Vouchers, Choice, and “Choice”
cross-posted at The G Bitch Spot
From the latest T-P articles on the voucher program and RSD schools, it seems that Jindal, Pastorek, and others (Vallas? I don’t know) see the RSD as the school system of last resort and don’t see that changing. I get this from the “assumption” that any school in the RSD or chartered by it must be a failing/failed school. I thought the changes occurred to improve the schools, not warehouse failures. Is this surrender? Resignation? Pragmatism? Is it that the children in those schools can’t be “educated”? That their test scores will never really rise even though lots of adults patted themselves on the back over the teeny rise in scores last school year? Or perhaps the goal of the vouchers is oddly altruistic, aimed at taking some of the burden off RSD schools and charters to help them enact new methods, pedagogies, etc.
Ha.
And this touches on a point that has burned my ass, and other parts, about the schools systems—there’s been no overall reform, just fracturing. The breaking up of the Orleans public schools was fueled by frustration and not a desire to enact specific reforms for specific problems. Yes, there were some really bad schools in this town, and there are some poor schools all across the state, but breaking up the system so the worst schools are over there, middling schools here, and former-magnet-now-charter schools are up here—that’s not reform. It’s the same system we had before with many of the same problems. There was and still is little public talk about what happens in the schools, in classrooms, with teachers, with students, between teachers and students and support staff that is different, that creates improvements in outcomes. And what changes are discussed are hampered by being geared toward raising test scores. Test scores make ADULTS think that something is happening and being done. What about the children? Teachers? Parents?
Choice is a double-edged sword and generally has proven itself to be, especially the more “choice” there is, the more the system adopts universal choice with multiple ways to opt out of the public schools. The parents with the most education, drive or ambition, and access to resources (whether that’s money, time, a computer, family members, whatever) are most likely to benefit. Though choice, including universal choice, is promoted as a way to improve low-performing schools, in practice, it often takes the most capable, directed, and supported kids out of the public school system, leaving behind children who pose the most educational, emotional, behavioral and social challenges, who need the most time, patience, and resources, a recipe for failure no matter how dedicated the school’s staff may be. It helps some of the kids, those who opt out and actually stay out (there’s a high turnover rate with most voucher programs, with families using it one year and not the next for various reasons), but does little to help the whole system, little to ameliorate the challenges urban public schools face. (These are also not problems that only occur in cities with black and Latino children.) Choice and vouchers can also undermine the good going on in a public school system, as people absorb and accept without question that “private” schools are “better” than “public” schools and drain their children and the money and auxiliaries attached to those children out of the public schools. Privatization/choice alone is not a solution. And can add to the problems.
It’s not now we should be praising ourselves over. We should be planning, analyzing, fretting, debating and preparing for the future, what happens in 2, 5, 10 years. Will we have served students, families and our community?
None of this is new, people. Look at who says what and why. And how often they mention “students,” “teachers” or the future.
G Bitch
NOLA
>>>>
photo courtesy of angela7dreams, used under this Creative Commons license
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
If Jindal is “warehousing failure” I predict that he will need to rent a few more warehouses before his end of term/realization of his Veep-Quest. As is so often the case one needs to look beyond rhetoric and euphemisms to even begin to get to the heart of the matter.
So much of what is wrong in NOLA, and in America at large, all boils down to education. Once we get that in hand it will take a generation or so for the effects to really distribute themselves through our society. Hard to do in the era of the soundbite/short attention span.
Everyone should read The Clock of the Long Now…
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I wholly agree. Millions of our tax dollars are being put into a voucher program which will take even more productive students out of the public system leaving poorer performing students behind. Test scores will drop. Teachers will leave. Parents will wail. Politicians will earmark more money to “fix” the broken system, and eventually the Public School System will be dismantled in favor of “private” schools that we have to pay for. Isn’t politics fun!
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
Unfortunately, this is not just indicitive of the failure of the public school system. The concept that one can buy their way out of the responsibility of supporting public education is closely related to the problem corrupting it; Poor parenting.
Condemning public schools, rather than taking a concerned part in their advancement is not really much different then the false belief that those same public schools should have parented children who otherwise went unsupervised.
The failure of any of these schools falls heavily on the parents who refused to take part in the interaction with them, and their childrens’ education, as well. Allowing them to close down in favor of voucher, charter or any pay-as-you-go school system will seem like a solution, until such time as that becomes the norm, and the metal dectectors show up in those doorways, as well.
The USA used to have one of the best public educational programs in the world. Of course, we used to take pride in the slogan, ‘Made In America’, too.
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:36 am
You know, I can’t shake how mad this is making me. This system of trashing programs to meet statistics, betterment through elitest spending, looking at the ‘Big Picture’…
When I read Loki’s remark about “Warehousing Failure”, I see the faces of thousands & thousands of children, their potential condemned before it ever gets off the ground, warehoused as living failure, in cities across the state, the country…where will we be when they come to adulthood?
Blogging about inner city crime and street violence?
What better way to breed it in to our culture…
Yet here we are, allowing a government to parent US, and badly. That’s right, ‘allowing’. As if they had our best interests at heart, rather than fiscal rewards and re-election. All the more reason it’s time to change the entire game…
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Lord D, you should be mad. Go on with your mad self.
I agree there are poor parents out there, and some of our public school population comes from single and young mothers, but you can’t assume that they alone bring the system down or that the majority, or even half, of the children in a “failing” public school or system are poorly parented. Many parents try their hardest with what they have, which may not be much, and rely on public schools to supply what they cannot and supplement what they can. I also am slow to point the finger at “parents” when there are so many other adults in children’s lives who make a difference and make The Difference. Public schools are meant to educate every child who enters, regardless of race, religion, differing ability, socioeconomic status or parental involvement, ability, age, education, etc. Schools need to be part of a supportive social system, along with—oh horrors!—a social safety net, not yet another institution that throws up its hands and says Uncle because X isn’t done exactly the right way.
One more point–bad parenting comes in all socioeconomic and other flavors. I knew kids growing up who went to great schools and had some pretty poor parents. I’ve also seen them in private schools—well-dressed and -fed, often by someone other than the parents, getting an excellent education, all the best of everything, excellent food and extracurriculars, rotten to the core with all the status and resources to glom that rottenness all over the place. And get away with it.
Public schools CAN work. There ARE good, solid ideas about what makes a good school. We know you need to provide either a variety of students (meaning not only desegregating schools/systems but de-concentrating poverty) so that teachers and administrators can provide the help needed or you need to pour far more resources into those schools than the public and government are willing to so that the extra help can be provided and results obtained without burning out hardworking, well-meaning and up-against-several-walls adults. We know that when 1/4 of the kids in a class are below grade level, the teacher has a challenge. When it’s 3/4 or more, even the best, most experienced and masterful teacher will have a hard way to go. The problem is that hard fucking decisions need to be made and followed through. We can’t get distracted by one glittery thing in the box. It’s more than parents, more than money, more than privatization.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming……..
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Agreed. Especially the part about bad parenting not being determined by socioeconomic factors. When I was growing up I often caught heat because of my friends. The guy with the mohawk, the girls in punk clothes, the gay guy, etc. It did not go over well at all when I say “Look, my friends are kind. They have manners and ethics. Most of the little preppy kids that are your friend’s children are the ones doing cocaine because they can afford it and date raping girls at the Butterfly on Saturday nights.”
Money and family name mean little when it comes to character. Parenting on the other hand….
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
This gets off-topic but as I generally or at least often see it, as important as parenting is, it is treated like something so easy any idiot can do it in an hour or 2—and this is intimately connected with the strong association of women, mothers, with parenting. Look at early childhood education and day care—lots of women, very low salaries, yet they are critical to a child’s future, regardless of parents/parenting.
I had to have the same “arguments” with my people, Loki—yeah, my friends looked a little skanky but they were better to me than many in my own immediate family. And yes, it was the rich kids who always had drugs because they had the disposable income to spend and the emptinesses to fill. We, on the other hand, had to settle for conversation and radio.
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I grew up in Public schools. I oppose the vouchers because that money should be going to re-establish our school system here. Public education was what Jefferson believed in- an educated populace. (and with RSDs and private schools, who is “directing the educating”? That one fact determines the direction of where those kids go in the Future.)
I am older than most of you. I came up during the Civil Rights movement and came from a poor family. So many of us kids from that era went on to gain college degrees and make something of our lives beyond what our parents had. We benefited from wonderful teachers and the interaction of different kinds of folk.
Today in New Orleans, with my parents’ finances from the Past, I could never attend the RSD or private schools. I came from the bottom of the barrel, but my mother kept on me and helped all of us during my early years. Her dream was for the three of us to exceed the life she had lived.
Public schooling taught me so much, not just the books, but integration with those not exactly like me. It taught me to learn and accept others, and it also lead me to become very skilled in many fields. It was a melting pot that I have cherished all of my life. It gave me the freedom to just be myself. It also taught me responsibility- I worked 40 hours a week all through High School, and still graduated as the very top of my class.
It also gave me a broad enough education to go and do anything I wanted.
I never went to college. The Military gave me my engineering skills, but Public schooling gave me the ability to study anything and learn. I am self-taught in as many as 20 fields. I am competent because of those schools, so much so that I am 20 hours away from my Master’s degree.
I’d like to see an RSD school do that and still create a well-rounded Human Being.
What I see going down as far as education in NOLA enrages me.
This cannot stand.
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Beautiful, GG, beautiful. Yes, exactly.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:48 am
And there we have it. The building of character. This is something a voucher program does NOT allow for. That, and a sense of community…If the public school system is in trouble, what message does it send to the students there, to take your kid and money and bail out, and have the local government back you? What could possibly send more of a message of not belonging, of being an outcast, of living at the bottom of some throwback class system…
As for bad parenting, I agree this is not an economic issue (I never suggested it was, BTW) but still, it has a huge effect. I raised my two daughters on a musicans budget (talk about poor) and they went to public schools…until students started beating up teachers and their parents sued the schools for expelling them; until there were metal detectors and guards at every entrance, who became expected to baby sit latch key kids whose oarents weren’t around. At the same time, the nearby private school was the source for drugs, as those kids had the money & cars to facilitate dealing them…
So I return to my original statement: If we are to resurrect the American Public School System, it will require much more than funding. Children must be included as one of the greatest assets of our society, treated as such, taught to respect themselves, often by taking time & involvement in their day to day lives, as much as doing the same with their education.
This current trend towards buying one’s way up the ‘class ladder’ can only create more division and resentment, not just in schools, but neighborhoods & nations. Look where President Richy Rich has taken us, and how we are seen by the world…
July 24th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Perhaps when all our children are “included as one of the greatest assets of our society, treated as such, taught to respect themselves” they will be the kinds of parents who can support their children, money, privilege, luck or not.
In the morass of accusations, inferences, and half-truths that take up too much of the discussion of public education in NO (and not just since The Flood, not just in the past decade or 2), “parent involvement” has often been slung around to imply that some kids aren’t educable or worth the money and time because their parents are “too” faulty. And it was said of mostly poor black children. Having been one, I reacted more to the implications of that phrase than your suggestion, Lord D, which wasn’t there in what you were saying, agreed, but lingered because of other people’s mental farts.
Yep, Richy Rich is a case in point. There’s a pervasive idea that money is all that’s needed to buy whatever, especially education. It amazes me that college students, not all but too many of the ones I see, think that paying tuition is the beginning and end of their education, that they are owed certain grades because of the amount of tuition they pay or just the fact they pay tuition. That’s a whole ‘nother 42 posts……
July 25th, 2008 at 7:49 am
It is one of the saddest conundrums of our times that so often those who ca afford to get a good education are many times the ones who squander it. Ask anyone who has ever worked on Tulane campus….