‘Defund public schools’ is not the answer
My children have all attended the same public elementary that I did here in West Chester. My school spirit has remained so strong for the past 40 years that the school office staff added “Class of ‘84” to my parent volunteer badge. Since I was a student, the West Chester Area School district has had a long succession of visionary superintendents, committed faculty and staff, and hard-working board members. The result has been a district that has been continuously improving.
Serving on a school board is wildly unglamorous. It is a lot of long hours making hard choices about education, faculty, staff, transportation, safety, facilities management, and budgets. All of this with no pay, little thanks, and a 100% guarantee to tick someone off. Even when the district is succeeding.
This year the focus is a little different. A small-but-loud minority of people who started clamoring to get the schools open at the beginning of the pandemic — against the advice of health and medical experts — have used the tragedy of the pandemic to boost their names in a bid for school board positions.
Once it became clear that schools would be open, these candidates had no newsworthy issue on which to campaign, so they embraced the fictional looming social disaster of CRT in our schools. They have struggled to convince voters that CRT is being taught to primary and secondary students and had even more trouble demonstrating that the result is that we are graduating a generation of Marxists as a result.
During this effort to stir a controversy, this flock of pandemic-inspired candidates has been conspicuously quiet about the actual issues that school boards routinely tackle.
Being largely forced to concede that schools are open and reluctantly recognizing that the majority of voters do not see CRT as a major threat to the republic, the GOP and their supporting PACs have finally settled on coming clean about the major plank in their platform.
The real reason they have been working hard to fuel and harness the animus over school closings and CRT was to stage the push to abandon our public school systems.
Don’t take my word for it. Chester County GOP Chair Gordon Eck concluded a recent column in the Daily Local News with a call for “school choice,” which he then described as a process of defunding school systems.
The column was headed “don’t fight racism with racism.” There is no universe in which defunding public schools is going to rectify any problem, but most especially the problems of race and class. This country, whether we like to admit it or not, has a very serious, extensively studied, well documented, and irrefutable opportunity gap. Creating a system where the students are funded and not the schools may sound appealing initially, because it could allow a student in an underprivileged district with informed and motivated parents to attend a better school. However, in such a system it would not be long until these students get squeezed out.
School choice will create competition among the schools, as the GOP promises. But the competition will be rife with the same abuses that exist today among A-list universities.
Affluence can buy opportunity, and does. (See Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin for examples.) Good schools will have to manage their enrollment by setting standards. Affluent families will find ways to meet those standards through economic might, be it in tutoring for academics, test preparation, coaching for athletics, having more extracurricular opportunities, or by making the right donations at the right times. The schools of the affluent will rise, the schools of the less affluent will fall. It will have the worst faults of the current system, except that a student’s address will be replaced by more direct measures of their family’s wealth.
Right now, we have a surfeit of candidates for school boards around the region whose interest in administering schools was born of their misplaced anger over the pandemic. Funded by the GOP, they have joined the School Choice bandwagon, a “solution” that will make things worse and that most Americans will not support.
We absolutely need to innovate public school funding in Pennsylvania so that good teachers can be treated like the incredibly valuable resource they are and opportunity can be spread better across the state. But school choice — a.k.a. the “Defund the Schools” movement — is not the answer.