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education equity

Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool Choice

‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Editor’s note: In a February 1988 New York Times column, William Safire traces this expression to a cartoon in an 1846 edition of Punch magazine. The cartoon, entitled “The Ministerial Crisis,” features a showman telling a customer, “Which ever you please, my little dear. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.” Safire provided context from Edward C. Stephens, who at the time was dean of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications: “The phrase is used today not so much as an invitation to choice as it is a rejoinder to complaint. It seems to be similar in intent to, ‘You made your bed, now lie in it.’ ” 

Once upon a time, my late beloved, wife, Marylyn, and I decided to count the semesters that our five kids had spent in “public” and private schools beginning in Illinois in 1963 and continuing from 1968 in Berkeley, Calif.  

Why would such a proportion have mattered to us? I suspect that Marylyn’s years as a public schoolteacher plus her strong sense of parental and civic responsibility had, for that moment, made yesterday’s decisions seem a matter for self-examination. I’m not clear that our answer (precisely, a 50-50 split between public and private schools) was directly relevant to the ongoing quarrels over “school choice,” but it can serve as a specimen of the control so cherished by parents like ourselves of middle or higher incomes, over where their child shall spend his or her 2,340 days experiencing the formal schooling required of all kids. 

We were buyers in that market of schools, all of which were competing for our business; and those labeled “public” were every bit as dependent upon our personal decisions as were Montessori or St. Ann’s. That’s the way it was, and to this day remains, at least in the sort of neighborhoods we preferred and could afford to inhabit. 

From the start of School Year 1968 (our first in Berkeley) we elected to send all the kids to the newly racially integrated “public” schools. We were enthusiastic customers, as were most of our neighbors. This was expected to be an experience we wanted for our children, even though, at least for our two older boys, it would mean getting bused to a school well outside our neighborhood. 

Over time, this system has, to a degree, served the purpose of integration, at least at John Muir, the K-5 elementary just up the street. Our three younger children remember it in mostly positive terms. Sadly, the older boys who were bused to Malcolm X (originally Lincoln) found a strange atmosphere of hostility and blame from some of the faculty.  

After two years, we switched our children to a racially integrated Catholic school, which then served all five children until each moved on to high school. The boys all spent grades 9 through 12 with the Christian Brothers. For one year, our youngest tried a co-ed Catholic high school which disappointed; then to her – and our – satisfaction, she shifted to Berkeley High.  

Thus, we made our choices, some perhaps to be regretted, but I think we learned from our mistakes. The responsibility for decision-making was good for all of us. 

What is the point of this ramble? Simply that parents like ourselves have not merely the abstract legal authority to choose the school but the means to do so, either by moving to the neighborhood of our preferred public school or paying private school tuition, as we did for one-half of our children’s school years.  

But the children of the poor also have to be schooled; in truth, their need is often greater. And their parents’ authority to choose could be realized, just as our own, without increasing the total cost to the taxpayer – if that be an object of reform. The dignity of the poor could be realized as was ours; their domestic roles could be validated and celebrated. And our government schools could, at last, deserve the title “public.” 

The loser, obviously, would be the officers of the teacher unions for whose welfare the poor have been kept in bondage. I can’t shake the memory of my friend Albert Shanker, president of both the United Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, and his oft-repeated slogan: “I’ll represent children when they start paying union dues.” 

 Of course, each child does exactly that when forced by family poverty into a school the parent loathes.

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Charter SchoolsEducation EquityEducation PoliticsFeaturedSchool Choice

Let’s begin listening to the voices that really matter in ed choice conversation

Keith Jacobs
Keith Jacobs

Mary McLeod Bethune Day Academy is one of 123 schools in the Washington, D.C., area under the oversight of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Founded in 2003, the PreK3-8 academy is an IB World School that offers world language, art and music in addition to its core academic curriculum.

While attending a recent event hosted by D.C. Public Charter Schools, I stood in the lawmaking core of our country where landmark decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education promised education equality and closed my eyes.

I imagined what it would be like to celebrate the success of all students without focusing on the particular setting that allowed them to achieve this success. That’s when I realized we’ve been going about this all wrong.  

Education choice reformers often focus on the wrong “face of the education choice movement.” We look at lawmakers, activists or orators declaring their unwavering support of education choice who are surrounded either by supporters or by the opposition – teacher unions and school district leaders. 

All those faces have one thing in common: adulthood. 

Yes. The only faces we see, the only voices we hear, are those of adults. But those faces and voices cannot convey that education right now, particularly in cities like Washington D.C., is a life or death choice for students. 

As a choice organizer from the same background as many of our students, even I struggle to communicate for our kids. Grownups are sometimes too far removed. Opponents of education choice who would deny students the means to escape the shackles that have burdened their families through generational poverty, despite their inability to effectively support these populations, must hear from students directly. 

I opened my eyes and looked around. The event I was attending was meant to celebrate the accomplishments of charter school students and highlight the fact that more than 12,000 are waiting for a seat in those charter schools. 

In most instances across the country, waiting lists are tied to funding access, but in D.C., the problem is far more egregious. 

In 1995, the District of Columbia School Reform Act stated that charter schools would receive right of first choice to vacant buildings. Today, Mayor Muriel Bowser literally has closed the door on minority students by refusing to allow this. Refusing to allow the expansion of charter schools keeps students beholden to the randomness of the charter school lottery and forces them to remain stuck in ineffective and unsafe schools.

Over the past 20 years, D.C. public charter schools have effectively served low-income and minority students by implementing dual-language, technology, arts, inquiry-based and project-based schools while also focusing on diversity and innovative learning models. These schools are safe, effective and thriving.

This was evident in the thunderous drumline of Mary McCleod Bethune Day Academy Public Charter School as participants marched through a standing-room-only crowd. Students as young as 8 showed pride and mastery musicianship representing a charter school that caters to their unique abilities.

The worth of these schools also was evident in an exhibit in which students shared their journeys and inspirations through original works of art. One student stood before his drawing of Emmett Till, the teenage boy brutally lynched at age 14 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. This student’s portrait reminded me of the sins of our history and how the grotesque and untimely death of a child catapulted the civil rights struggle into a mainstream movement. 

Till’s casket is memorialized right up the street at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but what has our country actually learned from years of oppressive practices against minorities and the fight to do better? Today, instead of denying access to diners and buses, our country limits the access of our most vulnerable children to quality education options, continuing oppression that began long ago.

In the days of the Civil Rights Movement, we didn’t focus on children until tragedy struck. Until the death of a child galvanized a nation.

Education choice is the social justice issue of our time.

Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

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Commentary and OpinionEducation EquityFeaturedSchool Choice

‘Midway’ reminds us of what made America great

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

“Midway,” directed by Roland Emmerich, is based on real-life events in the clash between the American fleet and the Imperial Japanese Navy that marked a turning point in the Pacific Theater during WWII. While the Battle of Midway is a great reminder of American society’s admirable traits, the U.S. must continue to expand opportunity for everyone in the education arena to flourish in a growing and innovative society.

Trips to the cineplex are important holiday rituals in the Ladner clan, and Midway was on the viewing list this year. I enjoyed it. Looper issued a video with several scenes you might suspect were Hollywood embellishments. But nope, they actually happened.

See more here and here.

The Battle of Midway is a helpful reminder about many admirable aspects of American society. George Orwell said that to understand London, one had to visit Paris. Imperial Japan is a good stand-in for our un-America, which allows us to understand ourselves better.

Japan of the 1930s was a monarchy run by rival elites of the Army and Navy. The film does a decent job of portraying this rivalry and hints at the precipitating cause of the Pearl Harbor attack. Japan imported most of its oil from the United States at the time. Horrified by atrocities in Japan’s empire building in China, the United States passed an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan. The Japanese elite decided to secure new sources for oil but understood the need to knock out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor to do so.

All of this reminds me of a quote from Matt Ridley’s book, “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.”

The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in “The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy,” because they endlessly seek to govern by design in a world that is best organized spontaneously from below. Public policy failures stem from planners’ excessive faith in deliberate design. They constantly underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangement, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.

Elitist societies, like the pre-Civil War American South, are prone to making rash decisions to suit the needs of their elite. Japan’s elite got the Pearl Harbor attack very, very wrong, and it cost their country dearly. Japan had employed similar tactics successfully against Russia earlier in the century, but the United States was no sclerotic Czarist Russia.

Despite putting a priority on Europe, the USA was far more than Japan would ever have been able to handle. At one point, for instance, the United States was producing a new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier per month. Japan brought six such carriers to attack Pearl Harbor and lost four of them at Midway.

The pilots who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack were the best trained in the world. Their planes were superior to ours at the outset. The elitism of pilot training, however, represented a severe weakness. Many of the pilots who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack died in the battle of Midway. Given that pilot training was akin to graduating from Harvard Law in the Japanese system, this was a huge problem.

Where did the United States get enough pilots to crank out a new fleet carrier every month? It went something like “Hey Tommy, you’re a bright kid and good in a fight. How would you like to become a fighter pilot?”

American planes improved in quality and quantity. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, realized the scale of their folly after the attack, stating, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

The Japanese elite had not just underestimated American industrial capacity and human capital; they also underestimated American ingenuity. “Midway” accurately portrays the crucial role played by American codebreakers in the pivotal Midway battle.

Yamamoto aimed to draw the remaining American aircraft carriers into a trap by attacking Midway Island. Admiral Nimitz learned of their plans and instead had our remaining carriers lying in wait to destroy the four Japanese carriers. A group of Navy musicians proved crucial to the codebreaking effort.

A key to American success in World War II was making good use of talent, whether in the form of repurposed musicians or Rosie the Riveter back in the factories. We were much better at this than Imperial Japan, but not as good, either then or now, as we could or should be.

Today, state, national and international testing data show that talent development is not normally distributed in the United States. White students in America sit comfortably among the ranks of the top European and Asian education systems, while American black and Hispanic students score closer to the averages of countries that expend a fraction of our financial effort:

Our ancestors weren’t afraid of foreign competition. They made the foreign competition afraid of us. If we want to “make America great again,” we need to expand the opportunity for everyone to flourish in a growing and innovative society.

Equipping children with literacy and numeracy is a key component of mobility. The performance of our education system is a major impediment to such an aspiration, and in fact, may have us trending toward a detrimental elitism of our own.

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