In his weekly "School of Thought" column on Time.com, Andy Rotherham considers the political backlash currently afflicting charter schools and walks away with two lessons that help explain the difficulty in having a nuanced and complex conversation about their role in public education today:
First, with 5,000 charters ranging from very traditional to completely online, the term 'charter school' is increasingly meaningless. After all, what does a network of schools like Achievement First really have in common with the mostly low-performing online schools run by White Hat Management in Ohio — the force behind the proposed deregulation there?
Second, the public can't be expected to parse those distinctions, so the quality issue has more potency than many charter advocates seem to realize. The education marketplace is not an economic one with the best ideas winning out. Rather it's a political one with the loudest or most organized voices usually carrying the day and the most compelling examples winning the public debate. So one spectacular charter screw-up counts more than 100 quiet successes, and the good and great schools can't overcome the headwind created by the laggards.
In a Wall Street Journal column today on the controversy surrounding the NAACP joining the New York City teachers union in an anti-charter school lawsuit, William McGurn writes:
For those who understand that our big city public school systems have become jobs programs for teachers and administrators, the NAACP's response makes perfect sense. That's because there are many African-American teachers in these systems, many of whom presumably belong to the NAACP … The NAACP is doing in New York what the United Federation of Teachers is doing, and for the same reason: protecting the interests of its members.
In an entry on redefinED last fall I discussed why middle-class African Americans feel such loyalty toward school districts and why this loyalty is fraying in Florida. Thanks to a variety of parental empowerment programs in Florida, African-American educators and local community activists are increasingly opening up financially-viable schools, and as these publicly funded private schools provide more middle-class teaching jobs, the middle class African-American community -- which includes African-American politicians -- is embracing them.
If the NAACP and New York City teachers union were more enlightened, they would understand that a centralized, command-and-control public education system is not in the best interests of teachers, parents, students or taxpayers. A public education system that empowers educators and local communities to create their own schools and empowers parents to match their children with the schools that best meet their needs is the best path to equal educational opportunity. Unfortunately both the NAACP and New York City teachers union are on the wrong side of history.
David Brooks focuses again on health care in today’s New York Times, and his observations have huge implications for public education. Here are his key points:
Democrats tend to be skeptical that dispersed consumers can get enough information to make smart decisions … Democrats generally seek to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power in the hands of centralized experts … Republicans at their best are skeptical about top-down decision-making … Democrats have much greater faith in centralized expertise ... Republicans ... have much greater faith in the decentralized discovery process of the market … This basic debate will define the identities of the two parties for decades … In the age of the Internet and open-source technology, the Democrats are mad to define themselves as the party of top-down centralized planning.
I am a lifelong Democrat and the Florida coordinator for Democrats for Education Reform, but I agree with Brooks’ critique. Certainly in public education, continuing to centralize power in the hands of school boards and state legislatures is mad because doing so disempowers teachers and parents and ultimately undermines student achievement.
Kevin P. Chavous, a former Washington, D.C., councilman and board chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, reflects on the NAACP's fight against school closures and charter school expansions in New York City, in light of a Harlem rally of parents urging the civil rights group to drop its opposition. Writing in The Washington Post, Chavous asks how we got to the point "that the country's foremost civil rights organization is the target of a protest by the people it was created to serve?"
Elegantly, Chavous adds:
As an African American growing up in the ’60s, I revered the NAACP. I will never forget when my mother took me to a NAACP-League of Women Voters rally at Butler University in Indianapolis, my hometown. My mother was active in both groups, which, at that time, were protesting the presence of Alabama Gov. George Wallace on Butler’s campus. Wallace was an avowed segregationist who famously stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block the entrance of its first black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Only 7 at the time, I distinctly remember carrying a sign that I pointed in Wallace’s face. I don’t recall what the sign said, but I knew he didn’t want boys like me to get an education. As the police pushed me aside, my mother and her fellow protesters praised me for marching like a man for equal rights. Later, when my parents sat me down to give me my own NAACP membership card, I was proud beyond words.
I reflected on that time when I saw a photo of young black students at the Harlem march against the NAACP. I could see myself in one of those photos — a boy standing with his mom, holding a sign and making a statement in support of his future. I couldn’t help but see the irony: me marching with the NAACP against Wallace, and today’s children marching against the NAACP. It just shows that black parents will fight for the progress and quality education that their kids deserve — no matter who is standing in the way.
From the online news service NJ Spotlight:
In a stunning display of strange bedfellows, Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic power broker George Norcross took to a Camden graduation stage on Friday to call for the immediate passage of the tuition tax credit bill that would provide up to $12,000 vouchers for low-income students in select districts to attend private schools.
The odd pairing gave fresh speculation to the future of the Opportunity Scholarship Act (OSA), the long-debated school voucher bill. OSA has picked up new political momentum in the waning days of the legislative session this month.
But for the measure to actually pass, a few uncertainties and long-running battles remain to be resolved.
From Samuel G. Freedman in The New York Times:
Amid the grandeur and permanence of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they marched down the aisle in pairs, the graduating seniors of Rice High School in Harlem. They were the 70th commencement class in the school’s history, the latest to bear the venerable epithet of being “Rice men.”
All those trappings of longevity, the bronze doors and marble pulpit and stained glass, were illusory. The graduation ceremony on May 27 was the last ever for Rice, which is being closed, and the event was most significant as a symbol of the continuing contraction of Roman Catholic education in the urban settings where it has been most needed.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder called the Detroit school system a "failing format" when speaking to reporters from the Detroit Free Press Thursday at the Detroit Regional Chamber's annual policy conference on Mackinac Island. But instead of calling for a wholesale conversion to charter schools, as some might suggest, Snyder offered that a "system of schools" with charter-like autonomy might be more innovative:
... He said the school board could focus on measuring academic results instead of dictating curriculums and school-by-school management.
"You need to empower the schools more, rather than having a command-and-control structure of the district," he said. "How do you give the administrator in that school and the teachers a team? You make it more entrepreneurial and innovative.
"It's like they're a business unit, and they're there to help their kids grow. Give them the resources to succeed, and then, how do you hold them accountable?"
No doubt, the decision to grant private learning options for public school students is a tough one for any lawmaker who has spent a lifetime supporting the neighborhood public school. But the debate on the floor of the Louisiana House today sounded at times almost anachronistic.
The House was hearing a tax credit scholarship bill, HB 621 filed by Rep. Kirk Talbot, a Republican, that aims to give options to low-income students at a scholarship amount, roughly $4,000, that is less than even the state portion of the Louisiana public school formula. Not incidentally, the state’s legislative fiscal office said the program would likely save taxpayers money. (By way of disclosure, we have helped advise Rep. Talbot, who to his credit insisted on strong academic and fiscal accountability provisions in the bill.)
The bill provoked some predictable and reasonable concerns, as opponents wrestled with the potential impact on public schools. But seldom has the line between public and private been drawn so harshly or with such indifference to the needs of students.
Rep. Patricia Smith, a Baton Rouge Democrat and retired oil company spokesperson, challenged the very concept of parental choice: “Don't you think there’s enough choice already?”
Rep. J. Rogers Pope, a Denham Springs Republican and retired school superintendent, sounded as though he were establishing terms for the war on terrorism: “You’re going to have to answer to the public schools in your district. Either you’re for them or you’re against them.”
Rep. Joe Harrison, a Gray Republican and financial planner, offered a singular gauge on how to measure such legislation (Hint: It's unrelated to whether children are helped): “This is not the kind of bill that is going to help our system out.”
The bill, incidentally, was approved by a margin of 52-43 but fell one vote short of the absolute majority of the full chamber necessary to pass because 10 representatives were absent. Supporters hope to bring it back for another vote next week.
It is irresponsible to equate the values of parental empowerment and school choice today with the ugly history of Jim Crow. But Hazel Dukes, the president of the NAACP's New York State conference, now is fighting back at school closures and charter school expansions in New York City with just such a message.
Dukes announced she would hold a counter protest tomorrow in front of the Harlem Success Academy, whose leaders last week led a rally asking why the nation's oldest civil rights group would fight reforms designed to benefit poor blacks and Hispanics. Dukes said then, as she said today in a press release announcing the protest, that co-locating charter schools and traditional schools would be tantamount to "setting up separate and unequal education."
The NAACP had every reason to be anxious of private school voucher plans and other choice schemes that grew out of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, as some southern school districts made it clear they would take advantage of those policies to resegregate public education in their states. But choice as its proposed in New York City today, as it is in several other states considering or implementing voucher or charter school options, provides options disproportionately to low-income black and Hispanic children that often come from impoverished single-parent households. Hazel Dukes can stand before Eva Moskowitz and appropriately challenge the Success Charter Network's efforts without summoning the ugliest racial injustice in our nation's history. Dukes has used her influential position to tarnish an important policy debate and, more disturbingly, has abandoned a large part of her constituency that is looking to the NAACP for support in this new age of public education.
As Andy Rotherham reported this week, the House Appropriations Committee noted that Department of Defense installations throughout the United States are "struggling with the issue of dependent education for K-12 students" and is calling for a process that lets military families more easily establish charter schools. "Frequent moves by military families highlight the differences and inequities among various state public school systems," the committee noted in its military construction and veterans affairs spending bill. "An increasing number of families are opting for private or home schooling to compensate for lack of public education quality and to maintain continuity in their child's progress."
The committee directed the U.S. comptroller general to determine how to make this happen and report back to both houses of Congress by the end of the year.
