A Defense of Public Schools
/Countering Charters, Vouchers, and Betsy DeVos
Note: At times I will refer to “public schools” in contrast to “charter schools.” This is solely for clarity and ease in this conversation. It is important to note that charter schools are public schools; they just operate differently than traditional public schools.
Betsy DaVos confirmation hearing (Source: CSPAN)
This past week, there was a congressional confirmation hearing for the new president’s Secretary of Education nominee, Betsy DeVos (provided in its entirety below). DeVos is a staunch – and influential – advocate for school voucher programs. Voucher programs involve providing public tax dollars to parents for attending a wide variety of schools, often including private and religious schools. DeVos has also been a strong supporter of charter schools. Those two efforts combined, and particularly voucher programs, would gut traditional public schools, though (very crucially) not abolish them completely. There will be students who will never have any other choice than their neighborhood schools; the ability to attend private or charter schools often depends on very simple privileges, such as parents who can drive their kids to school every day. Leaving underprivileged kids at schools that are bled all but dry of their funding does a disservice to us all. Our society and our democracy are best served by a well-educated populace. Moreover, our children benefit from being around people who are unlike them, in privilege, identity, heritage, and ability. I strongly believe we should focus our investment, financially and otherwise, on supporting traditional public schools and reforming them as needed. DeVos, if confirmed, threatens the survival of traditional public schools, but she is far from the only threat. A national obsession with charter schools, while not always misguided, is a more immediate and long-lived challenge. Both issues must be confronted in the defense of public schools.
Recently over lunch, I was talking to one of my colleagues about a local charter school. She had some favorable things to say about that charter school. Among them was that the students at that school “actually want to be there.” I can imagine that she was right, and there is definitely something appealing about that as a teacher. I’ve had plenty of students who didn’t want to be in my class, or in school at all, and that is difficult to work with. But that conflict is one of the most important parts of the mission of public education. We will all pay a price, sometimes literally, for not giving every child a quality education. DeVos and others would argue that charter schools or voucher programs are the best path to quality. I argue that the more scattered our school population becomes, and the more power becomes concentrated in exclusionary schools, the further we move away from a model that will work for every child. That isn’t to say problems don’t exist in our current public schools and public school system. Many problems exist, and various kinds of reform will be needed to ensure their quality and survival.
Enter: outsiders with ideas on how to ensure quality education for everyone. There are a many proposed solutions, with varying price tags attached (sometimes more literally than others). Outsiders are often favored for varying reasons, including the belief that reform needs to come from outside of the system. When looking to reform public schools, the outsiders of choice usually come from the business world. And so we have Betsy DeVos, with control of the Department of Education nearly in hand. DeVos’ status as an outsider is nothing shocking in education administration: we are a field governed by non-experts. Nor is it shocking that DeVos has no teaching experience, no formal training related to the field, and did not send her kids to public schools. Particularly when picked by Donald Trump, that seems to be par for the course.
Unsurprising as it may be, DeVos’ lack of knowledge on the subject is troubling, and may have very serious consequences if she is confirmed. Her lack of qualification is not my main focus in this post, but it speaks to the issue of having non-experts (from the business world or otherwise) govern education. Two particular points on which she seems to lack knowledge are relevant to what follows: her confusion in regards to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and on the difference between “growth” and “proficiency” in assessment.
IDEA is a federal law passed during Nixon’s time in office that requires schools receiving federal money to offer equal access to students with disabilities (physical, cognitive, or emotional). DeVos’ answer was that this sort of requirement should be decided at the state level, showing a lack of awareness that it is an existing federal law which her department would be in charge of enforcing. Although the law isn’t new, constant effort is needed to ensure its requirement are met – all the more so if private schools are going to start receiving public federal money.
In assessment, “growth” measures the progress a student makes in a particular area, where “proficiency” measures them against a specific benchmark. To illustrate the difference, assessing whether a student can read at a 9th grade level is assessing his proficiency. Looking at a students’ reading level at the end of the year relative to where she started (say, beginning 9th grade with a 4th grade level and ending at a 7th grade reading level) is assessing her growth. At a glance, “growth” versus “proficiency” may seem like a semantic debate over two jargon words for the same concept – and in fact, that seems to be what DeVos thought it was – but in practice, they are significantly different. That distinction is crucial when it comes to using standardized assessment to determine federal school funding.
These two points are salient, because they show a lack of understanding about two factors that are explicitly related to her (potential) future Department, and because they illustrate the kind of issues that can arise when someone with only a general familiarity with a field is assigned to run it. DeVos is problematically unqualified, and her nomination is another play in a long-running effort to reform schools from the outside, often with business-people, or at least business-management ideals, leading the charge. In these discussions, teachers are often not treated as competent, let alone trustworthy, professionals. They are instead viewed as the key problem in education: a colony of potentially beneficial bacteria that, if not managed by an outside authority, will rot the host. This treatment isn’t alien to all other fields, but few or none are distrusted to the degree that teachers are. When proof is needed for why teachers aren’t trustworthy, a number of bad teachers can be trotted out. Even in your own life, you can probably think of a couple truly terrible teachers. I certainly can. Instead, individuals or companies from the business world are brought in to set teachers straight and reform the profession. I can’t imagine this would be tolerated in any other field, but in education it has been accepted enough that business leaders are given increasingly larger slices of our system.
I’m an English teacher, so I am drawn to metaphors. Perhaps what follows won’t qualify as a good one, but I hope you’ll indulge me. Imagine that you are a civil engineer, and you are an expert in building bridges for busy roads. In a year, hundreds of people drive over these bridges, with a wide range of vehicles. You need to build a bridge that can support all of those vehicles and all of that wear. If you fail and someone gets hurt, it won’t just affect that one person: it will affect the many people she knows and those who depend on her.
A less-than stable bridge (Source)
Now, building bridges like this is important work, and we all have a stake in whether the bridge collapses or not. So, I, an English teacher, come in to make sure the construction is done right. I have never built a bridge, and I have no education in this field. However, a team of bridge builders is kind of like a classroom: they both involve managing people and working towards a specific goal. What’s more, I’ve driven over a lot of bridges in my time. I tell you, the engineer, how best to build this bridge. If you don’t listen to me, you may lose your job. If your workers’ union tries to oppose me, I’ll talk to my friends and see if we can diminish the power of that union.
People wouldn’t tolerate what I’ve described above. It’s silly, and there could be serious, far-reaching, and expensive consequences if I got it wrong. It could work, but I wouldn’t bet on it. However, this is (an exaggerated version of) what teachers deal with. We are already a field run by non-experts. And there are some out there who think the non-experts have too little influence. Or, in the words or Senator Joseph Lieberman introducing DeVos, that being a non-expert is “the most important qualifications you could have” for education administration.
While DeVos represents this problem, she is far from the only billionaire exerting control over the field. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), like any system of standardization, has both good and bad aspects, but it is also hard to ignore the role corporations had in their creation. The research that argued the CCSS were needed was funded in no small part by Microsoft and Walmart. Then those same organizations funded the development of the CCSS. That, in itself, isn’t a bad thing, but it speaks to the power corporations have over our education system, when they can argue that their system is necessary, design that system, and see it adopted in the majority of states – including setting high stakes for teacher effectiveness as measured by these standards. In other words, those corporations get to tell us there's a problem, create its solution, and ensure that teachers are held accountable to their created solution.
The importance of K-12 teaching experience is precisely why teacher education programs require student teaching. Our university education offers invaluable insight, theories, and practica, but many of those are challenged by, or even broken by, the day-to-day demands, issues, and limitations of public school education. This disconnect is even greater when it comes to people with no experience in the field (other than, perhaps, attending or observing a public school). Managerial maxims may sound useful, but they rarely account for the issues public schools face. As mentioned in my previous post, those issues can be best summed up by saying public schools must consume every imaginable social issue in hopes developing a cure. Few CEOs have to worry about whether the people in their building were homeless last night, or if their parents recently tried to murder them, or if they have an unidentified need that makes their work far more difficult than it is for any of their peers. Those are all issues I have encountered in less than a year.
I do not mean to frame this as an either-or issue, or to cast businesses as villains. There are a lot of good things businesses have to offer the education world, ranging from new ideas to financial support. A partnership between public schools and businesses can be incredibly valuable. But a partnership is very different from one administrating the other. In my more cynical moments, I feel that businesses mean the business-education partnership to be primarily one-way: directing schools and teachers how to better serve businesses’ interests. Far less common is the idea that schools and teachers should inform the practices of the business or political world. Yet schools still reap the consequences of business and political decisions and are left to pick up the pieces.
In Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, UCLA professor Mike Rose argues that:
“A further, larger, issue is this: in all the public discussions I’ve heard, the focus of school-business alliances is solely on the problems with the schools and what businesses can do to remedy those problems. The discussion never seems to include businesses’ contributions to the conditions that have limited educational achievement” (77).
As for those “conditions that have limited achievement,” Rose is more specific on the following page, describing “an ongoing, damaging trend in American business that pushes short-term interests over long-term prosperity and the social good” (78). A look at the new president and his cabinet validate Rose’s words.
Charter schools are, indeed, public schools, but they have more freedom in how they operate and are often founded and/or run by people from the business world. In some cases, they are even run as for-profit entities or by for-profit management companies. That is distinctly different from traditional public schools, and, according to Mike Rose, “there is a danger of the profit motive trumping educational goals” (76). The greater freedom charter schools are given can cut both ways. In short, charter schools lessen regulations and give those schools greater freedom. Depending on who is at the helm of those schools, that could be valuable and produce excellent results. However, if this greater freedom and authority is handed over to unqualified or misguided authorities, it can be ineffective or even harmful.
But even the schools that produce excellent results can deny access to, or expel and suspend, a far greater number of students than public schools can. So, while charter schools are public schools in some regards, there are meaningful differences when it comes to educating our entire population. As highlighted in an article from The Atlantic, some charter schools (including, perhaps tellingly, ones with high test scores and general performance) suspend, expel, and refuse entry to students with disabilities and students of color at a higher rate than their public school peers. The authors of that article “express concern that some charter schools are dissuading children with disabilities from enrolling, which may contribute to the high marks some zero-tolerance schools report.” Moreover, increased school of choice results in greater segregation in race and socio-economic status. Having a choice of schools depends upon also have certain degrees of privilege.
Traditional public schools have an obligation to provide access and education to all of the students within their boundaries. That creates many challenges, class size not the least among them. As with charter schools where the kids “actually want to be there,” I can understand the appeal of refusing entry or not educating everyone, but that is a terrible, selfish vice that I must be aware of and fight against. Education isn’t about making my life easier, and our schools shouldn’t be shaped by such a selfish desire. As an early career teacher, I certainly have my share of struggles in maintaining a safe, equitable, and rigorous environment in my classroom. It is, frankly, very difficult to educate every student and confront their wide variety of challenges. However, that work being so difficult, and the challenges being so numerous and diverse, is precisely why we need to do it. If educating the most difficult students feels like a Herculean – or even Sisyphean – task for knowledgeable, highly trained professionals, then those students would likely have little chance of receiving a quality education elsewhere.
I can’t imagine anyone truly thinking that our public school system needs no reform. There are many issues, both with individual schools and the system as a whole. However, we are not faced with the false choice of leaving the system as it is or effectively abandoning it in favor of charter schools, private schools, and vouchers. There are reasonable compromises between this false dichotomy. Like school-business partnerships, there are undeniably good things that private schools and charter schools have to offer, but that does not erase their flaws. I would much rather see their ideas be used to inform public school reform rather than draining public schools’ funding and diminishing the traditional public school model as a whole. Thinking that public schools can be reformed by giving their funding to private schools, and more to charter schools than we already do, is like thinking that you can rebuild a house by walking off with most of its pieces.
Thomas Jefferson
I am a firm believer in the mission of public education, but as with charter schools, its virtues do not negate the current system’s flaws. If we mean to keep public education – and we should; there is no reasonable alternative – then it is in our best interest to reform our system, borrowing the methods that work while still striving to ensure universal access. Universal education, at least in accordance with Founding Fathers’ perspective on “universal” at the time, is an ideal that stretches back to the beginnings of education in the United States. To quote Thomas Jefferson, “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be….Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” Or, as it is often paraphrased, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”
We have stumbled in this pursuit, and failures have caused measurable harm, but the answer is to fight for reforms, not to abandon ship into a sea of charter and private schools. The single biggest challenge, and the single greatest value, of public education is the need to try to save everyone. The fight is daunting, and there are many improvements needed, but there is no worthier cause. The fight will always be a long-term one, but the short term is made more precarious as individuals like DeVos stand on the brink of controlling the machinery of our public education system. It falls to us, as teachers and as citizens, to defend it.
Works Consulted
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds for Student Success.” Gatesfoundation.org, 9 April 2009, https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/investing-the-recovery-funds-for-student-success.pdf. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
Brown, Emma. “Trump Picks Billionaire Betsy DeVos, School Voucher Advocate, as Education Secretary.” Washington Post, 23 Nov 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trump-picks-billionaire-betsy-devos-school-voucher-advocate-as-education-secretary/2016/11/23/c3d66b94-af96-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html?utm_term=.f241d4484aee. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
Deruy, Emily. “Unequal Discipline at Charter Schools.” The Atlantic, 18 Mar 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/unequal-discipline-at-charter-schools/474459/. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
Glatter, Hayley. “Can School Choice Work in Rural Areas?” The Atlantic, 19 Jan 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/01/can-school-choice-work-in-rural-areas/513584/. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
National Conference of State Legislators. “School Vouchers.” ncsl.org, 20 June 2013, http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/school-choice-vouchers.aspx. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
Nelson, Libby. “Betsy DeVos was Asked a Basic Question about Education – and Couldn’t Answer.” Vox.com, 17 Jan 2017, http://www.vox.com/2017/1/17/14304692/devos-confirmation-hearing-education. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
Rose, Mike. Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us. The New Press, 2014.
Strauss, Valerie. “Betsy DeVos Apparently ‘Confused’ about Federal Law Protecting Students with Disabilities.” Washington Post, 17 Jan 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/17/betsy-devos-confused-about-federal-law-protecting-students-with-disabilities/?utm_term=.12b237a390f5. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
Sum, Andrew, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin, and Sheila Palma. “The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School: Joblessness and Jailing for High School Dropouts and the High Cost for Taxpayers.” Center for Labor Market Studies. Boston, Massachusetts: Northeastern University, Oct 2009, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/The_Consequences_of_Dropping_Out_of_High_School.pdf
Swasey, Christel. “David Coleman: Dropping All Things Beautiful from American Schools.” Common Core: Education Without Representation, 17 Dec 2012, https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/4484/. Accessed 21 Jan 2017
