Editors, The Nation.
Charter-school advocates and others who claim the mantle of
education reform have now seen their ideas put into practice in a number of
areas—from high-stakes testing to digital learning to the takeover of
struggling public schools. The results are in. How are they doing? Suffice it
to say, if this were a high-stakes test, they’d fail.
As the articles in this issue illustrate, the strategies pursued
by education reformers frequently dovetail with those of austerity hawks. The
latter burnish their conservative credentials by cutting budgets and defunding
schools. The reformers sweep in to capitalize on the situation, introducing
charter chains like Rocketship and K12, which produce real no benefits for
students. The chains do, however, generate cash for investors, as a new trove
of public money is directed to private coffers. Far too many poor kids,
meanwhile, are consigned to schools like Philadelphia’s Bartram High: buffeted
by violence, wracked by relentless budget cuts and choked by the “white noose”
of wealthy suburbs (in the evocative phrase of former Mayor Richardson
Dilworth) that soak up a disproportionate share of resources.
Of course, US schools were not perfect before the advent of
market-oriented reform. Charter schools were praised by American Federation of
Teachers president Al Shanker in 1988—not as replacements for public schools
but as laboratories where new pedagogical ideas could be developed. While
fighting to keep public education public, we shouldn’t lose sight of the
importance of efforts to experiment with teaching, and to see what new
technologies can do if introduced in the interest of children instead of
private investors.
The havoc wreaked by so-called education reform has had the
upside of crystallizing a movement of parents, teachers, school staffers and
kids who are fighting for education justice. Schools, as Pedro Noguera points out in this issue, are
still a vital social safety net for children. A truly progressive vision for
public education shouldn’t focus on stories of how a few kids competed their
way out of blighted neighborhoods. Instead, it should focus on taking back that
stream of money going to charter chains and corporate tax cuts and redirecting
it toward schools anchored in strong communities and using proven methods for
teaching kids—the very methods deployed in schools where the rich send their
children. Indeed, the most disadvantaged kids should get even more support for
their schools than their privileged suburban counterparts.
Without education equity, we don’t have an educational system at
all—we have a rigged rat race that starts in kindergarten.
Read more from our special
education issue of the Nation.
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