“Charter Schools” is an emotional term that invokes a sort of shimmering gateway of hope. It sends a siren’s signal offering educational panacea and the false solution to every parent’s nightmare: uncertainty about the future.
But like nearly everyone I know, I have taken shortcuts in comprehending political issues, with this predictable outcome: magical, spurious impressions.
In failing to appreciate the underlying essence and agenda of these private charter entities, like nearly everyone the true nature of Charter Schools has failed to register with me.
As scholastic products, these Charter Schools do not represent a gingerbread haven of scholastic excellence. Lift the veil of rhetoric and romanticism and they are revealed simply as the physical manifestation of a very old, very tired, utterly archetypal Republican trope: School Vouchers.
Milton Friedman introduced the imperative of privatizing public education nearly 60 years ago in his 1955 essay “The Role Of Government in Education”. He proposed decoupling the financing of education from its administration. The idea was for government to address individuals seeking an education not obliquely via a government-subsidized school but directly by furnishing “equity” capital. This money would support a free market of educational opportunity, a radical theology Friedman proselytized incessantly and very generally in pursuit of reducing myriad direct activities of government.
Neither the merit of this privatization ideology nor the success of its charter-manifestations is my argument here. Instead, quite simply, is the fact of this equivalence. Long have I understood “Vouchers” to represent an ideology abhorrent to me. Yet somehow I – and I daresay many, many other of the politically congruent – have failed to intellectually merge the equivalent methods of School Voucher with Charter School.
Yet these entities accomplish precisely the same end. The difference is only that the commoditization of student’s education is hidden within the school structure of charters in the form of “ADA” per capita allowances. These schools are designed specifically to funnel public educational monies into private pockets. The veneer of educational salvation serves beatifically to mask Milton’s underlying theology of privatization.
Since the political right failed to convince our polity of the wisdom in empowering private institutions to do the people’s business, whether parochial, not-for-profit or secular – since the Right failed in its goal to institute school vouchers, they instead triumphed in accomplishing the same deed covertly through the widespread, national proliferation of charter schools.
These charter school entities are nothing new then, they are merely GOP school vouchers cloaked in charter school sheepskin.
All that patina of educational salvation is just so much PR, successful because so many of us fail to scrutinize political fads adequately. Charter schools are simply the modern means whereby school vouchers have been implemented.
Charter schools = school vouchers and some of us should be more skeptical about grandiose promises of magical cures.
2 Comments
August 5, 2013 at 9:00 am
Thank you for the link. I am *really* looking forward to reading a scholar’s take on this. Friedman discusses segregation at some length. He “deplores” segregation, acknowledges a role for vouchers in addressing it and urges the state to implement vouchers as a de-segregation tool in the kitbag of free marketeering. In reality the issues of segregation, so painful to one and all, have been camouflaged behind a misrepresentation of vouchers never theorized in the beginning. Mind you, it was a bad idea from the beginning, but the outcome of segregation was anticipated by its progenitor.
August 5, 2013 at 8:27 am
I enjoy your blog. I recently read this by Christopher Bonastia, associate professor of sociology at Lehman College, who fills in some of the pieces, too: “Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed.” March 2012, http://www.alternet.org/story/154425/why_the_racist_history_of_the_charter_school_movement_is_never_discussed?paging=off
Excerpt:
The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.
Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders’ strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: “We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program,” he wrote. “Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with ‘em.”