Angry (tl;dr)

It's important to remember that America has seen angry, agitated times before. The Civil War, when politicians became so angry they left the country and raised armies to kill each other-- that was a fairly angry time. We've had Presidential campaigns that were hugely vicious and libelous, Hell, as we've all been musically reminded, once upon a time the Vice President of the United States killed a prominent political leader in a duel.

And yet, something feels different now. My stock explanation is that while we've always had anger and viciousness as part of our public and political life, we've at least agreed that civility was the ideal, the norm to be pursued, and now we don't. I'm not sure that's true, but it feels true. We have become outrage junkies; we are sold policy and products based on the outrage it will cause. "The Secret That [fill in the blank] Doesn't Want You To Know" which translates roughly to "This will really piss those bastards off." The GOP policy position on the ground has been largely reduced to "Do things that will enrage liberals" and political coverage in the second-hand full-bias media is usually framed in terms of who will be outraged. And damn-- progressives and liberals and anti-Trump's really have to stop publishing versions of "Trump has now done something that will totally end his run!" Sorry, but 2,437th time is not a charm.

Telling truth to power is important, hugely important. But truth is not measured by how enraged you can imagine somebody being about what's been written. And when you start steering by imagined outrage rather than truth, understanding and accuracy, you are headed for the weeds. Sometimes I find Samantha Bee funny; sometimes I think maybe we've found a progressive Ann Coulter.

I was talking about this on twitter (to the extent that anybody can talk about anything on twitter) and was called out for my own contributions to incivility in the education debates. Well, sir, that's just...um... fair. But I like to think I've made a bit of a journey in this regard, and I think it tells us a little something about the shape of these debates.

When I started blogging, my defining characteristic was anger. It had been growing for a few years. Having stupid policies, anti-education and anti-student policies, inflicted on my classroom was nothing new, but I was noticing that I was increasingly losing my power to defend my students from them. The idea of national standards backed up by a national standardized test that would be enforced by making it part of student grades all seemed like self-evident educational malpractice, and yet policy makers were talking about it, taking steps to inflict it. So I went to learn more, and I fell through a door into a world where I found all sorts of people whose policy ideas struck me as wildly insane and rather abusive-- and who seemed absolutely uninterested in paying any attention to what actual teachers had to say.

My colleagues at school were, by and large, not interested. They complained when we were gored by the tip of the iceberg that passed by us, but they had no particular interest in finding out what the tip was attached to, or how big and wide the iceberg really was. And I was turning into the staff crank. So I turned to the outlet that has always served me in the past-- writing-- and for a number of reasons (mostly admiration of the bloggers already out there) I turned to blogging.

It did not occur to me that anybody would read my stuff. My goal was to vent, to rail about policies and articles that struck me as foolish, destructive, blind, ignorant. And so I regularly broke Rule #1. I called people names-- some of them kind of mean. I broke one of my big rules of online discourse-- I said things about people online that I never would have said to their faces.

I was angry. And the more I read, the angrier I became. Not just the anger of seeing destructive and dangerous policies pushed, but the anger of seeing my own profession and the institution to which I devoted my adult life both under attack. And the anger that comes with being under attack and not being heard-- not just being unheard, but seeing no avenue whatsoever to say a word. Was it effective? Well, yes, in two ways. It was effective in giving me an outlet for what I was thinking and feeling, and it was effective in letting other people who felt angry and upset and isolated know that they weren't the only ones, that they weren't crazy, that somebody else could see what they saw. We teachers are a terribly isolated tribe, and in troubled times, that does not serve us well.

What has surprised me most about social media is the avenues of conversation that have opened up, not just with fellow teachers and supporters of public ed, but with thinky tankers and policy wonks on the other side of the debates. The mere fact of being actually able to be heard in, as they say, some of these spaces has made me more careful and less ragey over the past couple of years. That's not a bad thing.

In times like these, it behooves all of us to pay a little more attention to our rhetoric. There may be times when rhetorical flourishes like "I'd like to punch him in the face" or "She should just go die somewhere" may be harmless hyperbole; these are not those times. We have a civility problem these days, and every time you put out some words, you are either helping or hurting. It's no good arguing you are in the righteous right, so it's okay-- everyone thinks they're in the right.

At the same time, I believe firmly that you feel what you feel. Telling somebody, "Hey, you should have different feelings" is a waste of everyone's time. You feel what you feel.

And I still firmly believe that some people can be taken seriously, and some can not. Some people are using words in good faith, and some are just using words as a tool for leveraging whatever goal they have, and still some others in high office use words like magical incantations, intended to conjure lies into reality. There are good grown-up arguments for charter schools that I disagree with, but can recognize as serious arguments; there are also pro-charter arguments rooted in deliberate skewing of the facts and denial of reality. I am absolutely opposed to national standards, but I understand how people of sound mind and good faith can like the idea. On the other hand, there isn't a serious argument in the world for the retention of third graders who passed their classes but failed one standardized reading test. Civility does not mean letting someone piss on you and tell you it's raining while you cheerfully agree with their weather assessment.

In other words, during times of conflict and stress, it is hard to chart a path between civility and honesty, and anger can make a lousy GPS system.

People want to be heard, and if they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voice until they think they are heard. I've survived many tough meetings and tense classroom situations by holding onto that truth. But the flip side of it is that if you scream at people like they're stupid and evil, it's really hard to get them to hear you. Which doesn't mean that you couldn't be dealing with someone who is, in fact, stupid and evil.

On the one hand. On the other hand. But. So. However. You see the problem-- balancing the line between civility and honesty in contentious times defies easy answers. It's not as simple as "Everyone on that side of this line is an evil beast" or "Everyone on this side of the line is fully trustworthy" or even "People on both sides of the line are equally culpable." In fact, there is never a clear place to draw a line.

That may be the disease of our age-- not incivility or meanness or anger or viciousness, but just a fervent belief in easy answers that can divide everyone up into simply delineated tribes. Twisting our map of the world to accommodate our simplified view of the world is distorting everything, and the strain of doing the twisting is making most of us extra cranky. And while our leaders seem unwilling to engage in thoughtful introspection and reflection, that also means that "Just follow some leader I trust" is off the table as an operating procedure. It may be that we just have to be big boys and girls and think for ourselves.

5 Reasons I Oppose Vouchers

Honestly, I had thought that vouchers were pretty much dead and gone and living only in the hearts and minds of determined free market cult members. But since it looks like DeVouchers are on the fast track to Policytown, I want to just list, without a lot of fanfare or my usual gumflappery, the reasons I believe that vouchers are Really Bad Policy. So here's a quick list of five reasons to oppose the policy.

1. Church and State

Turns out that in practice, vouchers have mostly been a subsidy for people who send their children to private religious school. I think separation of church and state is a hugely good idea, and I think it's a good idea both for the state and for the church. Using public tax dollars to finance private religious schools violates that tremendously. That should bother those schools more than it bothers taxpayers, because in the long run it can't lead anywhere except to government oversight of religious practices. I don't want to pay tax dollars so some Religious Academy can teach the Bible as factual history and flat earth as science, and I also don't want to see the Federal Bureau of Religious Education set up to decide which religious schools pass muster (including the faux religious schools set up by profiteering oportunists.

2. School for All

If your school wants my tax dollars to pay for student tuition, you had damn well better take every student who applies and fits. No turning away students just because you don't want to be bothered with them or because they're the wrong race or the wrong creed or not properly abled or they just might cost too much to educate. That is one mighty messed-up part of voucher programs-- my tax dollars go to finance the same school that refused to admit my child.

3. Disenfranchised Taxpayers

A voucher system is taxation without representation. The idea is that the marketplace is supposed to sort these schools out or pressure them to do develop a good aquatics program or tiddly winks team. But that means only parents have a say. If you are an employer or a neighbor or a fellow voter and taxpayer or a citizen depending on educated professionals to take care of you later-- well, you have no say in a voucher system. You still get to pay taxes, but you have no say.

4. Accountability

It's not just the question of what is being taught in the schools. As a taxpayer, I'd like to know what my money is being spent on. So voucher schools had better be just as accountable as public schools. Public board meetings by known school directors. Transparent and fully open and available budgets and financial records.

5. Tell the Truth about Costs

It is amazing to me how rarely discussions and proposals about vouchers actually address the amount. Because that is everything. If the government announced that it was giving everybody automobile vouchers, folks would want to know whether the voucher was enough for a new Lexus or just a used Kia. It's pointless to discuss vouchers without discussing the dollar amount. If the voucher is one third the cost of tuition at a participating private school, it's pretty much useless as anything but a partial rebate to people who already send their students there. If it's a full-on, cover-the-cost-of-any-good-private-school voucher, then taxpayers might want to know how that voucher is going to be paid for.

A real voucher system would be expensive. Right off the bat, the day vouchers go into effect, a whole bunch of money moves even though not a single student leaves the public school. Where did that money come from? Did the public school just lose it, even though their expenses didn't change? Did the taxpayers just cough up a bunch of extra school tax money to pay for sending students to private school? Will the taxpayers pay more to fill the new gap in the public budget, or will they just be taxed for the vouchers directly? Were the vouchers underwritten by corporations who took a corresponding tax break, and now, because LexCorp directed a half million of its tax payment to voucher schools, taxpayers have to make up the difference in, say, road maintenance?

Vouchers, especially vouchers that are big enough to actually pay for some school, increase the total system cost for education. Where is that money coming from?

There's more to all this argument, most especially dealing with all the issues involved in privatizing one of our most important public institutions (yeah-- other than that, Mrs. Lincoln) but I promised myself I'd put up a short, clear listicle, so here it is. Vouchers are a huge mistake, even if they're being pushed at the federal level. Push back.

The End of May

My Memorial Day weekend generally contains two major features. One feature is the actual honoring of Memorial Day. Here's how I finished up my morning yesterday.

This is the park in my small town. On the left is a the Civil War Monument, one of the first couple put up in Pennsylvania. The large building in the back is our County Courthouse. And on the right, our band stand, where I have played summer concerts with our 161-year-old town band for almost fifty years. That band of course marched in the parade today; you can see a few members in our faux Union Army uniforms in this shot. Some are people I graduated from high school with, and others are former students. When I say I live and teach ins some of postcard small town, I am not kidding.

My other activity for the weekend is grading papers. This year finals were last week, and this weekend I graded all the final papers, final essays, final tests, and final Hey-Mr-Greene-is-it-too-late-to-turn-this-in? work. It's a big deal for me, partly because it's just a big mountain of paperwork and grading, but also because in reading through those last major efforts, I see who really pulled some things together, and who I perhaps failed to open up.

On the list of Things They Don't Really Tell You About Teaching, or the list of Ways This Job Is Different From Many Others is the part that is driven home this time of year, every year-- that every year of teaching has an end. We meet a new batch of students, we pick apart their strengths and weaknesses, figure out what makes them tick (the better to motivate them), we work to build them up, and then, hopefully, we look to see what strides and changes and growth they have developed by the end of the year.

And then we say goodbye.

It's like working in an office where every year every person who works there is fired or promoted or leaves to work at a new company. Every person except you.

These last weeks are often like school redux, gathering together stripped of the notion that we'll be at this for a while, that we have lots of time left to figure some things out. Routines fall away, culminating projects consume time, and the necessities of paperwork and report card processing dictate that "this could affect your grade" is no longer part of the landscape.The moment when they will no longer be your students is close enough to touch.

This can be an awesome time of year, or a terrible one. It's the time when as a teacher you either realize that you managed to craft a beautiful roomful of learning this year, and you and your students can all feel pretty good about it. It can also be the time when it comes slamming home just how much you came up short. It's point where your students sprint across the finish line powered by sheer glowing joy, or they drag across it, barely scraping forward.

And no matter what, it's a time when it's all over.

You've done what you can do. They are who they are, and in these last great days you can hope to see some of that. It's times like the end of May that make me laugh at the folks who try to measure Days of Learning. I don't know how you would ever measure a May 30th, and I really don't know how you would stack that up beside a September 4th. They're just different days.

Graduation for my school is coming up this Sunday. Weather permitting, the students will walk across that same stage in the picture above, surrounded by 150 years of history and under a canopy of cool green. After they get their diplomas, they'll disperse, run to their families, walk out into the world. They will never be together like this again. I will never see some of them ever again. And in three months or so, I'll start over again from scratch.

The park is about five blocks away from my house, so after Memorial Day programs and band concerts and graduation, I walk home, through tree-lined sidewalks like this one. In the fall, they'll be a range of golds and browns, and that will start a new year as well. But for right now, it's the last days of May.

Politics vs. Ed Reform

Derrell Bradford is the head of NYCAN (and some other CANs too), one of the reformy arms of 50CAN, a reliably reformy group. He turns up in many of the usual reformy places, including Campbell Brown's the74 site, where he recently wrapped up a three-part series about the state of the reform movement, adapted from his speech at the Yale School of Management’s Education Leadership Conference in April. It's the third piece that I found most interesting; in it, he addresses the growing partisan problems that the reform movement has faced ever since Donald Trump became President.

I know what I think I see-- reformsters who self-identified as Democrats faced a challenge in a President whose politics they opposed, but whose policies were pretty much in line with what they've been advocating all along. But I'm curious about how they see it, and Bradford has always been an articulate advocate for the reformy world.

Party allegiance is the new litmus test not just for political philosophy, but for personal belief and social inclusion. Answering the wrong way on the wrong question not just on reform — but on anything — carries the weight of possible ostracism from both the left and the right. 

Agreed. In fact, that fits the trend I've seen presented that we are entering an era of "tribal epistemology," where the truth of any proposition or observation is not tested by any objective means, but by whether or not the proposition is supported by the tribal leaders. This has the effect of turning everything political-- if Beloved Leader says the sky is green, to look up at the sky yourself becomes an act of political defiance. You must prove your allegiance to the tribe.

Bradford notes that the election was tough to navigate.

I ultimately supported Clinton despite my firm belief that she would appoint a secretary of education determined to make our lives harder, not easier. In the professional sense, I voted against my own interests because I thought it might be best for America.

Agreed. Pretty sure that's a broadly held position in the education world.

He notes that These Times have led to many reformers heading further into their hard right or hard left positions, and this would be the place where I'd like to see further explanation because it remains hard for me to see the "left" wing of the reform movement as being all that leftist. But here he offers a pretty simple encapsulation of the political split of reformsterism:

We don’t have an education reform movement because liberal Democrats believe in civil rights. And we don’t have one because conservative Republicans believe in market solutions, low regulation, and freedom. We have one because they could believe in them both, at the same time, together, and at the same table. The golden age of “reform” that folks associate with President Barack Obama exists only because of a history of this sort of collaboration.

Out here in the cheap seats, I'm not sure that's what I saw.

First of all, what's up with putting "freedom" on the GOP list, as if Democrats aren't interested in freedom?

Second, this model suggests that reformsters came together as equals in this coalition. I'm not sure this is true-- the charter movement (which is about all that's left when we talk about an "ed reform movement") has been almost exclusive a business-driven movement. Corporate and privatization interests have used a variety of ideas as protective cover, including progressive ideas about equity and civil rights, but after years of this, I remain unconvinced that the major players have any real political bent at all. But we're talking about the left because it's impossible under the current administration to pretend that ed reform policies are about social justice or equity. And it is telling that when the language of equity and social justice is stripped from ed reform policy, hardly anything about the actual policy actually has to change.

In other words, charter and choice policy that doesn't explicitly pursue equity and social justice looks almost exactly like charter and choice policy that claims to care about equity and social justice. Mostly you just have to change some language in the PR.

In fact, Bradford is very correct to put "low regulation" on the GOP list, because that is the one significant difference between reform policy that does or does not pursue equity. Regulation and accountability are a necessary element if you don't want the reform landscape to be clogged with fraudsters and scam artists, not to mention operators who are racist and classist. 

The golden age that Bradford speaks of could exist not because reform had protective cover on both flanks. Obama could not easily be accused of being anti-progressive, and yet his neoliberal leanings put him in perfect tune with the corporate privatization approach. 

Bradford recaps some reform history to underscore that it has been built on bipartisan deals. True enough. Dems and GOP politicians have put party aside for something else. Bradford suggests that something else has been, and should be, For The Children. My cynical sided suggests that the something else has been For The Money, or For the Deep-Pocketed Private Interests Driving So Much of Ed Reform. 

And Bradford offers an interesting example of working across lines of personal and political belief-- Martin Luther King, Jr., and his willingness to work with all manner of people (including the hugely racist LBJ) to achieve goals of social justice. 

"Keep your eye on the goal" seems like an excellent piece of advice (it's actually one of my rules), but it highlights exactly the problem that Bradford is trying to address. Bradford suggests that the goal to keep eyes on is the needs of 

 a boy on a corner in Bridgeport who just needs you to be on one side — and that side is his. He’s actually the last person who needs you to be a partisan — steeped in what you won’t do and closing off policy opportunities that make you uncomfortable because of your political beliefs — because in the end, it’s his life, not yours, that depends on it.

First, there are huge differences of opinion about how to serve that boy's needs.  

But more importantly, that boy's future is not the goal that all reformers have their eyes on. For some, choice for its own sake is what matters, and if a choice system leaves that boy in a lousy school, well omelets and eggs. For some others, the goal has always been to open up that billion-dollar marketplace so that they can get in there and compete for those sweet, sweet dollars. And some reformsters are in no hurry to help that boy on the corner until he proves himself to be worth the trouble, because it's possible he's not a striver and out on the corner is where he deserves to be left. 

On the most fundamental level, we have two philosophies of school operating-- one that sees education as a means of raising up every single child, and one that sees schools as part of a way to sort the deserving form the undeserving. The sorters thought they had to at least pretend to get along with the uplift crowd to get what they wanted, but now they are ascendant, in power, and damned sure they're not going to stop the bus to pick up some ragamuffin on the streetcorner who is just looking for a hand out paid for with some deserving wealthy person's tax dollars.

In any coalition, as the endgame approaches, the different views of what that end should look like become more evident as coalition members pull apart for their special. It's easy to carpool from Omaha to New York City for the first several hundred miles. But once you get to the city limits, if one car is headed for the Bronx and another is headed for Wall Street and another is headed for Long Island, your carpool is going to have problems.

The ed reform coalition was always going to fall apart. Well, unless you take a cynical view of the movement. Because maybe it was never a coalition at all, but a big solid core of pragmatic opportunistic corporate privatizers who surrounded themselves with just enough of people from different political viewpoints that they could protect that core. Maybe the "coalition" was just a thin candy shell, and now some parts of the shell are being sloughed off.

There is one other thing that always strikes me about these calls for cooperation within the ed reform community. I realize that Bradford's original material was a speech for a particular audience, but if we are talking about social justice activists working with racists and Democrats working with Republicans, couldn't we also talk about folks who want to remake the education system working with, talking to, even listening to the people who work in that system. Everyone should think about working side by side with everyone else-- except teachers. And I don't mean some carefully handpicked we-know-they-mostly-agree-with-us teachers. Bradford says that real progress is uncomfortable, and yet reformsters largely remain unwilling to suffer the discomfort of listening to actual working teachers who might disagree with them. 

 

ICYMI: Memorial Day Weekend Edition (5/28)

The best read of the week was actually an eight-part series at Slate about cyber schooling, and that's so important that I gave it its own post. So if you haven't caught that yet, you can find the posts laid out here. 

And for reasons to cast a careful eye on that series, read this piece from Wrench in the Gears.

In the meantime, here's the rest of your reading selections. Remember to post, tweet, promote and otherwise amplify the work of the writers you support. It's a way that everyone can help shape the conversation.

Trump Budget Would Abandon Public Education for Private Choice

How the Trump/DeVos education program looks to a law professor (spoiler alert: not good).

Five Startling Things Betsy DeVos Just Told Congress

There was a lot to process in the DeVos testimony at the top of the week. Here Valerie Strauss lays out the five most striking things that came out of DeVos's mouth.

Who Is Behind the Assault on Public Schools

Howard Ryan at the independent Socialist magazine takes a look at what, exactly, has been driving the assault on public education.

Don't Like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats.

Diane Ravitch in the New Republic with a little history lesson to remind us how Democrats bear some of the blame for Betsy DeVos and her policies.

Why Do Billionaires Care So Much About Charter Schools

Harold Meyerson in the LA Times talking about why folks like Eli Broad just have to get their fingers in the charter pie. You have to love a piece that ends with this line:

Pure of heart though some of them may be, the charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system itself. How very comforting for them.

Personalized Learning Pathways and the Gig Economy

How not really getting an education dovetails nicely with growing up to not really get a job.

What Betsy DeVos Calls Education Transformation Is Actually Public Theft

Jeff Bryant walks us through what DeVos is actually telling us, and what's she's telling us is that she's going to turn education over to privateers.

The TFA Top-Ten Listers: Where Are They Now?

Remember when ten TFA-ers went on Letterman to say why they became a teacher? That was four years ago. Gery Rubinstein checked to see how their teaching careers are coming along.

The Facts about Charter School Finances in Camden, NJ

Jersey Jazzman is actually continuing his series about how University of Arkansas screwed up its study, but this segment also has some larger implications.

The New York Times on the "Little-Known Statistician" Who Passed

Audrey Amslein-Beardsley on the passing of William Sanders, the inventor of VAAS. 

Screw-U

Betsy DeVos has brought Robert Eitel in to "right-size" the Department of Education. His previous experience is running a fraudulent for-profit university. Jennifer Berkshire and Christopher Crowley look at all the bad signs here.

Death by a Thousand Retirements

Marie Corfield passes on her speech from a retirement dinner that saw 800 years of educational experience head out the door. 


I Am Done-- I Hope Public Education Is Not

Thomas Ultican, friend of this blog, is retiring, and he offers some reflections on what he's been through in his career.

NC: Vindictive GOP Cuts Education Just Because

This is now two-week old news, but I swear-- in the current climate, somebody can murder a nun with his bare hands in front of a bus full of young orphans, and the outrage will die down in less than twelve hours (or be replaced by the outrage over a new awfulness). I almost passed on this story, thinking it was past time to comment on it.

It's only two weeks old, and that makes it moldy and stale-- except that the outrage over this should be endless. I mean, God bless the people who keep a steady count of the number of days the people of Flint have gone without clean water, because leaders in Michigan poisoned an entire city and the country was in an uproar, and then-- squirrel!!

I imagine these days a politician who intends to do something terrible, even if he understands that a lot of people will call it terrible, figures that after twenty-four hours of anguished tweeting and blogging and the sharing thereof, everyone will just move on, and all the politicians have to do is run out the clock.

Maybe democracy got lost in those hills somewhere

So if you ask me how the GOP of North Carolina keeps doing terrible things, I'm betting that's part of the explanation. "Don't worry boys," someone days in a back room. "In about two days the fuss will blow over and our newest plan will still be in place."

So two weeks back, Senate Republicans got testy about the length of budget debate, so they called a recess after midnight, and came back at 3 AM with, among other things, an amendment to combat the opioids crisis.

What they didn't mention was that the million dollar program would be funded by cutting the education support for the districts of Senate Democrats. This included some very specific chopping. For instance, a program to help teacher assistants become full-fledged teachers didn't have its funding cut, but the program itself is now only allowed in GOP districts. As Dems skew rural and minority in NC, that means that areas that particularly need to get more future teachers in the pipeline have now had that pipeline tightened instead. Another cut removes support for getting fruits and vegetables into school lunches-- but only in Democrat-represented districts.

NC Republicans have been spanked twice this month by the Supreme Court, with that court striking down measures intended to reduce the non-white vote and negating some of NC's spectacular gerrymandering. According to the New York Times, NC Republicans will just rewrite the laws.

It is fair to note that NC Dems were not exactly models of fair play and democracy when they had power. But the NC GOP has abandoned all pretense of fairness or cooperation. Besides trying to find new ways to bring racist Jim Crow practices back to government, they have rewritten the rules of government to try to keep a newly-elected Democratic governor from doing his job, worked steadily to destroy the teaching profession, and designed bold new ways to destroy public education.

North Carolina might once have stamped "First in Flight" on its license plates, and it has a nifty Latin motto, but it seems that the signs greeting visitors to North Carolina should be read "North Carolina: Where Democracy Goes To Die." Anyone who cares about North Carolina should keep paying attention and keep making noise.

What Do Charter Schools Solve

The challenge-- the problem to be solved-- for public education is fairly simple: How do we provide a solid education for every child in the United States for a politically sustainable cost? (I wish the last part of the challenge wasn't there, but let's face it-- it's not like education is, say, a war in Afghanistan for which politicians are willing to write a blank check).

The challenge is not easily met, and in many places, in many ways, public schools have not fully succeeded. From entrenched racism, to the effects of poverty, to denial of necessary resources, to "failures" that are manufactured or imposed on schools, to widespread and hard-to-budge inequity, public schools are sometimes hampered by larger issues, and sometimes are part of the problem.

Public schools are not perfect. They're pretty damn good, and in many cases, their problems have been exaggerated or created out of whole cloth (Oh nos! Low PARRC scores!!!). But public schools are definitely not perfect.

I don't know any public school advocates who won't acknowledge that, despite being labeled as intractable flat-earth defenders of the status quo. But charter advocates often fall back on a style of argument roughly outlined as "There are HUGE problems here, therefor we must use our solution." This is the rhetorical equivalent of a person who shouts, "You're on fire, so you have to let me punch you in the face" and when you try to ask why, exactly, a punch in the face is a solution, they just keep hollering "But you are on FIRE!"

The presence of a problem does not automatically prove that a proposed solution is actually a solution. Which is why I keep coming back to this question:

What problem do charter schools solve?

Are charters just a road to nowhere?

Public school critics say that wealthy folks can choose the school they want by choosing which upscale neighborhood they want to stay in. Do charter schools solve this problem of privilege? Entry to some charter systems require an educated adult who can navigate an application system(and has time off during the day to do it). Some charter schools require contributions of either time or money or both. Privilege does help with access to a charter system-- just like the public system. How that plays out varies from location to location-- just like the public system.

Public school critics say that they want to extend the same kind of choice that rich folks get. But charters don't solve that problem. Poor families can't choose to live in a rich neighborhood so that their child can attend a rich neighborhood school. But a charter system does not give them a free selection, either. Ultimately the charters will choose who attends them by finding ways to reject or discourage or push out students who "don't fit." Charters will choose to bar students with language issues certain special needs by refusing to offer the supports those students need. Charters also choose WHEN students can enter-- if you miss the window at a relatively young age, you're SOL because they don't accept students in the middle of the year or entering higher grades.

And our current Secretary of Education has made it quite clear-- she cannot imagine situation in which the federal government will say to a charter or other private school, "You  may not have federal tax dollars if you are going to discriminate against those students." The ability of charters to pick and choose their students without penalty is being dramatically expanded.

Public school critics say that public education is hidebound and trapped in other centuries, in need of a stiff shot of Vitamin Innovate. But we've had modern charters for over a decade-- exactly what educational innovations have they discovered that can be used to improve the nation's schools? If you have good facilities, plenty of resources, and a carefully chosen batch of students, you can run a good school? That's not an innovation-- everybody already knew it. Other attempts at innovation, from strapping a child to a computer to enforcing a prison camp atmosphere, have proven to be not particularly useful and often depend on the power to get rid of students who "don't fit" to keep from totally collapsing.

I don't bring these up simply to play neener-neener so's-your-old-man. In fact, if these were the only problems that charters failed to solve, I'd say go ahead and let a thousand charters bloom. But that is not the case.

Public school critics say that public schools cost a lot of money and don't give enough returns. But running a parallel system of schools, duplicating administration and buildings-- it's a very expensive way to do education. And again, I would say, even as a taxpayer, to bring it on. But most states have set up a system of trying to run several systems with the same money that used to run one system, and that means that every child taken out of the public system weakens that system for the students left behind, the students whose parents can neither move them to a ritzy neighborhood OR get them into a charter school.

Public school critics say that the public system is an unresponsive monolith, and that can certainly be the truth. But how is it an improvement to have a charter school whose operators are unelected, do not have to meet in public, and are not accountable to the public. My small town is served by a public school system and some cyber charters. This month, the proposed budget for the public system is available to anyone who wants to look at it. Taxpayers can come to the next board meeting to comment on that budget, or they can just call their elected board member and spout off. Meanwhile, nobody knows who even runs the cyber charters or what they intend to do with the tax dollars they collect. How is that better?

Public schools screw up, and it's not just public school critics that notice. But there are laws and rules and regulations in place that govern public school and public school staff, providing an avenue for reporting, punishing, and correcting those issues. Charters are mostly operating with far fewer rules and regulations. How does that make them more accountable or reliable?

Public schools often reflect and exacerbate equity issues. But charters have also been instrumental in increased segregation, as well as programs that seem aimed at creating compliant worker drones and not future leaders.

Again, my point is not "Hey, these charters are no better than public schools." That would suggest that the effect of charters is simply neutral. But it's not-- modern charter policy is economically damaging, the dispersal of students to charters damages the community, and charters attempt to rescue a handful of students at considerable expense to all the students who are left in public schools.

This is like taking a special tonic that costs a thousand dollars a bottle and makes you feel worse. It's bad policy.

Furthermore, equity would mean that choice wouldn't be necessary because all the choices would reflect a quality education for all.

— Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) May 23, 2017

Charters do solve the problems of some individual families-- I don't want to send my child to public school (for any number of reasons, some more admirable than others) and now I don't have to. I'm sympathetic to that choice (well, unless your beef is that you don't want your white kid to go to school with those black kids-- then you're just a racist jerk) and I understand why you want to make it. But as a nation, our approach to education can't be, "We'll make sure that some kids can get a good education, and the rest-- oh, well. They're not our problem."

The challenge of public education is, again, to provide a good education for every child in the United States for a politically sustainable cost. It is a challenge that comes with lots of obstacles and problems, and after so many years, it is still not clear to me how modern charter schools help meet that challenge. Instead, I think modern charters have been set up to be one more obstacle. But by all means, if you want to explain to me exactly what problems charter provide a solution for (and not more explanation of how public schools are bad), my comments section is open for business.