Hillary Clinton was asked if a poll showing interest in charter schools among African-American parents who are unhappy with public schools made her support expanding charter schools and voucher programs. The Democratic presidential candidate had the right answer:
But the original idea, Roland, behind charter schools was to learn what worked and then apply them in the public schools. And here’s a couple of problems. Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one — but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do, thankfully, take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education.
So I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system — not outside of it — but within it because I am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy and it is a path for opportunity.
But I am also fully aware that there are a lot of substandard public schools. But part of the reason for that is that policymakers and local politicians will not fund schools in poor areas that take care of poor children to the level that they need to be. And you can get me going on this…. I mean, the corridor of shame right here in South Carolina, you get on there and you can see schools that are literally falling apart. I’ve been in some of those schools. I have seen the terrible physical conditions. That is an outrage. It is a rebuke to who we are as Americans to send any child to a school that you wouldn’t send your own child to.
This is the strategy behind the rapid expansion of privatizing strategies like charter schools and vouchers: Use them to take money out of public education, leaving the most challenging students in public schools, then use the struggles of underfunded, overburdened schools as an excuse to screw them over further. It’s a version of the overall Republican strategy to break government and then use the fact that government is broken as an excuse to break it some more—only this attack on the public good of education has been successfully marketed as “choice” and even, cynically, as an advance in civil rights.
