American Nightmare: Charter Schools
Joaquin Q. Malik commented that the only point he didn't agree with me on in my Predictions for 2007 blog was short summary of the problems with charter schools. Malik is working on a piece about charter schools himself, which I very much look forward to reading when he's finished. In the meantime, I'll expand on what I think are the problems with them.
If public schools were safe, decently funded, and the teaching was of high quality (as was once the case, most notably in the 1930s-1950s), charter schools would never have been considered an acceptable alternative. The folks who select charter schools with the goal of giving their kids the education they should have received in the public schools don't bother me -- I think it's sad that they have to do it, but I understand it given the current defunding of public schools. The intentional destruction of the public schools by the U.S. government, aimed at furthering a conservative agenda, is what forces progressives (who have historically believed strongly in public education) to consider private and charter schools in the first place.
What bothers me about the government's advocacy of charter schools is that they know they have less and less incentive to keep up the quality of public schools if "school flight" pulls out all the kids whose parents have the resources to see they're well-educated, leaving the public schools as a dumping ground for children the government either doesn't give a damn about, or would actively like to prevent from being educated -- the children of the poor and the "underclasses".
For those who thought that charter schools would end segregation, see Harvard University's Civil Rights Project report: Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education. Even when minority rights organizations themselves sponsor charter schools and give children a progressive education, they do it almost exclusively in segregated environments.
Furthermore, charter schools are subject to mismanagement, both unintentional and deliberate -- that's the biggest cause of charter schools closing. Public schools can't close and strand students. There's an excellent overview of this problem in Northwest Education Magazine: "Why Charter Schools Stumble -- and Sometimes Fall."
Additionally, charter schools give carte blanche to religious fundamentalists of all flavors, whose idea of schooling is in direct contrast to the ideals espoused by the (now defunct) American educational system. These people now educate their children at the expense of those (black, poor, female, etc.) people they specifically want to subjugate or to keep out of their schools. The idea that they get tax dollars to further their oppressive religio-political agendas really sticks in my craw. And they don't turn out more educated students, as this article in New York Teacher demonstrates with a very good graph.
One can, of course, rightfully critique public education in the U.S., particularly the influences of sociological constructs like Taylorism, which aimed to educate working class students to accept the place designated for them in capitalist society, and which certainly rests of a foundation of segregation, a legacy that continues long after Brown vs. Board of Ed. (A good summary of the critique is John Taylor's Gatto's, "Against School". For a popular, accessible overview of different views of public schools, check out the PBS series School: The Story of American Public Education.)
One can also criticize the funding methods of public schools, especially the problem of using the local tax base to fund local schools, so that people who live in more affluent communities can provide better educations for their children. These inequities were and are pervasive in the public school system and have been well covered for decades by Jonathan Kozol and others.
Traditionally, American public education has had the tasks of teaching students subjects, and also socializing them as citizens. It's absolutely no accident (though given Reaganite American chauvenism it's certainly ironic) that in the Reagan area "government" classes were starting to drop from most public school curriculae -- sure, it was often a stupid, boring class usually taught from a conservative and grossly nationalist viewpoint. On the other hand, it also told students how the machinery of the State operated and I know that when I took the class in a huge, mixed class, mixed-race public school (North Hollywood High, 1975), there was a contingent of leftist ("opposition") students who were happy to educate their peers about the contradictions in the rhetoric of "liberty and justice for all." Boring as it seemed at the time, in retrospect it gave us the opportunity to talk (in and out of class) and got us to think and -- although we didn't know it -- to take a position on politics upon which we could build over the years.
I believe strongly that there is a liberatory value in teaching children to read, write, cipher and analyze, whether or not the intent is to mainstream them and fit them into predetermined social molds. There's a reason why oppressed people in western culture seek literacy -- literacy is power (remember the scenes in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass where he learns to read by hook or crook, and at great personal risk). The degradation of literacy in the U.S. follows the curve of defunding public schools and the rise in charter schools. In the International Adult Literacy Survey, 1994-1998, the results indicate that when comparing U.S. adults to adults in other high income countries "the U.S. overall performance is mediocre at best, and that, as a nation, the U.S. is among the world's leaders in the degree of inequality between its best and poorest performers.." In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. ranked higher. In the 21st century, they rank lower than they did in the 90s.
There are disputes about the degradation of reading skills in the U.S. population. For example, Jeff McQuillin tries to debunk the widespread perception of a literacy crisis in "Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States (1998)." I've read his work and remain unconvinced, in large measure because schools have responded to accusations about literacy failure by "teaching to the test," ensuring students score higher (even, at times, teaching the test questions themselves, when they can get them), but failing miserably to teach students how to think about texts, to critique and analyze them.
Stephen Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizer note the following in their article, "Sixty Years of Reading Research -- But Who's Listening?" [Phi Delta Kappan, V80, 1999]:Actually, the opposition between conservative and progressive views of education has existed for a long time. Conservatives see children as primarily in need of discipline, while progressives see them as creatures seeking opportunities for expression and initiative. Conservatives look to education mainly to supply basic skills for a competent labor force -- skills taught one at a time and tested by standardized, impersonal instruments -- while progressives want school mainly to nurture active citizens and creative individuals. Conservatives think of education as socializing students to the status quo, while progressives view it as an opportunity to teach students to critique and question the world they've inherited. Many conservatives doubt that public education is even an appropriate domain for government, while progressives see it as the seedbed of democracy.
...
In a sense, research studies and journal articles are beside the point; this is a religious controversy. After all, if you believe that children are intrinsically flawed beings who need to be tightly controlled and amply punished, you will design a very different kind of classroom from the one you would design for people who were seen as basically good, worthy of love and respect, and capable of self- actualization. If you believe that books -- especially religious scriptures -- have only one correct meaning that is inherent in the text, you are not going to be very friendly to schools that teach children to explore a wide range of books and ideas, to write and discuss their own responses, to make critical evaluations of what they read, and to develop strong and independent voices as authors.
... there are clear distinctions between conservative and progressive approaches to education. A classroom in which children are working in small groups on various projects they've chosen looks and feels far different from one in which students are sitting in rows listening to a lecture or filling in worksheets. We've watched children from all backgrounds excel when given lots of opportunities to choose their own reading, writing, and inquiry topics and when classrooms are structured so that the teacher can provide lots of individual attention that's well-tuned to students' personal needs. Students at the Best Practice High School, a small Chicago public high school we helped found in 1996, prove to us every day that progressive ideas can be brought to life in the inner city. And on the other side of the equation, we've observed the failure of punitive approaches, of approaches that assume that young people bring to school no relevant knowledge or abilities of their own, and of lockstep scripts that prevent teachers from using their own judgment to provide what students need at a given moment. What this suggests to me is that at the moment when "sixty years of research" was demonstrating unequivocally that "whole language" teaching -- reading rooted in the analysis of literary texts -- was most effective in educating students, particularly in the areas of comprehension skills and critical thinking, and when such research began to be institutionalized in the public schools, conservative forces marshaled together to slam public education and joined with the conservative government administration to defund public schools while funding these new charter schools. This was going on at the same time as the so-called "Culture Wars," in which right-wingers claimed that "leftists" controlled the universities and were teaching their students according to a "leftist agenda"... as if there was no "conservative agenda" already in place. What was really happening was that conservatives were panicking as study after study demonstrated that "liberal" methods worked better than the methods they espoused, and that their worldview was increasingly difficult to substantiate given the current state of research in just about every field, from biology to anthropology. (But that's another story...)
A 2004 report from Democracy Now discusses a Bush administration burial of its own government agency, which found that "children attending charter schools score lower on standardized tests than students at regular public schools." I suppose the Bush maxim, "No Child Left behind," is at least mathematically valid if all children receive an equally bad education. I could not avoid seeing the damage done by the privatising of public education; it was glaringly obvious over my 20+ years of teaching, most of which took place in state universities. Each year, my students would come to me less and less prepared for the tasks that college students must undertake: critical thinking, formulating questions, hypotheses, and arguments; evaluating evidence; college-level reading comprehension. Charter school students made up a large segment of this group, and the worst were the kids from the fundamentalist charter schools who, in the words of Joseph Heller's fictional character Ralph Newsome, "have no ideas, and they're pretty firm."
In the last five years, I've had class after class of good-hearted, well-meaning students who were stunned to find out that they, in fact, could not read. Well, most of them could read the words on the page, and often whole sentences. But they simply couldn't make sense out of a paragraph. One paragraph -- one idea: that was a foreign thought to them, and it tooks weeks of course time to teach them to be able to paraphrase even a paragraph of a critical essay that, 20 years ago, they would have been able to do blindfolded by the 8th grade. And writing... each semester I'd count fewer and fewer students who could write comprehensibly, much less coherently. By the time I left teaching at the end of 2005, I often had classes where not one single student could write at what I considered at 12th grade level.
20 years of charter and private schools down the line, and we've severely disadvantaged our children. We've stolen their potential and narrowed their chances for success. In a system like this, the only people who succeed are the few with the who are brilliant, inquisitive, self-motivated and lucky... or the ones who have money and connections already. Almost none of these kids are qualified to do jobs beyond a lower-management or menial level -- but of course the kids of the privileged classes, the kids with the family connections, will be hired whether they're qualified or not. They don't have much competition, after all. The rest will be left to rot in the enormous sea of American under- and un-employed, intentionally bereft of the skills that would help them successfully challenge an unbelievably unfair system.
Posted by kalital at March 29, 2007 10:37 AM
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I believe that money can't solve the education problem in America. Your views are biased and emotionally driven by your liberal conservative dichotomy you set present in your words. In the inner city, parents have lost hope in public school and thus turn to an alternative (Charter schools) But this is only a sign of the times for it is only obvious to the working class parent that there is a cycle of defeat that must be broken. We want our children back and the public school experiment must do so without my son and without my daughter. Give me liberty or give me death sounds just about right at this desperate juncture of the American Experience. I'll take the little liberty I have left by taking back my role as the primary influence for my children. Please consider reading The Public School Nightmare by John Taylor Gatto. This is neither conservative or progressive, just common sensical.
"Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point. Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think."
Richard Mitchel
Posted by: Marcos A Martinez at July 10, 2007 10:51 PM
Though you attempt to dismiss my arguments out of hand by claiming they are biased and "emotional," you fail to describe a single instance in which this is the case. In fact, you read me poorly, since you are arguing against things I didn't say, and suggesting things which I already DID say.
For example: "The folks who select charter schools with the goal of giving their kids the education they should have received in the public schools don't bother me -- I think it's sad that they have to do it, but I understand it given the current defunding of public schools."
I'm not upset at inner city parents who create their own charter schools because the government has destroyed the public schools in their neighborhoods. I'm upset at government charter school policies that result in that destruction.
Also, the evidence that I've read Gatto is in the article itself, where I mention his work explicitly, and place it in the context of my critique.
As for the "cycle of defeat," I believe that it's a myth. The very terminology is rooted in blame-the-victim arguments and neconconservative race and class politics. A "cycle of defeat" is the name given by neocons to the behavior of a population that has been politically disenfranchised, socially limited, and economically disenfranchised over generations. Progressives might more accurately call it a "cycle of repression."
Historically, it's clear that when educational, political and economic opportunities are extended to oppressed populations, they take quick and sure advantage of them. However, no amount of charter-school building in the inner city is going to help the entire population rise above the limits set for them by the social, economic and political structure. Instead, it will offer some limited opportunities for individuals embedded within the structure to transcend it -- this is surely a reasonable goal that parents would embrace for their children, but it is not a recipe for the liberation of the group as a whole.
Posted by: Kali Tal at July 11, 2007 2:49 PM
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