School Me
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.
