Some choice observations on schools

Henry Thoreau was my schoolboy idol. I admired the way he lived and the way he put words together. He didn’t have access to Twitter in the 19th century, but he could do more with 140 characters than anybody tweeting today. Of course, some people don’t venture beyond tweeting, at least without a ghostwriter, because their thoughts aren’t worth more words than that.

Thoreau’s most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” begins with the observation, “That government is best which governs least.” Critics of American government as it’s developed often champion that idea, usually without citing Thoreau, and commonly without noting that even as he indicted the government of his day, he also acknowledged the necessity of government itself.

I’m an advocate of limited government. I’m also a public school teacher, and public schools have been government schools ever since the Puritans created them in 17th century Massachusetts. The Puritans believed that their commonwealth’s well-being depended on raising up generations who could read the Bible, and that this was a public responsibility undertaken for the public good that should be supported by taxes.

Today public education is under indictment, often for reasons that have nothing to do with schools themselves. Public schools aren’t responsible for the classroom consequences of poverty and family trauma and neglect, and while schools reflect the selfindulgence and narcissism that characterize contemporary America, it’s wrong to scapegoat teachers and schools for vanities embraced so broadly across our Facebook culture.

On the other hand, public education isn’t blameless. Too many experts and officials, armed with their arrogance and undaunted by their ignorance of life in actual classrooms, have for 40 years peddled failed “reforms” that have only made things worse. Excessive, unreliable assessments, ineffective discipline, a disdain for content, and a cult of self-esteem have crippled schools and students.

Couple these legitimate complaints with the convenience of shifting student, parent, and societal responsibility onto a beleaguered institution, factor in many Americans’ disenchantment with government agencies, and it’s easy to understand why some parents and taxpayers find choice alternatives appealing.

Incoming President Trump has promised to reallocate twenty billion federal education dollars to funding charter schools. His designated secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a staunch advocate of vouchers and “privatization.”

Charter schools are private schools that receive public funding. Vouchers are tuition credits parents can spend at the school of their choice. Advocates like Ms. DeVos prescribe both as remedies for the decline in student achievement.

Her supporters laud her as a “reformer,” while the NEA condemns her “disastrous ideology” and “decades of work to undermine public education” and “divert taxpayer funds from public schools to private schools.” Ideology aside, Ms. DeVos is remarkably unfamiliar with public education. She has no training as a teacher, she’s never served in school governance in any capacity, and neither she nor her children even attended a public school.

Mr. Trump seems equally unfamiliar with public education. Like Ms. DeVos, who pledged to put “an end to the federal Common Core,” he’s frequently promised to “get rid” of it. While I find the Common Core unrealistic, largely irrelevant, and an impediment to local school flexibility, and am therefore no fan myself, the Common Core isn’t “federal.” That’s why Mr. Trump and Ms. DeVos can’t get rid of it. They also can’t, in Ms. DeVos’s words, “let” states “set their own standards” because states already can set their own standards. If they’re confused about this, they should talk to Vice President Pence. His state, Indiana, was both the first to voluntarily adopt the Common Core and the first state to abandon it.

It’s hard to defend denying any child the opportunity to escape a failing school. However, when those schools are failing because of some students’ disruptive, outrageous conduct and apathy, and the constraints officials and policymakers have laid on teachers and principals that cripple our ability to deal with that pernicious conduct and apathy, choice alternatives that in practical terms may help some students escape while leaving others, owing to their circumstance, trapped in a failing school aren’t solutions to the problem.

Charters and alternative placements consistently don’t outperform public schools. Where alternatives have excelled, their success can usually be traced to the license granted them to exclude disruptive students, their freedom from counterproductive regulations imposed on regular public schools, and the commitment to learning evidenced by parents and students motivated enough to pursue an alternative in the first place.

Liberals commonly argue that our public schools need the expertise and oversight that only government can provide, and that the bigger the government, the wiser its mandates. Conservatives counter that we need to unshackle the entrepreneurial genius of the free market to solve our school problems.

Both camps are wrong, not because government and free enterprise are bad, but because they’re irrelevant. The problems at school are personal. They’re in our homes, in the example we set for our children, and in our children’s expectations for themselves, their willingness to work, and their resolve to overcome the obstacles that all of us encounter, and that some of us encounter in greater measure.

If we want safe, productive schools, we need to demand and defend them. We need to stand against all the forces that assail schools and the students in them. That’s something no bureaucrat and no voucher can do.

We — you and I — need to do it.

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Too many experts and officials, armed with their arrogance and undaunted by their ignorance of life in actual classrooms, have for 40 years peddled failed “reforms” that have only made things worse.

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