Why do liberals hate school choice?

People who follow politics, even casually, learn not to expect high moral standards from politicians. But there are some outrages that show a new low, even for politicians. Among the consequences of Democrats’ recent election victories, especially at the state and local levels, is the election of officials who have publicly announced their opposition to charter schools, and their determination to restrict or roll back the growth of those schools. What have the charter schools done to provoke such opposition? Often located in low-income, minority neighborhoods, these schools have in many cases produced educational outcomes far better than the traditional public schools in such neighborhoods. A Success Academy charter elementary school in Harlem had a higher proportion of the children in one of its classes pass the statewide math exam than in any other class at the same grade level, anywhere in the state of New York. As a result of the charter schools’ educational achievements, it is not uncommon for thousands of children to be on waiting lists to get into such schools — in New York City, tens of thousands. This represents a huge opportunity for many low-income, minority youngsters who have very few other opportunities for a better life. But, to politicians dependent on teachers’ unions for money and votes, charter schools are expendable. In various communities around the country, charter schools are already being prevented from moving into empty school buildings, which would allow them to admit more children from waiting lists. https://thecitizen.com/2018/12/04/why-do-liberals-hate-school-choice/

White liberals are standing between minority children and school choice There is no greater coalition issue in America today than school choice. Seventy-one percent of likely voters support it, meaning that more people approve of school choice than of America itself . A whopping 82% of Republican adults favor school choice, as do 68% of Democrats, according to RealClear Opinion Research. If there is anything the public can agree on, it is this. So why isn’t nationwide school choice a reality already? Perhaps we ought to ask white liberals, whose opposition to school choice is as predictable as it is absurd. Though most Democrats support school choice, that support comes overwhelmingly from black and Hispanic Democrats. In fact, white adults of all political persuasions are substantially more likely to oppose charter schools, vouchers, and tax credits than black and Hispanic adults, according to polling data from Education Next . I saw this white liberal opposition in action during the Trump administration when I served as the Department of Education’s press secretary under Betsy DeVos, the department head at the time. At a majority-black private school in Milwaukee, predominantly white protesters rallied outside, waving teachers union signage, in opposition to the very kind of school choice program that let the minority children inside escape failing public schools. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/white-liberals-are-standing-between-minority-children-and-school-choice

One reason why affluent, liberal parents often choose segregated schools, even when that may not be their intention. School segregation has been in the news a lot lately, with journalists examining the policy decisions that cause it, and the parental decisions that perpetuate it. See, for example, Kate Taylor’s New York Times article, “Family by Family, How School Segregation Still Happens,” and Patrick Wall’s Atlantic article, “The Privilege of School Choice,” subtitled, “When given the chance, will wealthy parents ever choose to desegregate schools?” In 2012, the Fordham Institute published The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent’s Guide to Socioeconomically Mixed Public Schools, by now-Fordham president Michael J. Petrilli. The following excerpt examines why it is that upper-middle-class parents often put other considerations ahead of school diversity. *** Naomi Calvo is a recently minted Harvard Ph.D. who immersed herself in Seattle’s “controlled choice” program for her dissertation. The intent of that effort, which offered parents public school options from across the city, was to better integrate Seattle’s sharply segregated schools. The program required all parents to list their school preferences. Calvo later pored over these choices to look for patterns. How important was the proximity of the school to home? Test scores? Demographics? Did these preferences vary by race and class? Calvo spoke to parents about their decision-making processes. One vignette is particularly telling: One morning I interviewed Sylvie, a vivacious middle class white mother whose daughter attended a popular alternative school. Sylvie was thrilled with the school—it was a perfect fit for her shy daughter, a nurturing close-knit community with project-based learning and a “child-centric” curriculum. The principal knew every student, and kids called teachers by their first names. The one downside, Sylvie said, was that the school was not as diverse as she would like. For some reason it had trouble attracting students of color, particularly black students. Later that afternoon I interviewed Bernice, a middle class black mom who had chosen a large traditional school for her “social butterfly” daughter. Although the school had low test scores and a mediocre reputation, Bernice had been impressed when she visited. She thought the principal was pushing kids to excel, and liked the “collegebound” program that encouraged students to start thinking about college early. She was also attracted by the curriculum, which focused on basic skills. As Bernice described the different schools she considered and the various factors she weighed in choosing among them, I noticed that she did not mention Sylvie’s alternative school as an option. Had she, I asked, considered sending her daughter there? “Oh no,” Bernice replied. “That school, it doesn’t have any discipline or structure whatsoever. Do you know,” she went on in a horrified voice, “they even let the kids call teachers by their first names!” Of course, we ought not generalize from this one story; not all affluent white parents want progressive, open-ended schools, and not all black parents want highly structured, traditional ones. But there is some truth to this stereotype. It’s hardly a secret: For decades, magnet school administrators have been placing Montessori schools in black neighborhoods as a way to draw white families, and “back-to-basics” schools in white neighborhoods to draw black families. And it works. In the early 1990s, another Harvard graduate student, Maureen Allenberg Petronio, studied the public school choice program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She found that parents tended to be either traditionalists, who wanted their kids to learn basic skills and get the “right answers,” or alternative-school aficionadas, who sought environments that “stimulated curiosity and encouraged exploration,” as she put it. Guess what? The alternative school parents were generally white professionals, while the traditionalists came from poorer backgrounds. More recent studies have confirmed these differences in parents’ educational values. Economists Lars Lefgren and Brian Jacob looked at data from an unnamed school district regarding parents’ requests for particular teachers. (About one in five parents made such requests every year.) What they found was that parents in more affluent schools placed a higher priority on teachers who created an enjoyable classroom environment, while parents in poor schools focused more on teachers who could raise student achievement. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that individuals from different cultures and backgrounds might have different values and preferences when it comes to their children’s education. However, it’s not just a matter of preferences. Bernice, the black mom, was right to be alarmed by the alternative school and its lack of structure, because those types of schools have tended to be ineffective for minority kids. On the other hand, a highly structured school would have repelled Sylvie and may have bored her daughter. These moms haven’t merely figured out what kind of school they would like for their daughters; they may have determined which type of school would educate them best. Progressive Education: Good for “White Folks” Only? In 1986, Lisa Delpit published “Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator,” an article that soon became one of the most requested in the Harvard Educational Review’s history. Delpit was born in Louisiana, where, as she put it, her teachers “in the pre-integration, poor black Catholic school that I attended corrected every other word I uttered in their effort to coerce my Black English into sometimes hypercorrect Standard English forms acceptable to black nuns in Catholic schools.” But in her own teacher training, she learned from her professors that this “traditional” approach to education was shortsighted or even racist; that “people learn to write not by being taught ‘skills’ and grammar, but by ‘writing in meaningful contexts.’” She took these theories and tried to implement them in an integrated school in Philadelphia. “The black kids went to school there because it was their only neighborhood school,” she wrote ruefully. “The white kids went to school there because their parents had learned the same kinds of things I had learned about education. As a matter of fact, there was a waiting list of white children to get into the school. This was unique in Philadelphia—a predominantly black school with a waiting list of white children. There was no such waiting list of black children.” While the older black teachers at the school focused on traditional skills such as handwriting and arranged their students’ desks in parallel rows, Delpit embraced all of the progressive methods: open classrooms, learning stations, carpeted sitting areas instead of desks, math games, even weaving to teach fine motor skills. “My white students zoomed ahead,” Delpit wrote. “They worked hard at the learning stations. They did amazing things with books and writing. My black students played the games; they learned how to weave; and they threw the books around the learning stations. They practiced karate moves on the new carpets. Some of them even learned how to read, but none of them as quickly as my white students. I was doing the same thing for all my kids—what was the problem?” Delpit eventually adopted more traditional methods, which helped her black students improve their reading and writing skills. That’s not to say that she rejected the tenets of progressive education entirely. But her article sparked an enormous response from other black teachers, who believed that the fashionable progressive methods were good for “white folks” but not for kids of color. And those teachers might have been right. Poor Kids, Promising Results So if progressive education—at least the kind that downplays the teaching of knowledge and skills—is not generally the best approach for the neediest kids, what is? What kinds of curriculum, pedagogy, and culture are seen in schools that teach disadvantaged children effectively? One of the most compelling investigations of high-performing high-poverty schools is David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. Whitman, a former U.S. News reporter, looked at six highly successful secondary schools—four charter schools, one Catholic school, and one regular public school. All are achieving phenomenal results as measured by test scores, graduation rates, and success in college, and all serve predominantly poor and minority students. Whitman’s unique contribution was to identify a secret ingredient in the schools’ success: They are all benignly paternalistic: Each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think but how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values . . . The schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance. Students are required to talk a certain way, sit a certain way, and dress a certain way. For example, Whitman wrote about the Cristo Rey Academy, a Jesuit school in Chicago that sends high school students to internships in professional office environments. The dress code . . . is remarkably detailed—and sure not to send teen hearts racing. Boys wear long-sleeved cotton or poplin shirts with collars and buttons and free of lettering and logos. Shirts must be buttoned all the way up and worn over plain white undershirts. A solid black or brown belt must be worn at all times. Trousers must have a crease and hem in the leg, and pants must be worn at the waistline. Leather or leather-like shoes in solid black or brown must hold a shine. A boy’s hair cannot be long enough to cover his collar or longer than a #2 clipper attachment. Boys are shown, and practice, how to tie a tie. All the markings of teenhood and teen rebellion—earrings, facial piercings, sun glasses, or corn rows—are flatly forbidden. The dress code for girls is similarly drab: blouses buttoned all the way up, no white socks, no tight pants, no earrings larger than a quarter, and only soft colors used for eye shadow. Wearing a watch is recommended. But the watches cannot have sports logos or cartoon figures on the timepiece. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/one-reason-why-affluent-liberal-parents-often-choose-segregated-schools-even

WHY LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA HATE CHARTER SCHOOLS, AND WHY WE NEED THEM. I grew up in a suburb of thriving metropolitan Salt Lake City. Public education was mediocre and mildly amusing. Then came fifth grade. My mother had heard about a new “charter” school that was opening up and they were asking for potential students to submit their names for lottery acceptance. (For reference, a charter school is one which receives public funding but operates independently from the specific school system in which it is located.) My mom, being as suspicious of anything anti-establishment as a small-town woman could be, researched the institution thoroughly. It was called Legacy Preparatory Academy. It was founded on a classical educational approach springing from the pre-existing methodology of Christian home school networks. My mom submitted her children’s names into the vast pool, and, by some miracle, we were accepted. Legacy Prep, as we called it, was an astonishing creation. We were the guinea pigs, attending classes at an old University of Utah building while our school was under construction. Uniforms were strictly enforced, students were taught to remain in “learning position” (upright back, with hands clasped out front, resting on the desk), and we had different teachers for every subject. In fact, prior to entry students took entrance exams which placed us according to our aptitude. When the time came for math class, or reading class, we headed off down those ancient, dimly-lit hallways to meet with a few other kids and an instructor. My homeroom teacher taught us European history with an emphasis on the Renaissance. We learned methods of note-taking. We learned how to ask proper questions. In science, we were taught the ideas behind species-categorization. In art history, we were taught how to identify particular portrait artists. In reading, we memorized a poem by Robert Frost. The method behind this madness? A modernization of classical education. Teach the student how to communicate, and he or she can learn anything. We were pushed to analyze and synthesize at every turn. Technology was spurned in favor of blackboards and chalk. Nobody was held back by the ineptitude of a peer; if a child required individual attention, it was given to him or her. If my fellow students struggled with spelling, they were paired with tutors who worked with them thirty minutes every day. The teachers who came here were exceptional, and so were the students’ parents. Legacy Prep required that parents give a certain number of volunteer hours every year, and the expectation was met with hearty assent. Imagine that? Direct parent involvement in the classroom. No longer is the classroom a daycare center, it’s an incubator for young minds and parents are expected to contribute their own time, talents, and resources. The community that existed around the Academy was one of intellectual growth and camaraderie, not competition and slothfulness. Today, charter schools are frowned upon by liberal intelligentsia for undermining public education. In my own home state of Washington, charter schools are constantly berated in public forums (we are zealously pro-public education, apparently). But what is it that they find so repulsive? In a charter school, teachers are encouraged to push themselves as well as their students towards excellence. Hard work is rewarded while expectations of privilege are not tolerated. Similar to a private school, a charter school encourages mutual respect through equanimity in the form of school uniforms. Traditional ideals are taught openly, such as the contributions of Western civilization to the world at large. There is a tireless effort to encourage open dialogue. Reading and an appreciation for knowledge are held in the highest regard. Even ten-year-olds developed a profound zeal for the material our instructors had prepared. I’m not saying these characteristics can’t be found in a public school—of course they can! But what I had at Legacy Prep was something I will never forget. It was an opportunity to bathe in the warmth of intellectual curiosity even as a child. Material was not boiled down to its acrid simplicity and then spoon-fed in carefully allotted dosages. Our teachers welcomed us with seminars, lectures, and sincere pedagogical exercises. Instead of setting standards and then rushing along the battle-lines treating the fallen, Legacy Prep adopted a solid, structured approach to education, based on centuries of Western experimentation, and expected teachers to adapt to fit the needs of their students. If every school was a charter school, a student would enter the world as a well-educated person even if his learning was a passive recollection. But not every school can be a charter school. I understand that. Let’s not prevent others, however, from having experiences like I did in the name of state institutionalization. Options are the key to a prosperous society. The free market works best when innovation is allowed, so why not give the market of education free reign? https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/why-liberal-intelligentsia-hate-charter-schools-and-why-we-need-them/

The Battle Over Charter Schools: The fiercest battle yet in America’s struggle over charter schools erupted last fall in Massachusetts. If passed, a ballot initiative in the general election would have given the Commonwealth the power to annually add up to 12 new charter schools — publicly funded, independently run alternatives to traditional public schools. They would have been built in a handful of urban communities, where 32,000 children, a majority black and Latino, were sitting on waiting lists of existing charters as they languished in underperforming district schools. But teachers, parents, and investors across the state, and the country at large, took to picketing, advertising, evangelizing. In one corner formed Save Our Public Schools (aka No on 2), a coalition that included teachers unions, PTA committees, the Jewish Labor League, and the Brazilian Women’s Group, and aligned with the likes of the NAACP, the mayor of Boston, and Senator Elizabeth Warren. They argued, broadly, that charters pilfer money and students from district schools, aren’t held accountable, and privatize public education. Their opponent called themselves Great Schools (Yes on 2), a cluster of charter advocacy groups, funded by the Walton family and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and aligned with low-income parents of public school children and Governor Charlie Baker. Yes on 2 insisted that all families should have the ability to choose their education, and teachers should have the freedom to innovate. Both sides spent a combined $33 million, one of the largest ballot-item campaigns in the state’s history. A week before the election, polls showed a dead split. To help decide, dozens of constituents asked Professor Paul Reville, former secretary of education in Massachusetts, how they should vote. Reville was the chief architect of the Education Reform Act of 1993, which introduced chartering to Massachusetts, and he’s been an outspoken champion of charters since. But whenever someone asked, “What do you think of charter schools?” Reville was quick to respond, “Which school are we talking about?” Are we talking about New York’s Success Academy or KIPP schools nationwide, perennially profiled examples of the best — charter, public, and private included — in the nation? Are we talking about any of the five Massachusetts charters that Senior Lecturer Kay Merseth, M.A.T.’69, Ed.D.’82, investigated in Inside Urban Charter Schools, wildly different in curricula, pedagogy, and mission, but all wildly successful? Are we talking about Boston-based Codman Academy, founded by Meg Campbell, C.A.S.’97, Ed.M.’05, where 100 percent of its students (98 percent minority) are accepted to college? Nationwide, while charters only educate 6 percent of the nation’s students, they regularly fill a third of U.S. News and World Report’s top 100 high schools. Or are we talking about Philadelphia’s Harambee Institute of Science and Technology, a K–8 charter with a cafeteria that on weekends converted into an illegal nightclub? Harambee was featured in a recent Last Week with John Oliver segment on sensational examples of failing charters, including several that closed in the middle of the year, and a Florida elementary charter that shuttered in the middle of a day. Reville’s point: It’s impossible to generalize charter schools. How charters are run, funded, and overseen varies dramatically from state to state, school to school. In Charter Schools at the Crossroads, one of the most comprehensive overviews of the charter movement, Chester Finn, M.A.T.’67, Ed.D.’70, concludes, “The charter track record can best be described as stunningly uneven.” But voters most often asked Reville a simpler question: “What am I voting for?” A majority were unfamiliar with charter schools; there are 78 in Massachusetts, to traditional public schools’ 1,934. As Finn told me, “Most Americans still have no idea what a charter school is.” Knowing seems to make a difference. When Education Next surveyed parents, teachers, and members of the general public across the country last fall, only 28 percent supported the formation of charter schools. Yet when participants were provided a two-sentence definition of a charter school, 52 percent approved. Today charters educate 3 million pupils (a million more sit on waiting lists) in 43 states. But as some 330 new charters open a year, the sides grow more polarized. Folks like Meg Campbell claim they fight for charters because they’re fighting “on the side of justice.” Others, like Kelly Henderson, Ed.M.’06, a public high school English teacher in Newton, Massachusetts, claim that charters are not only an “attack on public schools,” but also a “pernicious” and deliberate “attack on women,” who comprise 76 percent of public school teachers. How did charters get so muddy? How did a movement that began with far-flung bipartisan support just 25 years ago morph into one of today’s most contentious debates in education? https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/05/battle-over-charter-schools