Tag Archives: school choice

Two Different Worlds…

Education / Youth, , ,

Some of you reading this post may remember an old love song–I believe it was sung by Nat  King Cole–in which he rejected warnings by an unidentified “they,” to the effect that he and his love came from “two different worlds.” At the end of the song, he promises that their two different worlds will be one.

I’d say their chances were better than those of contemporary Republicans and Democrats.

Over the past few years, a steady stream of research has documented the growth of America’s partisan polarization. Today’s Republicans and Democrats would be more upset if their children married someone of the other party than if they married someone of another race or religion. Facebook and Twitter conversations are filled with expressions of incomprehension (WTF!) of positions taken by the other party.

Now, the Brookings Institution has come up with another indicator that Rs and Ds really do live in “two different worlds.” The researchers were exploring one of the thorniest issues raised by “school choice”–whether, as many of us worry– parents opting for privatized schools see education as a consumer good rather than a public good, thus privileging the inculcation of personal skills over democratic ones.

In holding schools more directly accountable to parents, school choice reforms reduce the influence of the democratic structures and processes that govern traditional public schools. For example, being more responsive to parents generally means being less responsive to school boards. This can have important implications if parents’ desires for their own children’s schools differ from the broader public’s desires for its education system. For instance, schools may look different under school choice reforms if—as is often argued—parents are preoccupied with getting their own children ahead, wanting schools to prepare their children for college and career success at the expense of serving more collective interests for social, political, civic, and economic health.

Questions about how parents’ and the public’s desires for schools differ are among the richest questions surrounding school choice reforms. They are also among the least explored empirically. We recently released a study looking at what parents and the public want from schools. Instead of finding the parents-public distinction we expected, we found a Democrat-Republican contrast we had not considered.

The results were very different from the researchers’ expectations. Parents and the broader public prioritized the same goals–a balance between the personal and the public.

Given these similarities, we wondered who—if anyone—is particularly drawn to “private success.” Did any subgroup of respondents want schools to prioritize students’ private interests over more collective, societal interests?

We ran a logistic regression model to examine which, if any, respondent background characteristics were associated with choosing “private success” as the most important goal. We included all of the usual respondent characteristics in the model: gender, race, ethnicity, educational attainment, age, political affiliation, and parent status. Only one was a significant predictor: Republican respondents were much more likely than Democratic respondents to want schools to prioritize “private success.”

It’s a shame there are no earlier studies that might serve as benchmarks, allowing us to see whether and how these and other attitudes prevalent in today’s GOP differ from those of previous Republicans.

In any event, the pressing question we face now is how to make those “two different worlds” into one–or at the very least, make them overlap.

 

 

School Choice of Fact

Education / Youth, , , ,

Yesterday, I noted that school privatization brings with it a number of unintended–and unfortunate–incentives. In Ohio, those incentives were financial; the Ohio Superintendent forced to resign was gaming the system for money.

Today’s lesson, children, centers upon a different incentive: the opportunity for proselytization. Welcome to Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana.  

Mother Jones reports on Jindal’s sweeping voucher program, which has received glowing reports from advocates of school choice and privatization. There is no doubt that Louisiana schools are in need of dramatic reform, but as the article notes, the state is poised to spend billions of tax dollars with virtually no accountability.

The early result? Of the 119 private schools participating in the program, at least 19 teach creationism in lieu of science, and substitute religious dogma for documented history.

These schools rely on textbooks and curricula produced by Bob Jones University. (The texts are quoted and referenced in the article available at the hyperlink.) They teach bible-based “facts,” including:

Dinosaurs and humans were on earth at the same time.

God used the Trail of Tears to bring Indians to Christ.

Most slave masters “treated their slaves well.”

In some areas of the country the KKK “tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters and immoral movies.”

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was part of a propaganda campaign to make the Depression sound worse than it was.

If rejection of science and rewritten history aren’t your thing, the schools also teach law (“Ignoring 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, religion, morality and law, the Burger Court held that an unborn child was not a living person…”) and literature (“Mark Twain’s outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless”…Emily Dickenson’s poems “show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny…she never accepted [the bible] as an inerrant guide to life.”)

Louisiana tax dollars at work.

I’d worry about this more, but global climate change is a sign that the Rapture is imminent…..

 

Solutions with Problems

Education / Youth, , , ,

It’s probably human nature to believe that solutions we propose to “fix” problems are simpler than they are. And in fact, the less we know about the complexities of our problems, the surer we are that “all we have to do is X.” (I’m sure my students get tired of hearing me say “it’s more complicated than that.”)

Education has always been an arena where simple answers flower. If we “just” imposed discipline…if we made parents sign a contract…if we administered more standardized tests…if we let parents choose their children’s schools…that would solve the problem.

The people advocating for the “school choice” solution, especially, have always seemed oblivious to the myriad of practical problems involved, from transportation, to what you do about children being raised by uncaring/absent parents, to how you insure that the parents who do care have the necessary information about their choices, etc.

I am emphatically not saying that the fact that suggested changes bring their own complexities is a reason not to try them. I am simply pointing out that change, even for the better, introduces its own challenges. Teacher accountability, for example, is important–but we need to be sure the system we use genuinely reflects the performance of the teacher–not the prejudices of a principal or the poverty of the students.

Similarly, charter schools offering public school choice can be important laboratories for new educational approaches, and they can offer parents a better “match” for their children’s specific needs. But the sponsors need to insure accountability there, too, and as we have seen in Indianapolis with the decision to close the Project School, objective evaluation often runs smack into parental emotion–and creates disruption for the children who must then be enrolled elsewhere.

A recent story from Cleveland points to a more serious problem.

Ohio has enthusiastically privatized schools, bringing in private-sector management companies to turn many of them around (“if we just ran schools in a business-like way, then we’d see improvement…”) A few days ago, the Superintendent of Ohio Schools resigned, under fire after the state’s inspector general found he’d been improperly lobbying for a private education company he planned to work for. He had also allowed the company to pay for his travel.

Does this mean that private companies should never be allowed to manage public schools? No. It does mean that a decision to hire such companies should be made very carefully; such a decision brings risks of its own and we aren’t necessarily equipped to deal with those risks. (Someone might mention that to Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett, but he doesn’t appear to listen to anyone.) There is no magic bullet, and solutions–even good solutions–usually bring their own problems.

If solving our social and political problems was as easy as some people seem to think, wouldn’t we be further along toward solving them?