Vinson and I went back and forth on this image on facebook. He says basically… don’t trip and re-elect Trump. You may have to hold your nose. To which I say this: (ps… This is not about HRC. I voted for her in the general election.)
Dear Vinson,
Please accept my apologies for being so strident in my responses. It’s frustrating to attempt to communicate about complex issues that are not well understood. But, here goes.
There is an organized and extremely well funded attack on public education happening in this country and abroad right now. It is not a single issue but an intersection of issues that are foundational to democracy and to most people’s concept of social justice. Compromising on it would be like compromising on Jim Crow or McCarthyism. It can’t be done.
You can enter the issue at multiple points. You can be opposed to social darwinism applied to children… who gets funded classrooms and who doesn’t. Or at coercive “free” market notions of choice… in which state and federal education policy is determined by a shadow govt of empowered consultants who are neither elected nor accountable for their failures. Or at the point of defunding by design… in which there are no viable choices other than the ones chosen for you but you are free to choose badly. (Libertarian paternalism) You can enter on the rise of authoritarianism in the growing charter sector in which neither parent, nor child, nor teacher has agency in the educational process of next generations. You can enter at the site of structural inequity or opposition to k12 profiteering by providers and investors (in both the for-profit and non profit k12 charter sector). You can enter at the intersection of consumer protection against misleading claims and market based policies that injure children who are viewed as raw materials to accept or reject. (I wrote about here: http://www.stonepooch.com/ablog/mission-accomplished/ I hope you’ll read it)
Sure, charters may be able to be reformed and regulated, but as they exist today, most of them cannibalize the school districts they inhabit and steal from the public. Some charters are used to re-segregate and others create a two tier system in poor communities in which the undesirable child gets an underfunded public school. When per pupil funding goes to charters, it increases class size for public school children, steals resources, and removes enrichment and services like art, music, librarians, social workers, nurses from the public schools that can no longer afford them. Infrastructure can be stolen or co-located (usually to the detriment of the public ed child.) Most charters are at liberty to take the students they want and dump the ones they don’t. They engage in well documented harassment of children and families they’ve taken by accident. They take dollars and often close without giving dollars back. They can use tax dollars to pay for private properties that stay with the provider and do not belong to the public. They can be nominally not for profit and engage in no bid contracts with their profit arm. They are aided by politicians who get campaign dollars from a donor class that wants public education to be a market in which the public funds private investment and the public takes all the risk.
Some will say… well if the children get a better education… but for all those well-funded and powerful fingers on the scale, most charters are no better than public schools, and many are far worse. There are good reasons that the NAACP has asked for a moratorium on new charters and that the ACLU has joined a case against charter exclusionary practices. Children are cash cows in an unregulated, self interested charter industry funded by conservatives and aided and abetted by DFERs. As for successful charters that warm hearts… until charters are regulated as a class and their parasitical relationship to public schools resolved, it doesn’t matter if an individual charter is successful. That charter could have been a public school. http://friendsofpubliced.org/
Unfair Labor Practice
The attack on public education is also about unfair labor practices using scapegoating and deprofessionalization of teaching. A democratic establishment that supports practices that turn their constituents into an insecure, exploitable labor force has no standing. Working people have a right to have fair treatment and conditions in their workplace. Charters that open in closed schools NOT only do not take the teachers, they also DO NOT TAKE THE KIDS from the schools they closed. They brazenly declare improvement even though they have dumped both the unwanted children and the union teachers and staff. All they really accomplish is infrastructure theft. The biased research on dumped kids argues that it’s no injury to those kids because they “did no worse than they would have”… cynically… they were expected to fail and just did it somewhere else. No harm, no foul. Teachers in NYC who end up rubber roomed are smeared by the rubber room even if their only failing was to work in a high needs school with infrastructure that someone had an eye on. The charter may then exploit an inexperienced teaching staff and engage teacher churn to drive costs low and profits high. https://thehill.com/opinion/
Schools such as Success Academy (KIPP, Achievement First, etc etc) go after infrastructure and lie about their accomplishments. Who benefits? In the case of Success Academy, their first graduating class graduated only 20% of entering. Their HS had a teacher attrition rate of 70% of teachers in 2018. I might also note that this lack of succcess didn’t impact the success of Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz who was paid $782,000 in 2016. She remains a favorite of the ed reform movement and the uninformed or colluding donors who feather her nest (including funding a foundation set up entirely for the purpose of pumping her personal salary by 300). Moskowitz is a big donor to the political campaigns of Mayor and Governor.
DFER candidates are not part of any potential reform to the charter sector. I spoke about Cory Booker but he is only one example. His high profile camera ready outrage on all the easy positions and his smarmy twitter persona makes him appear like a good guy, but he actively supports dismantling of public education through charters and vouchers. His brother ran a for profit charter chain (voucher connection right there) in Tennessee that failed its kids for years before its charter was finally revoked in 2016. Now, courtesy of Cory no doubt, Cary is the lead education policy “expert” for New Jersey governor Murphy. That’s no surprise. In ed reform, if you stay the course on privatization, it doesn’t matter how incompetent or corrupt you are.
I will withhold my vote for that kind of candidate because on a sinking ship, I will not grab a stone to save myself.