FOCUS DC News Wire 7/23/13

 

 

The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton revealed yesterday that a survey of 1,000 adults performed by a Democratic polling company found, are you ready for this, that most people would prefer strong neighborhood schools instead of school choice.

 

Wow. Stop the presses.

 

Here's a little secret. We would all love to have academically high performing neighborhood schools. However, as is often the case, our desires don't match reality.

 

A short history lesson. Ever since the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" pointed out that American school were not meeting the needs of society government money has poured into our public schools. The results were dismal. Test scores failed to improve and in many classrooms, especially in the inner cities, very little teaching was actually going on. When I first became involved in education in Washington, D.C. 15 years ago it was probably smarter for the protection of their children for parents to keep their kids home rather than send them to the neighborhood school.

 

School choice positively altered this horrific situation. If you asked a father or mother why they sent their offspring to the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy in 1999 they would say because it was safe. Over a relatively short amount of time came the explosive growth of the charter school sector, the election of Mayor Fenty, his move to takeover DCPS, and the hiring of Michelle Rhee as Chancellor. For the first time charter schools began closing the achievement gap between rich and poor. The charter effect continues strongly to this day with Kaya Henderson now asking for the authority to charter schools along with the PCSB.

 

Yesterday, here's what the President of the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said about school choice:

 

"And yet public education is under assault by those who want, for ideological reasons, to call one of America’s great accomplishments—public education for all—a failure. These are the people who aren’t in education to make a difference, but to make a buck—and who don’t want you to have the ability to stand together as a union and have a voice in the work you do. These are the people who demand and pursue austerity, polarization, privatization and deprofessionalization. They say you can cut, cut, cut—not invest in—public education, and then they argue that public education is failing. Maybe they just never learned the difference between cause and effect."

 

"They fixate on test-based accountability, which makes the bubble test the almighty, rather than enabling us to teach in a way that enriches and engages students and brings joy to learning. They emphasize sanctions instead of support, and shift responsibility—including their own—almost solely onto the backs of teachers. They promote vouchers and charters, gussied up as 'choice.' They promote the 'escape hatch' theory of education: Only a few will make it out. They believe in a market system. But a market system says, 'There will be winners and losers.'"

 

So sad. The world will record that when the public schools fell apart, when drugs and weapons were more common than books in the classrooms, the response of the teachers' unions was to stand in the way of removing atrocious teachers and to contend that all that was needed was more money. However, according to the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson, between 1970 and 1996 spending on public education went up 190 percent. At the same time standardized test scores remained flat.

 

School choice has changed all that.