Detroit: Snitch or Be Fired

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Darnell Earley (already famous as the emergency manager who poisoned the Flint water supply) has a problem on his hands.

Well, actually, he has several problems, including crumbling, disgusting, unsafe schools. That's not the problem he's concerned about-- he's concerned about the teacher sick-outs. Michigan teachers are not legally permitted to strike-- but they can call in sick. And like any manager whose people are desperately going to great lengths to let him know there's a problem, Earley has sat down with them to talk and try to get to the root of the issue so that the school system can better meet the needs of the students and community. Ha! Just kidding. Earley has tried to cudgel the teachers back into line.

He's tried a court injunction against the union. Twice. The court has correctly noted that there's no evidence that the union is behind the sick-outs.

So last week, teachers reportedly became aware that there was a new policy document on the DPS website.

You can see the document here.

The first sections are old news. Employees may not strike. Supervisors may not encourage a strike.

Then we get to the snitching portion.

"Each and every employee" who becomes aware of any plan for a strike or work stoppage must report it, in writing and in full and in detail.

And the bottom line on all of this?

Failure to immediately comply with this order may be grounds for discipline up to and including termination.

So now, instead of spending money trying to fix decaying schools or get non-rancid food in front of students, Earley and DPS can spend money hauling teachers into tribunals to charge them with having prior knowledge of another teacher's intent to call in sick, with everybody's job on the line.

Michigan does have a whistleblower statute, which protects, among other things, an employee who "reports or is about to report (either verbally or in writing) a violation or a suspected violation of a law, regulation, or a rule" whether the law is state, federal, whatever. I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on tv), but it would be interesting to see if the teacher sickout qualifies as a last-ditch attempt to "report" the terrible conditions, many of which violate all sorts of rules, would qualify them as whistleblowers, and therefore protected from retaliation for the sick-outs.

But it's an even more bizarre stretch to try to implement a regulation aimed directly at anyone who knew that someone else was about to blow a whistle.

Earley's snitch-or-be-fired directive is just one more example of how this kind of management-by-czar model can turn into messy tyranny. I hope DPS teachers continue to defy Early, and I hope he looks as ridiculous as he clearly is when he tries to go after them. But what I really hope is that somebody in the state of Michigan wakes up and starts properly funding schools, communities, and the very citizens of the state. Though I should probably check to make sure that Pennsylvania doesn't have some sort of extradition treaty with Michigan before I post this-- I've just encouraged Detroit teachers to continue their sick out and you're just read me doing it, which means we could all be in trouble now. What country do we live in, again?

ICYMI: Browsing the edu-info

Here's just a bit of what's happening out there. As always, I highly recommend that you look down the right-hand sidebar, which is probably the best part of this blog!

Star Wars and Education Reform

Yes, Andy Smarick is part of the Bellwether-Fordham axis of reforminess. But he has a history of carefully considering the implications of ed reform and the unrestrained impulse to just throw out everything old. This quick take raises some useful questions. Also, Star Wars.

Common Core Can't sped Up Child Development


From last summer, this piece lays out the problem with the Core versus the development of small children.

The Blasphemy of School Vouchers

It's voucher-pushing time in Tennessee again. A perspective from a parent whose child attends one of those "failing" schools, and who does his homework on the larger issues.

The School Choice We Have vs The School Choice We Want

A good look at the joyous PR of Choice Week held up against the backdrop of Detroit, courtesy of edu-journalist Jeff Bryant

Have You Heard

Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) has entered the world of podcasting, and the world of podcasting is better for it.

Higher Education Is More Than Workforce Development

Tom Eblen gives a brief history of higher education in Kentucky and looks at how the new governor is poised to screw it up.

CCSS: Safe and Secure

The Collaborative for Student Success is yet another Common Core shilling group, supported by folks like the Gates Foundation, the New Ventures Fund, and the Fordham. It has to be lonely over there, standing up for the Common Core when nobody will even mention its name unless they're paid to do so.

Election Doesn't Matter

Last week executive director Karen Nussle issued a memo declaring Common Core a non-issue in the race for President, and she has a legitimate point. At this point Common Core lacks support among Presidential candidates as surely as roasting and eating baby pandas does. But Nussle sorts out the different types of non-support.

Many of the contenders have a complicated relationship with the standards marked by inconsistencies and shifting positions, while others have staked out governance positions on standards that are unconstitutional.

I think "complicated relationship" is a nice way to put it. There are, for instance, the flip-floppers. She calls out Rubio, who used to brag about his role in getting CCSS adopted in Florida. And Chris Christie and Fiorina and Huckabee (and Jindal and Walker) who are all for Common Core before they were against it. Nussle does not dig further, considering that this might be a result of selling the Core, not on their merits as educational standards, but on their merits as a good political posture. I suppose you can argue that the flip floppery is a sign that these candidates are unprincipled, but I think it's also a sign that Common Core was never a matter of principle to begin with. The Core were sold as politically expedient and politically sale-able. These deserters of the Core deserted the standards as soon as it became evident that they did not possess the only qualities that ever made CCSS in the first place.

Nussle's "unconstitutional" crack is for Cruz and Trump, both of whom have promised to undo the federal Common Core laws, and while I hold the feds responsible in large part for the Core's existence and prevalence, even I understand that talking about undoing the federal Common Core laws is like promising to repeal the federal laws requiring it to snow in Alaska. It's a cynical, cost-free to promise nothing, appropriate for two supremely cynical sonsabitches. To even sort of make good on the promise, Nussle points out, they have promised to use any Presidential power they can to undermine the Core, which would make for spectacular overreach and abuse of power. Oh yeah-- Ben Carson is in this group. Is he still here? Apparently.

Nussle also brings up the "principled leaders" while simultaneously giving them a pass for actually being flip floppers. Bush and Kasich "have consistently and unapologetically supported higher standards" she says, conveniently switching from "common core" to "highers standards" because otherwise both would just be flip-floppers who were a little slower on the flop than the rest. That would be appropriate for Kasich, who was still spouting the "but these were created by the governors" line long after even Common Core PR flaks had dropped that fiction (I watch him at the NH beauty pageant and my impression that Kasich is more clueless than diabolical). Bush, on the other hand, had staked out education as the issue-based limo that would drive him to DC, and ever since the wheels came off, he's been unsure about whether to wait next to the vehicle for a tow-truck or to just hitch a ride with something else.

Nussle does a nice call-back to the Washington Post prediction that Common Core would be the most important issue of the election before pointing out that it barely came up at all in GOP debates, and devotes twelve whole words to acknowledging that Democrats are also running for President and not talking about Common Core.

The Core Is Safe

Nussle wraps up by explaining why the Core standards are in no danger.


The enactment of ESSA forever ends what has long been the greatest point of vulnerability for Common Core: federal entanglement through Race to the Top and secretarial waivers in states’ decisions surrounding the adoption of standards and the selection of aligned assessments.

Yes, for people whose theory is that the Core was doing fine until Obama and Duncan and the feds messed everything up, ESSA is good news because it protects the states from the results of any federal elections, and Nussle is convinced that CCSS is firmly entrenched in forty-three states.

On the one hand, she has a point. Most states that "replaced" Common Core did it through the highly technical Lipstick on a Pig technique of changing the name and a few words here and there.

On the other hand, Common Core is dead, and public education is fighting a long clean-up battle against the shambling zombies that still grunt its name.

The portions of Common Core that are not on the Big Standardized Test are dead and gone, gone, gone. When was the last time you heard about a school sinking big bucks into the Common Core speaking and listening program? How many teachers are under intense pressure to implement instruction that meets those standards? Speaking and listening standards are absolutely part of the Core, but they're not on anybody's BS Test, so nobody cares. For all intents and purposes they don't exist.

What about schools and teachers who claim they are being led by the Common Core to new heights of educational awesomeness? I have read dozens of essays by these folks, and they all have one thing in common-- they are full of baloney. Here is the process followed by every single one of these schools and teachers:

1) Do whatever your professional judgment tells you is best for your students.

2) Credit it to the Common Core standards.

At this point, "Common Core" has about as much clear and specific meaning as "stuff." It means something completely different to every person that uses it, encounters it, or interprets it, and its decay into empty nothingness is accelerated by the lack of any sort of anchor-- there's no person, no group, no "authority" in place to say, "No, this is what it really means."

Common Core still exerts an unhealthy influence in a thousand corners of the country, depending on how deep the kool-aid runs in the veins of the People In Charge. But it's no longer possible to have a real conversation about it because nobody means the same thing by the words. So in a sense, Nussle is correct in believing that nobody can hurt the Core any more. However, nobody can hurt the Core anymore because it's already dead, shambling and shuffling around, desperate to eat brains but unable to form a single useful thought or join up with any of the other policy zombies.

USED: Dear Colleague

TO: State and Local School Officials
FROM: Faceless Federal Bureaucrat at US Department of Education

I hope that our recent letter about participation rates in accountability testing has clarified the department's stance on the 95% participation requirement. This most recent threat of Dire Consequences should be heeded, and should not be confused with this other time we made the threat, or the time before that. This time, if more than 5% of your test-worthy students are opted out of testing by their families, we will rain hellfire and damnation down upon you, or at the very least take away some of your funding.

ESSA requires a 95% participation rate. Yes, ESSA also recognizes the right of parents to opt out, but that does not mean that we can't hold you responsible for what they choose to do.

In fact, we like this regulatory principle so much, we have whipped up some regulatory extensions of this great idea.

We note with alarm that more and more of our younger children are unattractive. We are also concerned that parents are selecting clothing for their children without proper regard for aesthetic qualities of the child's wardrobe. Therefore, if we determine that more than 5% of your state's children have been told, "You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny," we will be cutting your federal subsidy.

We believe children's health is suffering because they are being fed too many fried foods such as french fries. We would like to see healthier choices made, such as broccoli. Therefore, if we determine that more than 5% of your families are not feeding their children broccoli every night, we will be cutting a portion of your Title I funding.

We are concerned that American children are falling behind other countries in median height at age 8. We recognize that height is often genetic, and so we intend to encourage short people to procreate with tall people. If we find too many short people pro-creating with other short people in your state, we will slash all federal school funding.

Of course, most experts agree that even mild corporal punishment is inappropriate and bad for children. Therefore, if we discover that more than 5% of the parents in your districts ever spank their children, we will send somebody over from USED to punch one of your administrators in the face.

We are certain you share our belief that when adult citizens of the USA choose to exercise their rights in ways that are inconvenient to federal purposes, it is the state and local school system's responsibility to separate those citizens from their rights; and that it only make sense that systems which fail to convince those citizens to give up their rights should be punished. Parents may have a federally-recognized right to opt out, but schools have a federally-imposed responsibility to keep parents from exercising their rights.

We are aware that some critics have argued that schools have no control over factors such as parental choice. We believe that concern will be addressed in our upcoming letter in which we will outline our plan for tying federal school funding to the price of tea in China. 

OH: Opt Out Under Attack [Update]

UPDATE: Courtesy of Board Member Wagner in the comments below:

UPDATE: OEA spoke with the primary sponsor of the bill that contained the provision to penalize educators who suggest opting-out as a possibility, Representative Kimberly Roegner. Roegner agreed to completely remove that provision from the bill in question, House Bill 420. Apparently she and others on the education committee have realized that this provision went way too far, was ill considered, and should have received more thoughtful consideration before being placed in the bill.

My thanks go out to all of you, including Crumudgucation, who joined into the collective voice that changed the minds that needed to be changed. My thanks go out to Representatives Roegner and Brenner, chair of the House Education Committee, for being open to our message. 

Here's what the original fuss was about.

Word came from a high-ranking official through Facebook today that somebody is gunning for those mean old Ohio Opt Outers.

The vehicle is Ohio House Bill 420, a bill "to amend sections 3302.01 and 3302.03 of the Revised Code to prohibit the Department of Education from including students who 'opt-out' of state assessments in calculations of certain grades in the state report card and to declare an emergency."

But that title sounds like a Good Thing, right. In fact if we look at some of the specific changes, we find versions of this language:

any student to whom a district or school is required to administer an assessment under section 3301.0710 or 3301.0712 of the Revised Code, but who chooses not to take the assessment, shall not be included in the calculation of the district's or school's grade under division (B)(1)(b) of this section.

In other words, students who opt out of the Big Standardized Test (still PARCC, in Ohio's case) will not be counted against their school's state rating.

However, the bill is listed as still in committee, where apparently the following language has been tacked on as an amendment:

“No employee of a school district or public school shall negligently suggest to any student, or parent, guardian, or custodian of that student, enrolled in the district or school that the student should choose to not take any assessment prescribed by section 3301.0710 or 3301.0712 of the Revised Code.” Violation of this law is termination, loss of license, and a criminal record. 

That's right. Tell your students or any of their friends and family that you think opting out might be a good idea, and you would lose your job, your license, and your clean record. Post a complaint about PARCC on the book of face, and you are in the slammer. Testify before a government agency that you think the PARCC is a big fat waste of time, and you could be an unemployed lawbreaker.

Word of this astonishing (and probably illegal) amendment slipped out courtesy of Ohio Board of Education member A. J. Wagner. We've met Wagner before-- he's the board member who led a small revolt when Ohio tried to cut special area requirements for elementary schools. And he shared a few thoughts about this move on his Facebook page which I am sharing now with his permission.

So, a teacher who says on Facebook, “These tests aren’t helping our kids;” a janitor who reports to his neighbor what he heard in the teacher’s lounge about the waste of time these tests are; a superintendent who honestly says to the PTO president who challenges the tests, “I’m only doing this because the state makes me do it, this doesn’t help your children;” a principal who testifies to a legislative committee that the tests are damaging our schools; a counselor who says to a parent of an anxiety ridden child on the verge of a breakdown, “The testing pressure is too much for her;” a parent who works in the cafeteria and opts her son out of the tests; a school board member who votes for a resolution condemning the tests; all of these risk losing their job and can end up with a criminal record. 

“Silence them!”
“Stop them before the public finds out what we’re doing!”
“Ruin their lives before they ruin our political careers with the truth!”

Let’s review.
 
• These tests have had no real value, at least not to student performance. They have tremendous value to testing companies.
 
• They cost a lot of tax dollars taken from your house budget and given to testing companies rather than classroom instruction.
 
• They cost significant time. Last year teachers in Ohio spent as much as 8% of their classroom time on tests.
• They cause needless, harmful angst in children who understand the high stakes placed on the outcomes.
 
• They cost schools the loss of good, experienced teachers, especially schools in poor communities where teachers are blamed for the poor performance of kids who come to school, hungry, stressed, sick, and beaten.
 
• They cost discouragement and hopelessness in impoverished communities whose houses are vacant as parents move, when they can, because they’ve been told, falsely, that their schools aren’t any good.
 
• They are telling us that our kids are stupid when they’re not. If the scores from last year’s tests are believed, about two-thirds of Ohio’s kids are not on track for college or a career. That’s not true. But just in case you don’t get the message, standards are being raised for next year’s test to make that point more emphatic. TWO OF THREE OHIO KIDS ARE TOO DUMB TO GO TO COLLEGE!
 
• These tests aren’t timely. More than half the school year is gone and we still don’t have final scores on last year’s tests! What is a parent or teacher supposed to do when they find out, in late February, that Junior didn’t do so well? Send him back a grade?
 
• Education Week has moved Ohio from a state ranking of 5 to a ranking of 23 in the past two years. Ohio hasn’t seen a meaningful increase in NAEP scores in more than a decade. Last year’s NAEP scores for Ohio moved us down.
 
• The test results are used to terminate local control by firing elected school boards and allowing outsiders appointed by outsiders to take control of our schools. They are not just burying the constitution; they are ending democracy.

If you are an Ohioan who cares about education, you might want to send Wagner a little message of support. And if you're employed by a school district, feel free to share this post-- but do it soon, because before you know it, spreading this kind of dissent and disagreement could cost you your job.

Coercion, force, threats, and more threats-- this is what it takes to get people to go along with the PARCC. You would think that legislators and policy makers might ask themselves why exactly PARCC has failed to win hearts and minds. but no-- instead, we'll just force people to shut up about it at gunpoint. Good luck with that, Ohio.

Power and Order

It's School Choice Week and all the usuals have to check in, and I've been trying to read the work of the more serious choice advocates. And that would have to include Andy Smarick.

Smarick's entry at the Fordham Institute blog is School Choice: The end of the beginning in which he would like to suggest that charter-choice systems are a done deal, and he has a lesson from his years of pushing choice that he wants to share:

But probably the most important lesson I’ve learned over the last fifteen years—the reason why school choice progress moves so slowly—is this: An education system without school choice makes perfect sense from the point of view of central administrators.

Thas's probably true in the sense that it's true to say that I married my wife because she smells nice-- it's true, but a rather incomplete picture. Or to phrase Smarick's observation another way-- we have the traditional pubic system we have because the trained professionals who have devoted their adult live to working in the ed biz have, in their constant work at growing and testing and refining, have settled on several best practices. Smarick might as well complain that the only reason that surgeons like to operate on tables instead of floors is that it makes it easier to operate safely and accurately.

Smarick observes that a centralized authority for a large cityful of students (like most people in the ed debates, Smarick is really talking just about large urban school systems) is efficient and sensible, except when it isn't.

When there’s a single school operator, it’s a big problem if it’s not good at operating schools. Large, centralized bureaucracies remove power from practitioners. A single political governing board can be captured by interest groups. Monopolies are able to resist unwelcome reforms and find it difficult to evolve to meet changing circumstances. A family may not like the school to which its children are assigned. A teacher may not like the school to which she is assigned. A school assignment system, as Senator Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, reinforces residential segregation. A single-provider model, as Ashley Rogers Berner argues, undermines pluralism while implying ideological neutrality. And so on.

All of these are, again, sort of partially legit kind of. Large centralized bureaucracies are nobody's favorite thing, though as a classroom teacher, you can appreciate a large central bureaucracy that is too lumpy and slow to really interfere with you. A school board can be captured by special interests, but the election process allows them to be UNcaptured-- and a charter operating company IS a special interest, and it cannot be changed by the voters. Teachers and students "may not like" their school. I'm not sure that rises to the level of a Big Problem. School assignment systems may reinforce residential segregation, but the charter record on fixing segregation is crappy. You know who could fix school segregation? A centralized school administration. And I think Berner is full of baloney.

There are actually other legit complaints about a centralized single-payer-provider for education, particularly states and systems that exacerbate the effects of segregation along racial and class divides on purpose through policies loosely described as Let's Not Spend Any Money on Schools for Those People. That's a problem. I'm just not convinced that a choice system offers any solution to it instead of, say, "rescuing" a small handful of students from underfunded schools while making those schools even more severely underfunded for the many students still there.

Smarick is ideologically predisposed to be in favor of "our transition from a highly legible, single-provider model to a decentralized, choice-based model." But we have a pre-existing model for a decentralized choice-based model for providing a human service, and that would be the world's most expensive, inefficient and mediocre health care system.

Smarick sees a tension between the orderliness of our traditional system and a system that "empowers families and educators." And this may be one of the key points on which we disagree, because I'll be damned if I can see how a choice system empowers anybody except the people who want to run (and profit from) a choice system (also, a good public system allows for a great deal of energizing anarchy under the surface, but that's a topic for another day.)

Smarick is one of the few people to make the claim that a choice system empowers educators. Most choice fans correctly note that it's a great system for Putting Teachers in Their Place by getting rid of unions and job security from day one.

But choice doesn't empower families, either. In fact, it takes away one of the most fundamental powers a family has when it comes to education.

It's the power to make a school take your child. Show up at the school in your community with your child in tow, demanding that she be educated. The public school cannot say no. In fact, if your child comes equipped with challenges or disabilities, not only can the public school not say no, but they must provide your child with the necessary tools and instructions. If you don't like what the school is doing, you can call school officials, and if you don't like their answer, you can call a school board member. If you're really unhappy, you can attend a meeting where, by law, all decisions must be made in public view. You have the power to do all that, and in many cases you can even follow your complaint up by dragging the school district into a court of law.

What power do families have in a charter choice system? The power to take their business elsewhere. That's it. You do not have the power to demand that a school take your child, or that they teach your child in the most appropriate way. If a charter decides that it wants to push you out, you have no recourse. Information for judging choice schools is limited and mostly parents face a barrage of marketing rather than useful information.

Smarick is, finally, interested in assuming the sale. He lists some legitimately important questions about how a choicey chartery system would work (how do we do decentralized organization? who owns the buildings?) as a way of saying, "See! Choice-charter systems are a done deal. We just need to work out the details." That is perhaps premature, given that no charter-choise system has yet proven to actually work well at anything (other than making some charter operators a bunch of money) and none answer the question "How do you have redundant educational systems without ending up with a system that is an inefficient money-sucking tax dollar black hole?"

I agree that many centralized school systems need a great deal of work, and there are some problems that some public school systems need to solve. What remains unclear is how a choice-charter system solves any of those problems.

CATO, Choice and Freedom

It's School Choice Week, one more faux celebration created as a hook on which to hang a hundred press releases.

School Choice Week does indeed launch a thousand events and commentaries, and plenty of them are not very serious puff pieces by not very serious people. But some choice supporters are reasonably thoughtful people, and their words are worth reading if for no reason other than to spark the mental exercise of figuring out why, exactly, you disagree with them.

Which brings me to Neal McClusky's pro-choice piece for CATO, the Koch-flavored Libertarian thinky tank. It's short and sweet and draws a line directly between school choice and freedom. And I appreciate the clarity of his argument, because it helps me understand why I believe he's wrong.

First, the liberty part.

Freedom must have primacy because society is ultimately composed of individuals, and leaving individuals the right and ability to control their own lives is fundamentally more just than having the state – be it through a single dictator, or majority of voters – control our thoughts, words, or actions.

The sticky part here is "the right and ability to control their own lives."  The ability to control your own life is directly connected to wealth and status, and wealth and status are directly connected to the wealth and status of your parents. The state is not the only entity capable of limiting individual freedom, and more and more often, it does so not out of its own interests, but at the behest of the corporate interests who have paid mightily to have government represent their interests and not the interests of citizens without wealth, access of power.

Then, the extension of the liberty argument:

But a corollary to free individuals, especially when no one is omniscient and there is no unanimous agreement on what is the “right” way to live, or think, or believe, must be free association – free, authentic communities. We must allow people and communities marked by hugely diverse religious, philosophical, or moral views, and rich ethnic and cultural identities and backgrounds, to teach their children those things. Short of stopping incitement of violence or clear parental abuse, the state should have no authority to declare that “your culture is acceptable,” or “yours must go.” Indeed, crush the freedom of communities and you inevitably cripple individual liberty, taking away one’s choices of how and with whom to live.

This is a swell ideal, and I would love to live in that country, but it requires a level playing field and a shared definition of free. For instance, I can't think of any way in which same-gender marriage in any way infringes on or damages my perfectly happy heteronormative (second) marriage. But I know plenty of people who are pretty sure there IS an infringement, and now are equally angry and certain that they have been told their culture must go. When it comes to crushing the freedom of communities, there is wide difference of opinion of what constitutes crushing, and there is no level playing field for the debate between those cultures. For centuries the traditional straights have had the upper hand, and the loss of that upper hand feels to many of them as if their freedom is being crushed.

The state does not have to declare winners and losers (and in fact I agree that it mostly should not), but it does have an obligation to even the playing field and to decide when certain communities are not fighting fair, which means it has to decide what is fair, which means while it may not decide winners and losers, it sure will look like it. While there's a level on which McClusky's ideal is an appealing and worthy goal, I cannot imagine how, for instance, we would solve, sans government, the collision of  one community that believes blacks should be subservient and poor colliding with another community that is composed of blacks who don't accept racist foolishness.Or a community of wealthy corporate heads who believe they should be able to reap all the benefits of corporate success and the community of laborers who believe they are entitled to a share as well.

Nor does it seem like a blow for equality to look at a authentic, poor urban community and an authentic, rich gated community and declare, "Well, let's let everyone be free to pursue their own goals without government interference." It's like a race between a one runner standing on the starting line and another tied up at the bottom of a deep hole, and the race officials say, "We can't untie that runner and lift them out of the hole-- that would be unequal treatment. Only if we leave that runner tied up and in the hole will it be a fair race."

In fact, one of our problems with the traditional system is that some folks identify authentic communities and then cut them off at the knees. Let's not fund schools in non-wealthy non-white communities and then just say, "Well, that's just how things are" when in fact we made things that way by failing to properly fund the schools we have.

This (to digress) is my problem with Libertarianism-- it assumes a level playing field. Rich guys who run companies are pitted against little guys who work in factories and that's okay, because Libs assume that the rich is rich because he earned it. But when the little guy wants to organize, say, a union, that's wrong. The rich guy has extra power because he deserves it, but for the little guy to try to acquire more power is wrong and unfair. Let the wrestling match between The Rock and Betty White commence. libertarians are too often happy with an uneven playing field because they think it's uneven in a just and correct way, not the result of previous unjust game-rigging.

If there are things on which all agree, choice is moot – all will teach and respect those things. But if we do not all agree, forcing diverse people to support a single system of “common” schools yields but three outcomes: first, divisive conflict; then, either inequality under the law – oppression – when one side wins and the other loses, or lowest-common-denominator curricula to keep the peace.  

Again, I appreciate his clarity because I can see exactly where we part ways. I agree at the start-- if we all agreed on what schools were supposed to do, we'd have far fewer educational debates and faux reformers. But his list of three outcomes is incorrect.

Divisive conflict is inevitable only if we imagine a school that must treat each student identically. There is no reason to imagine such a school. Properly operated, a school can be designed to meet a wide variety of needs for a wide variety of students. It's not even particularly hard to do. We only need a common denominator (low or otherwise) if we are putting all the students in the exact same class in the exact same program (one more reason that national standards and national standardized tests are stupid ideas). One side does not need to win at the expense of the other. My school's vocational training program does not need to thrive at the expense of a high-powered college prep program. Black students and white students, rich and poor, super-smart and struggling-- we can support all of those student populations at the same time. There is no reason at all for winners and losers.

In fact, charters do not even have to thrive at the expense of public schools. All we need is a commitment to fund all of these things. The problem is not that we are trying to force diverse people into common schools-- the problem is that we want to do it on the cheap.

The practice of squishing diverse people together in a system that denies sorting them into clear cut winners and losers is a foundational American practice, going all the way back to a Constitution that virtually every founding father hated some portion of. The idea that all cultural disagreements must be solved by the complete and utter obliteration of one side is a relatively modern invention, and we are not better off for it.

There is no net gain to freedom and excellence of our nation if we set up separate schools so that everyone is educated only among those with whom they agree. And I don't imagine that any government can erase all differences and create a happy land of perfect equality. But choice does not fix any of the problems McClusky refers to-- it does not make our country, or the people in it, more free.