Why I Support (Some) Charter Schools – Keith Nitta, Clinton School Professor
First, let’s be clear: I believe that public schools are vital for our nation’s democracy, economy, and security. Charter schools are public schools that have attracted attention from key business and minority leaders, whose support is absolutely essential for any widespread school reform. I support charter schools as one strategy among many for keeping the educational promise we extend to all children.
Charter schools are not a panacea. By freeing local communities and entrepreneurs from regulations, however, charter schools have invigorated communities, pioneered innovative curriculum and instruction, and helped needy students to learn. Of course, some charter schools have failed in their missions. Those charter schools that cannot manage their finances, whose students cannot pass standardized tests in sufficient numbers, and who cannot retain sufficient numbers of students should lose their charter. To protect students, the state board of education should hold charter applicants to tough standards and charter renewal applications to the very highest standards.
Charter school opponents often argue that charters distract us from the inadequate resources provided to schools and the unequal distribution of resources among schools that exacerbate problems of poverty and race. However, the problem is not lack of will or focus. Churches, non-profits, the courts, and even the federal government have fought poverty and racism in schools for decades before the first charter schools opened in 1992. Despite all of our good intentions and hard work, however, many schools continue to fail children, who tend to be poor, black or Latino, and living in blighted urban or rural areas.
The real question is: how can we improve public education for all students? Education reformers have to make a strategic choice. We can strive to address the entire system, then address individual schools. Or we can strive to improve individual schools, then attempt to “scale-up” local innovations. We need reformers pursuing both strategies, but I choose to focus on the local strategy. Elite politicians, business leaders, and education bureaucrats are already focused on standards, tests, and accountability. We need more attention to developing a diverse menu of innovative curricula, instructional strategies, and professional development that can help all types of students to pass the tests. Charter schools have proven to be a wonderful magnet for creative educational solutions, as well as an excellent means of involving parents and community members in schools.
If we let a thousand flowers bloom and build on our successes, our education system as a whole will improve. For example, we should capitalize on the success of the KIPP school in Helena, not only by adding more KIPP schools, but also by working to attract business and community resources to the rest of Helena’s public schools. Now that KIPP has been proven to work, perhaps the Walton Foundation could be convinced to support a KIPP-like program throughout Helena’s middle schools.
Why I am against Charter Schools – Faye Kelle, Clinton School Student
By virtue of its very existence, the parental choice and charter school movement breaks down the public into self-centered and self-serving parts, which endangers the cohesion of civil society by limiting its understanding of and commitment to the larger public good. Furthermore, this effort to privatize schools intentionally tears down progressive commitments to the democratic public that have long taken the form of championing a liberating and empowering, high quality liberal arts education for all. In the famous words of Representative Pat Schroeder, “What part of all do they not understand?”
Consider some of the most important achievements of the progressive movement: The integration of public schools (1952); The Civil Rights Act (1963) that led to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) that provided special accommodations for the poor; Head Start (1965); Title IX which protected women’s rights to equal educational opportunities (1972); The Indian Education Act (1972) which required schools to meet the special needs of Indian children, including bilingual and bicultural education, health and nutritional services, remedial instruction, and academic and vocational instruction, all of which set a precedent for accommodating the needs of children of other minorities in the future; and, The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (1975). Compounding the effects of such dramatic educational legislative reform leading up to the 1980s, textbook publishers were being effectively lobbied to include more inclusive revisionist history such as Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States. Furthermore, the secular humanists were moderately successful in introducing more democratic instructional pedagogies and methods of classroom management and encouraging student governments and site-based management. They also attempted to institute curriculum reform by including progressive lessons that were non-traditional and highly politicized, like sex education and gender identity, values clarification and other methods of teaching higher order thinking skills that indirectly but effectively encouraged students to challenge the previously sacrosanct authoritarian mental regimes of the ethnocentrism of Western European heritage, nationalism, unregulated capitalism, systemic oppression, and institutionalized religion.
These progressive reforms gave birth and passion to the current conservative standardization, school choice and charter movements that began in the early 1980s. Let’s be clear that this is the progress they resist and the educational “problem” they strive to solve. In contrast, the most serious problem that the current conservative education movements do not address—and actually detract from—is equity in education and providing empowering educational opportunities for all. The fiscal and psychological difficulties in establishing a level educational playing field in a society that still struggles with racism, classism, sexism and other forms of social and economic discrimination is one of the hardest problems this country has had to struggle with since local property taxes were designated as the primary source of public school funding. The charter school movement exacerbates—instead of solves—this very problem by focusing on special schools in special places where only special people can attend. Charter schools can literally only benefit an isolated, privileged few (whether they are rich or poor) and will, as a result, conserve the existing appalling anti-democratic conditions of schools called educational apartheid. Thus, the unequal, unjust and therefore undemocratic conditions of American society, its economy and its politics, will be conserved. Charter schools, no matter how stellar, constitute a breakdown and not a breakthrough for high quality education for all and a breakdown of individual citizens’ shared commitment to each other and the larger public good.
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