Backs to the Wall: Reflections on the Charter Dilemma

Just some reflection on the charter schools debate on this space over the past three months - and on Sharon Higgins' post, Where Sociology, Criminology, and Charter Schools Converge.

If I were an inner-city parent with children in a dilapidated, under-resourced school overrun with unruly students in crowded classrooms, filled with high percentages of non-native English speakers and special needs students in every class, and there was a shiny new charter facility that promised a better education for my child, promised classroom discipline that would remove disruptive students, promised extra funding from wealthy donors, offered smaller class sizes and with lower ratios of students with special language or learning needs, offered teachers who work longer hours and take phone calls at nights and weekends - then yes, I would be very interested in removing my children from their traditional public school and placing them in a charter.

I would also have fears, though: What if the charter is not as good as it advertises? What if it tries to force my children out if they don't help its test scores? What if it loses funding from the wealthy donors, this year, next year, any year? What if the teachers there burn out after a while, and there's a turn-over and continuity problem? What if the school ends up closing after wasting years of my children's education with failure to deliver on its promises?

And I would have a question that I wished some politician would satisfactorily answer: Why is the traditional public education system unable to fix my children's current school, instead of declaring it a failure and outsourcing its responsibilities to the private and non-profit sector?

If I were a traditional public school teacher, and saw the best students in my classrooms leaving in droves for those schools, leaving behind both a stronger teaching burden and less funding to support that burden; and if I saw other schools around me closing due to reduced enrollments, and fewer teaching positions offering living wages and benefits, legal protections for academic integrity and against unfair dismissal, and other protections achieved by unionized collective bargaining, I would oppose charter schools - non-unionized ones, anyway.

But I'm neither.

I am a U.S. citizen, though, and the charter issue raises concerns in my mind about equity and the future of the public education system. My biggest concern is the students left behind in the exodus to charters. I'm unable to see how they're not condemned to an educational apartheid that almost guarantees them a future of poverty, prison, or both. Another concern is the teaching profession. The charter push - though it doesn't have to be this way - toward de-skilling teaching in favor of commercial lesson scripts, and de-professionalizing it by marginalizing or eliminating teacher certification programs and teacher unions.

And as a citizen, I'm left with the same question as the hypothetical public school parent above: Why is the traditional public education system unable to fix its schools, instead of declaring them a failure, and outsourcing its responsibilities to the private and non-profit sector?

And how did things get to this state of affairs, with underprivileged parents' backs to the wall, forced to abandon traditional public schools in ways that serve the interests of the most privileged?

Image by sister72