Politicians who support charter schools are inequity enablers.
The proliferation of charter schools is indicative of a toxic environment due to our nation’s planned neglect of public schools and the intentional failure to mediate inequity. Politicians who have advocated for and abetted the rise of charter schools are complicit in a ploy in which an experiment with competition among a few students for entry into privately governed schools is substituted for a systemic effort to improve the education of all students.
I am a science educator, so of course, I have an affinity for science experiments that try to make sense of how the natural world works. What we learn may help us solve human problems. My disposition toward social science experiments is far more wary. These often begin with contentious, values-driven, “I wonder if…?” questions. But too often, the policies that align with hypotheses get implemented with a much wider audience before the results of the smaller experiment are analyzed and sometimes even when the findings are negative. That is the case with the current national experiment with charter schools.
To paraphrase, in 1988 Albert Shankar, former American Federation of Teachers president, famously asked, “I wonder if we remove bureaucratic and administrative restrictions, whether it could unleash often squelched teacher-led innovation and creativity?” Shankar wanted to empower teachers’ voices. Needless to say, anti-union folks and those who did not want to give up administrative prerogatives were not thrilled. The result of that short-lived experiment was creativity in some places. In others, different people made familiar decisions: Old wine in new bottles, just with different people in charge. So it is with complex experiments. Some are carried out with fidelity. Others are not. Not every hypothesis is verified.
However, the charter school experiments only addressed a narrow range of in-school influences on teachers and students, primarily regarding the locus of control of instructional decision-making– not an inconsequential thing. However, they did not tackle three fatal systemic flaws in American education: Inequity in the lives of children, their families, and communities; Inequity in education funding; and, the inherent inequities of racial and socioeconomic isolation.
This early iteration of charter schools faded and was largely replaced with a charter school experiment with a very different driving question: “Can placing privately-governed charter schools in poor non-white neighborhoods– in which schools struggle to educate children– act as catalyst to privatize education in the United States?" While the focus is still on the locus of control within schools, it is no longer teachers. Instead, the emphasis is on privately governed, and sometimes for-profit, school boards. A significant portion of current charter school advocates are billionaires who want to disempower teachers’ unions and citizens’ voices. Whereas the early charter school experiments may have harbored democratic and equity values, the current one does not.
While only 6% of U.S. students attend charter schools, the proportion is far higher in many major cities and some states around the country. In those places, charter schools are a significant drain on funding for public schools and have resulted in increased racial isolation and repeated corruption scandals.
Readers: You may not currently be the subject of this charter school experiment, but make no mistake: Many of the folks asking this new question– especially those with money to invest– still have you in mind. You are just on their back burner. They hypothesize that if the public will tolerate privatizing schools in traditionally less politically powerful neighborhoods, they will have made a giant leap toward their larger goals: Fully open up the education of all of America’s children as a profit-making opportunity; Advance the deregulation and de-unionization of every aspect of public service (Think Social Security and Medicare).
Charter-schools have risen in popularity due to a sick environment in which all of the supports for public schools listed above are absent, insufficient, or in decline. Charter schools have ascended as a major feature of education policy as result of a concerted campaign by a small number of wealthy donors and ideologues to influence politicians. This has been a decades-long effort– at least since the presidency of Ronald Reagan– to denigrate and defund government support for public wellbeing. When public schools have been allowed to crumble, well-paying jobs fade away, and good health care remain elusive, calling the availability of charter schools a choice is disingenuous at best.
The expansion of charter schools is a government-led experiment without any of the usual human subjects constraints– no informed consent, no warnings about potential harmful personal or social side effects. The subjects of this early-stage experiment are our most vulnerable children. The systematic failure to deal with the inequity in their lives has been exacerbated by the persistent failure to adequately resource their neighborhood public schools.
Maybe, decades ago support for the early iteration of charter schools was understandable. No longer. Now, we know that charter schools are no more creative or successful in generating student learning than public schools. However, they have increased racial isolation and drawn funds and attention away from overall school improvement.
Fortunately, we do know how to improve public education for all students: Invest in teachers' professional expertise; reduce class size; provide social, psychological, and financial support for children and their families; fully-fund special education; provide adequate support for teaching resources and facilities; and provide opportunities for mentoring developing and beginning teachers. Do it for all schools, not just some.
But that is not all. We need to change how we fund education both within and across states. Unequal funding preserves the privileges of the few at the expense of the many. This will continue as long as widely disparate local real estate taxes remain a primary source of school funding, pitting middle and working-class taxpayers against one another. We need to get unstuck. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. They reap the benefits of the work the rest of us do and the purchases we make. Make them pay up.
Charter schools do not mediate toxic inequity. They are inequity enablers. When politicians support the continuation and expansion of government funding for charter schools, it reflects their naiveté at best and repugnant values at worst: individual competition for scarce resources rather than ensuring a decent life for everyone. It is a crucial issue for assessing candidates for local, state and federal offices. Most important it reflects their core beliefs and what they will fight for once all of the soaring campaign rhetoric is a distant memory.
Ask them.
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Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He works part time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.