Why conservatives like charter schools

Authoritarians hate public schools. Having a public school system means opening the doors to everyone in a society and providing a common education that builds skills, breeds curiosity, increases civic engagement, and challenges children to learn from the past while building for the future. Done right, it instills a sense of citizenship while developing compassion and empathy for all. It should come as no surprise that the recent century commonly referred to as The American Century, coincided with a century of coast-to-coast public education for all children.

The American public school system is supposed to be the foundation of an egalitarian society where children of all races, creeds, colors and backgrounds come together to understand what it means to be an American. Unless that’s not the goal. Unless what you really want is to create castes, walling off some children from having to interact with others, and creating targeted and customized learning tailored only toward what your caste believes your children should know, facts be damned. If that’s the case, you will take the position of authoritarians. You’ll attempt to minimize access to education that might contradict or compromise your positions of power. And you’ll say you’re doing this for the good of the children.

That’s why one of the key tenets of the race to fascism and autocracy in America today is the demonization of public schools and its teachers, and the embrace of charter schools. Greenwich/Stamford state Sen. Ryan Fazio gushed over charter schools at a recent speaking engagement, wondering aloud why more schools couldn’t be more like Stamford’s successful Charter School for Excellence.

Fair question, but why glorify only charter schools? Aren’t charters still in large part publicly financed? And if so, why not simply do a better job of making all public schools better? Well, mostly because charter schools help conservatives maintain a veneer of looking like they support public schools, when in reality they’re too cowardly to agitate for scrapping publics entirely in favor of an all private school community. They want a private education they can control, but they still want everyone in the community to pay for it.

It should come as no surprise then that the desire for at least some privatization has led to the “parents always know what’s best for their kids” movement both in Greenwich and around the country. This has begat the banning of books, parents wanting cameras in classrooms, meddling in curriculum and stagnating teacher pay. And while anyone can become a parent, no training required, somehow just having kids makes some believe they’re now magically qualified to always know “what’s best for my child.” Here’s a news flash: you don’t.

If parents really knew, and acted upon, what was best for their children, we wouldn’t be a nation of smartphone and video game addicts. Television wouldn’t be saturated with ads for Type 2 diabetes medicines, which is likely a direct result of all the junk food kids grow up with. Our children would know the difference between the national debt and national deficit because right now more than half of American adults don’t. Many parents still believe the George Washington cherry tree story and that dinosaur bones were buried by Satan but sure, let’s let the “It’s wine-o’clock somewhere” crowd make school decisions instead of the teachers and administrators who go through a lifetime of learning and training designed to help your children be the best they can be.

Meanwhile, contrary to the shouts and protestations of the mob, research from Gallup shows American parents with kids in public schools are overwhelmingly happy and satisfied with their child’s school. Mysteriously though, when you ask people without kids in school how they feel, that’s where you see the satisfaction numbers drop. Almost as if there was some political motivation at work, rather than empirical evidence.

Sen. Fazio is right to applaud the success of Stamford’s Charter School for Excellence, but there are many other public schools in Connecticut just as excellent. How about we analyze what they have in common that makes them so good, and implement those strategies across both charter and non-charter public schools to make them all better. Unless making public school better isn’t really the goal.