-owned. Despite the power of ideology, pragmatic concerns will ultimately control how these tensions are managed, although doctors should spend time in school districts talking with teachers before abandoning their medical practices and joining large health care factories. Working on an assembly line has its downsides.
When 2,500 Harlem protesters yesterday challenged the NAACP's involvement in a lawsuit against school closures and charter school expansions in New York City, they joined a growing chorus of confusion that fails to grasp why the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group continues to fight school reforms that disproportionately benefit minorities.
Chiefly, one of the school leaders most confused by the NAACP's opposition to education alternatives is New York City's new chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott. Last year, in a column published in the New York Post, Walcott wrote:
More than 50 years ago, another education lawsuit asserted the rights of children of color. Brown v. Board of Education affirmed the right of citizens to an equal education when the Supreme Court found that school segregation is a violation of the right to equal protection under the law. That was the civil-rights issue of that day.
And yet, more than half a century later, we are still failing to protect the interests of our African-American and Latino children. Here in New York City, the graduation rate for African-American and Latino students is rising, but it remains just over 50 percent. These outcomes reflect a crisis that is devastating our communities. It is the civil-rights issue of our time ...
... Continuing to send students to failing schools, especially when we know how poor the odds are that they will succeed in those schools, and when we have evidence that we can do better, represents a fundamental violation of the civil rights of our children of color and their families.
For decades, the civil-rights movement fought in the courts on behalf of African-American and Latino children. This time, the battlefield in the fight for social justice should be the classroom, not the courtroom.
While the following quote from David Brooks' most recent New York Times column was focused on changes occurring in Britain, it also describes what’s happening in public education:
… the general direction is clear: the move from a centralized, industrial-era state to a networked, postindustrial one.
Rapid growth in charter schools, homeschooling, dual enrollment, magnet schools, vouchers, tax credit scholarships and online learning reflects the decentralizing of public education’s industrial hierarchy as power devolves from school boards, teacher unions and state legislatures to teachers, parents and local community organizations. As individuals and local entities become empowered, they are forming horizontal networks through which they are generating and sharing customizable resources. A good example is a network of African-American charter school development teams in St. Petersburg, Fla. These teams are sharing ideas, pooling resources and developing specialized charter schools that will be both independent and interdependent. Their collaborative is dynamic and strives to combine the advantages of being big (e.g., lower costs via economies of scale) and small (e.g., being nimble).
The teacher evaluation, tenure and merit-pay bills passed by state legislatures this spring are attempts to increase productivity in the current industrial system by giving managers more power, but ultimately parental empowerment legislation will have the most positive long-term effect. In the postindustrial era, issues deriving from centralized-power hierarchies, such as district seniority rules and statewide tenure and merit pay plans, will be irrelevant. The idea of seniority-based transfers, for instance, makes no sense in a horizontal system of fluid learning networks.
Teaching and learning will not improve in a postindustrial public education system unless parents make good choices. The learning options available to parents will be almost limitless, so matching children with the learning options that best meet their needs will be challenging. Providing parents with good information and the support necessary to use this information well will be essential. Defenders of the status quo regularly argue that parents are incapable of making good education decisions, which is why power needs to remain centralized.
Brooks is optimistic that Britain’s political class is capable of successfully navigating their transition into a postindustrial society. Let’s hope our political and education leaders are up to this task also.
For two months, the leaders of Rice High School in Harlem, challenged by a six-figure operating deficit and a 44 percent enrollment decline over seven years, have searched for ways to keep the boys preparatory school open. This wasn't just another financially struggling Catholic school. This was a financially struggling Catholic school that sent every one of its graduating seniors to college, and the vast majority of those students came from impoverished households that required financial aid.
This week, Rice announced that it would close its doors for good in June after 73 years.
Writing in the newest edition of The Washington Monthly, Barry C. Lynn says unions need to find common ground with entrepreneurs as a counterbalance to the centralized power of large monopolies. Here’s the crux of his argument, which has relevance for public education:
… the great middle class of twentieth-century America stood atop two foundations. One was freedom to organize the industrial workplace, to erect a 'countervailing power' within a necessarily hierarchical governance structure. The other was freedom from organization, the freedom to be one’s own boss, the freedom to build up a business that -- thanks to anti-monopoly law -- was largely safe from predation. Every American could choose the path that fit best.
School districts are monopolies with hierarchical governance structures, and over the last fifty years their employees have successfully organized industrial unions to protect themselves. But teacher unions strongly oppose the existence of entrepreneurs in public education, and they are especially hostile toward teachers being entrepreneurial and having the freedom to be their own bosses. Today’s teacher unions are the foot soldiers of school boards and protecting school board monopolies is a top priority.
Teacher unions are under siege, in part, because they insist on putting the power of school boards over the needs of teachers, parents, students and taxpayers. Embracing Lynn’s call to find common ground with entrepreneurs and abandoning their faith in school district monopolies will enable them to regain their status as a progressive force in education and the larger society.
Two different reporters contacted me this week, asking why I contribute so much to candidates who support education options for low-income children. Please allow me to share part of my answer to them, because it speaks to one of the real-world limitations we face as we expand public education choices for low-income students. The harsh truth is that teacher unions react with vengeance against any Democrat (and if they can, Republican) who votes for any option that involves teachers who can’t easily be organized for collective bargaining. So if we expect legislators to be able to resist these threats and bring an open mind to this new definition of public education, they need help.
In 1998, I started a privately funded K-12 scholarship program for low-income families in Tampa, and with no advertising we received 12,500 applications for 750 slots. That was when I first realized how much low-income families want parental choice in education. When the Florida Legislature passed the Tax Credit Scholarship in the 2001 session, we tried hard to get Democrats to vote for it. We could get only one. I was baffled by this, because the program would benefit only poor families, who largely vote Democrat.
One of these Democrats took me behind closed doors. He said he knew it would be the right thing to vote for the program, but he couldn't because the teachers' union was the largest donor to his campaigns and they would find and fund an opponent to take his seat.
In 2004, the national parental choice movement realized that if we were going to help more low-income parents have choice, we had to begin investing in the political process. For too long, the teacher unions have been the only player in the education reform political space and last year alone they spent more than $70 million nationally. Low-income families don't have this type of well-funded apparatus to make sure they have their voices heard in the political process. The result today is the American Federation For Children Action Fund, a "527" organization I am affilated with. AFC believes that parental choice for low-income families is a fundamentally nonpartisan issue, and that it is one of the most important social justice issues of our time. We try to help these families have a voice.
The reporters asked me specifically whether the support of parental choice by black Democrats was the result of my contributions and AFC's communications. That’s not only an insult to black elected officials who have shown remarkable courage, but it also ignores the obvious: African-American and Hispanic Democrats are receptive to parental choice because their constituents strongly desire it. Roughly three-fourths of the students on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship are children of color. Why wouldn't these legislators support giving more power to their constituents to choose the best school for their kids? The reason they didn't before is simple -- there was no counter to the poltical spending of the union.
The reporters also seemed incredulous that I would contribute to Democrats when Republicans dominate the Florida Legislature. I told them that, first, it’s the right thing to do. These legislators are voting to give low-income parents more educational opportunity, and they deserve support for doing so. Parental choice for low-income families should be a bipartisan cause. By countering the union’s money with some of our own, we are helping to make that a reality.
One of the more alarming developments out of Monday's Georgia Supreme Court ruling disbanding that state's charter school commission is the near-celebration among the court's majority of the 1877 state constitutional provision that guided the justices. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein establishes that Georgia citizens have repeatedly memorialized constitutional language "granting local boards of education the exclusive right to ... maintain ... the exclusive control over general K-12 education." But Hunstein laughably notes that the preservation of "the now 134-year-old status quo" is secured.
It's one thing to recognize the good intentions of the 19th-century constitutional framers who empowered the "level of government closest and most responsive to the taxpayers and parents of the children being educated." It's quite another to insulate the status quo from any attempt at public innovation and to glorify the result. Reasonable people can disgree on the effectiveness and proper regulation of charter schools, but is Hunstein telling us that no publicly funded educational innovation or enterprise is permissible unless first engineered and christened by the local school board? (more…)
For the second time in three years, the top African-American official in the Florida Education Association has been pushed out of the organization. FEA Chief of Staff Alfreda Davis, the former Chief of Staff for Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and a gifted leader, has been given a severance check after only 15 months on the job. She had replaced Aaron Wallace, who met a similar fate.
This is painful to watch, both as a former FEA local president who for years pushed the organization to be more progressive, and as the current head of a scholarship program that serves low-income children of color. Alfreda told me she was eager to move FEA beyond its siege mentality and wanted to find common ground with social justice programs like the one I lead – a Tax Credit Scholarship that gives more learning options to low-income families. But soon after we began strategizing she left.
Alfreda and other progressive leaders within FEA, such as Gary Stevenson, the FEA’s former Director of Organizing and Field Services who left just prior to Alfreda, were frustrated with how conservative the organization had become. They were particularly concerned about the FEA’s refusal to reach out and find common ground with low-income families, especially low-income families of color.
I’ve known some of the men now running the organization for more than 30 years. They have a strong intellectual commitment to progressive values, including racial equality, but they are committed to a model of public education and blue-collar industrial unionism that is incapable of delivering equal opportunity and social justice, and it’s this contradiction that is crippling the organization and eroding its effectiveness. A top-down, command and control model of public education that systematically disempowers teachers and parents will always be less effective and efficient, and organizing a union around protecting this system will always be a losing proposition. That’s where the FEA is today.
In the mid-1990s I wrote a series of essays calling for a new unionism in public education. I argued that instead of using our collective power to protect teachers from dysfunctional systems, we should use our power to transform these systems. My friend Bob Chase was elected NEA president in 1995 on a new unionism platform, but abandoned the idea when faced with heavy opposition from the NEA’s industrial unionists. The concept has been dead ever since.
Public education is in desperate need of a progressive union movement that embraces social justice activists such as Alfreda Davis and Gary Stevenson. Unfortunately, the conservatism that now permeates our education unions is going to be with us for a while.
