Call me un-American, but I've feared the word 'choice' for a long time. It's the preferred euphemism for not addressing inequality or monopolies or greed or social reform, or general indifference to all of the above. What better word to make it sound as though you're putting everyone on a level playing field, or more precisely, a level harvesting field where all anybody has to do is reach up and pick fruit that's roughly the same distance above their head as anybody else's?
It's just a matter of how fast you pick the fruit. Of course, if one person has an automatic fruit-picker, or if somebody can hire other people to pick their fruit and then some, or if somebody's close fruit turns out to be rotten because the tree is bug-infested and the next tree is accounted for, or if somebody isn't able-bodied enough to pick at all and somebody else takes advantage...well, you see the problem with the field thing, even if it's level. 'Choice' gets hollow in a hurry, like a bug-infested trunk.
There's a lot of hollowness in the so-called School Choice Plan recently passed by the L.A. Unified School District. What's being touted as 'choice' and a plum opportunity for community empowerment (another favorite euphemism for a power grab) is really something opposite. The district sees potentially giving away 50 new campuses to the most qualified operators--more than likely charter-school operators--rather than keeping them in-house as the kind of big change local education needs. But there's no guarantee that new casts of characters produce new results; less oversight is not such a good thing if people, even well meaning people, don't know what they're doing.
'Choice' is actually the problem I have with charters, even the successful ones. Charters can select kids, and then use their own criteria to keep selecting them; public schools have to take everybody. Call me a socialist--please--but there's something noble in the obligation to serve everyone. Lest anybody forget, schools are more obligated than most public entities to do that because schools are the oldest purveyors of inequality in our history. How many studies of modern-day segregation do we have to read to realize that? How many crappy, all-colored schools do we have to write about before we decide to do serious intervention?
The district plan might go down better with me if it included some provisions to serve the most underperforming group of students in the district, black students. But it doesn't. The plan does mention English Language Learners, as it should, but no one else as a group. Why not? I know that African Americans are barely ten percent of the student population, but they are the most imperiled. They always have been. The district that serves them owes them a plan, and a course of action, that takes that into account once and for all.
This image was taken by flickr user Pip R. Lagenta. It was used under the Creative Commons license.
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Americans seem to be becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea of 'personal responsibility'. Choice, they believe, rewards those more concerned with the future. Erin, do you think the problem is that these people do not understand that some people still struggle even when working as hard as they can to stay afloat?
Maxwell: i think most people are plumb out of goodwill towards man, especially in California. Our state motto should be "don't tread on my dream." The world seems to be separated into two camps, those who play fair and those who pimp off of those who play fair. Nothing inbetween. No context of history, need, etc. Subtlety is against the rules. Social equality is just an antiquated notion, something we tried but didn't like, so we moved on to the next thing. That's especially true in education, the area where the need for social justice is very much alive. It's a tension that we may never resolve. But the have-not kids suffer in the meantime..
The problem is not school choice, but the school choices given. As a magnet teacher I see the benefits and pitfalls of school choice. School choice allows parents who are motivated and savvy to get the most out of public schools. Sadly, most parents, while often motivated, are not so savvy. Those parents are often left with public schools that don’t address their children’s needs. Choice is a solution for some parents and kids when quality education is rationed.
Erin Aubry hits the nail on the head with most of her points but needs to go a bit further. To date, school choice has been used as escape hatches for parents who are dissatisfied most public schools – thus mollifying otherwise activist parents and thus robbing other not so savvy and activist parents of leadership.
Until support for public education goes beyond political sloganeering, fantasy reforms based on the worst our culture has to offer, and funding controlled at the school site rises to more than double its present level, the rationing of good schools will continue.
Yes we are a society of privilege for some and punishment for the innocent. As long as that is true, school choice provides an opportunity to a small number of savvy parents and lucky kids to get the education they deserve. As for the rest, it is simply an avoidable tragedy.
I hope the kind of discussion Erin Aubry engages in will continue to provide us with a chance to debate and create ideas that don’t fit the more conventional, and more often than not, ill-informed and misguided views found in most media outlets.