School Choice: Traditional Educators, Not Understanding Education
School Choice: By Tom Mcdonald, September 11, 2017
School Choice: How to Define Public Schooling in the Age of Choice?Â
School Choice: Ahhh. If I could only be so out of touch with reality and still be employed.
School Choice: The core fallacy here, is that public schools are successful in providing student success, performance improvement outcomes, for all students. Not only are they collectively NOT successful in doing so, they are aggressively resistive to research based, best practices, positive change.Traditional education, which public schools are a part of, create the education gap by maintaining their 20th century, factory based, one size fits all teaching methodology. The education gap creates drop outs, underemployment, unemployment, poverty, substance abuse, crime, incarceration which costs society billions.Rather than addressing this severe strategic problem in pedagogy and as a result provide real added value to their students and the public, they intentionally divert the strategic issue from advancing student success, for all students, to why school choice is bad and why Betsy Devos is bad (Both are good).
The end result is “let’s maintain a mediocre, public education monopoly, because it works for us. We don’t want to improve, we simply want to keep all the students.”
Hmmm. The goal of education, public (Including Charters, Montessori), private, for profit, virtual, is to effectively, efficiently, consistently, affordably and relevantly, provide student success performance improvement outcomes, FOR ALL STUDENTS, not just the middle. Whoever does the best job gets the students.
Well, public educations results for some of the students is mediocre and public educations results for all of the students is dismal.
Rather than improving what they do, which is why they are employed, they divert attention from the real strategic issue, which improves nothing and as a result maintains the mediocre/dismal status quo.
Unfortunately, the facts don’t matter. Lying, half-truths, false information is most important, because “what’s best for US is what matters. The public and the students don’t matter” .
The fact that traditional educators don’t understand education and why they are employed is disturbing. The fact that their approach to competition is to malign that competition, when they are no better, is equally disturbing. They fact that they are not interested in improving their student success performance improvement outcomes for all students, is simply criminal.
Tom
COMMENTARY
School Choice:Â How to Define Public Schooling in the Age of Choice?
COMMENTARY
Five responsibilities schools must meet to truly be called “public”
Too often, some so-called “public” schools are only formally public in the sense that they are government-run, taxpayer-funded, and subject to various accountability measures. Many struggle to fulfill a key expectation of what public schools were meant to do: provide equal opportunities for all children. Many citizens have been content to accept the formal classification of “public” without upholding criteria for the way that public schools ought to function. This is a problem.
Proponents of newer and alternative types of public schools, such as recovery districts and for-profit charter schools, increasingly cast public schools in formalist termsâcategorizing them by their form, rather than their functionâwhile trimming those terms to better align with their own structure.
According to the definition of one longtime school choice advocate, senior fellow and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute Chester E. Finn Jr., a public school is “any school that is open to the public, paid for by the public, and accountable to the public. It need not be run by the government.” Such labeling allows private and for-profit service providers to run public schools as long as they meet minimum formal criteria of being publicly funded and held to basic accountability standards.
But this label fails to encapsulate how corporate-managed charter schools operate as autonomous entities. About half the students attending charter schools go to one that is privately corporate-managed, according to estimates by the research nonprofit National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. For example, they may be accountable to communities only through standardized-testing performance, but not through an elected school board. They often draw on additional funding from private investors, who in turn hold the management organizations to their own expectations of profit and success at the expense of students.
In fact, it’s in the interests of those advocating for private and alternative schools to redefine the nature of public schools in ways that will enable more of the annual $600 billion spent on public schools at the local, state, and federal levels to flow their way. Vouchers, according to a July tweet from DeVos, are “an investment in individual students.” This thinking argues that providing direct funds to students’ families is equitable. But it downplays the limited nature of voucher schools, which can hold meetings behind closed doors, impose admissions criteria to block out certain students, and submit minimal accountability data. What’s more, emphasizing financial investment in an individual child is directly the opposite of long-standing views on what public schools should be doingâserving our democracy through the common good.
In this changing terrain, there are five responsibilities schools should have in order to truly be defined as “public”:
⢠Public schools should be open to the public, meaning all children are not only permitted but are also welcomed and equitably supported, even if their education may be more costly than average, such as that of students with disabilities or English-language learners.
⢠They should serve the public, meaning they meet societal needs like preparing active citizens to maintain the government and economy or to serve in the military or on juries, while also preparing graduates to critique and revise those needs.
⢠They should be responsive to the public, enabling comunity members to vote out school officials or change school policies through meaningful and viable avenues like elections, referendums, and open school meetings.
⢠They should be creators of the public, meaning that they cultivate citizens who know how to exchange ideas and respond to the ideas of others, while tolerating and working across differences.
⢠They should sustain democracy by developing skills and dispositions within children for participating and enacting freedom-oriented decisionmaking.
Sustaining democracy requires the skills and knowledge best offered in schools that are formally and functionally public. This is not to say that many don’t fall short of democratic goals. Yet the nature of public schools outlined in those five criteria provides the potential for meeting those ends in ways not always possible in private or for-profit charter schools, whose missions, student bodies, ideologies, and closed-door-governing practices are often too constrained to be aligned with democratic aims.
The debate will no doubt continue about which types of schools deserve public tax dollars. If we continue to focus on categorizing schools as public merely on the basis of their increasingly narrowed elements of formal operation, we will gloss over their function as places of citizenship development. We must instead concentrate on what public schools can and should provide for all studentsâand be careful about where we toss the label. The health of our education system and democracy depend on it.
Vol. 37, Issue 03, Page 18
Published in Print: September 6, 2017, as How to Define Public Schooling In the Age of Choice?