Jonathan Chait has a New York Magazine piece on charter schools that’s worth looking at:
In the dozen years since Barack Obama undertook the most dramatic education reform in half a century — prodding local governments to measure how they serve their poorest students and to create alternatives, especially charter schools, for those who lack decent neighborhood options —
I’m gonna stop you right there. Charter schools were first passed into law in 1991 under Bush41. The number of charter schools doubled under Bush43, who was a far bigger supporter of school choice than Obama was. That school choice continued to expand under Obama is a credit to him not screwing up their existing momentum, but let’s not pretend that Obama did any of the heavy lifting.
– two unexpected things have happened. The first is that charter schools have produced dramatic learning gains for low-income minority students. In city after city, from New York to New Orleans, charters have found ways to reach the children who have been most consistently failed by traditional schools. The evidence for their success has become overwhelming, with apolitical education researchers pronouncing themselves shocked at the size of the gains. What was ten years ago merely an experiment has become a proven means to develop the potential of children whose minds had been neglected for generations.
And yet the second outcome of the charter-school breakthrough has been a bitter backlash within the Democratic Party. The political standing of the idea has moved in the opposite direction of the data, as two powerful forces — unions and progressive activists — have come to regard charter schools as a plutocratic assault on public education and an ideological betrayal.
The shift has made charter schools anathema to the left.
In fact, neither of these outcomes is remotely unexpected for anyone living outside the liberal reality bubble. As for charter schools succeeding, Democrat-controlled inner city schools have long been failing, government monopolies seldom produce desirable results in the absence of competition, and ordinary Americas escape government control of their lives any chance they get.
Likewise, teachers unions hate both alternatives to their monopoly and giving up money and control to charter schools. teacher’s unions are one of the most powerful forces inside the Democratic coalition, and their endorsement brings both money and muscle to Democratic politicians. Compared to that, the wishes of inner city black parents for better education for their children don’t count at all. Likewise, social justice warrior cadres think the government monopoly on schools is a dandy way to impose woke ideological conformity on tender young minds. Why teach inner city students to succeed when you can manufacture new SJW cadres by telling them to current system is hopelessly rigged against them and needs to be destroyed?
“I am not a charter-school fan because it takes away the options available and money for public schools,” Biden told a crowd in South Carolina during the Democratic primary, as the field competed to prove its hostility toward education reform in general and charters in particular. Now, as Biden turns from campaigning to governing, whether he will follow through on his threats to rein them in — or heed the data and permit charter schools to flourish — is perhaps the most unsettled policy mystery of his emerging administration.
To head the Department of Education, Biden floated the names of fierce critics of charter schools, including the ex-president of the country’s largest teacher union and the former dean of the Howard University School of Education, who has called urban charters “schemes” that are really all about controlling urban land. Then, in a surprise move, Biden formally tapped Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s education chief — a nonideological pick who offends neither the party’s opponents of reform nor its remaining defenders.
Cardona has at least given lip service to charter schools in the past, so he’s probably among the least bad picks Biden could have made.
The achievement gap between poor Black and Latino students in cities and rich white students in suburbs represents a sickening waste of human ability and is a rebuke to the American credo of equal opportunity. Its stubborn persistence has tormented generations of educators and social reformers. The rapid progress in producing dramatic learning gains for poor children, and the discovery of models that have proved reliable in their ability to reproduce them, is one of the most exciting breakthroughs in American social policy. For many education specialists, the left’s near abandonment of charter schools has been a bleak spectacle of unlearning — the equivalent of Lincoln promising to rip out municipal water systems or Eisenhower pledging to ban the polio vaccine. Just as the dream is becoming real, the party that helped bring it to life is on the verge of snuffing it out.
Once again Chait is pushing the myth that Democratic politicians were big backers of charter schools. They were not. They are not. Save a few laudable exceptions, they never have been.
In college, I had a brief experience tutoring bright students who’d been taught depressingly little by the public schools of Detroit, which impressed upon me the cruelty of a system that denied so many kids any chance to develop their talent. But it wasn’t until I met my wife that I got interested in charter schools. Robin has devoted her career to education policy: She studied it in graduate school, taught at a low-income school, worked in local and federal education departments, researched for a liberal think tank, did executive-level work for a charter-school network. Her current role is with a nonprofit organization, consulting for and providing technical assistance to schools and state education bodies. Because of Robin, I’ve gained a window into a siloed world of experts who grasp both the state of research on charter schools and its staggering moral implications. Once you have scrutinized a machine that systematically squanders the intellect of an entire caste of citizens before they have reached adulthood, then glimpsed an alternative that reliably does the opposite, it is hard to stop thinking about it.
Charter schools face a crisis in large part because people don’t understand them.
No, they’re in crisis because powerful factions in the Democratic Party find them a threat to their business model. To quote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary:
A Moral Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough for but one.
“Down, you base thing!” thundered the Moral Principle, “and let me pass over you!”
The Material Interest merely looked in the other’s eyes without saying anything.
“Ah,” said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, “let us draw lots to see which shall retire till the other has crossed.”
The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an unwavering stare.
“In order to avoid a conflict,” the Moral Principle resumed, somewhat uneasily, “I shall myself lie down and let you walk over me.”
Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange coincidence it was its own tongue. “I don’t think you are very good walking,” it said. “I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water.”
It occurred that way.
Back to Chait:
Today, teachers unions have adopted a militant defense of the tenure prerogatives of their least effective members, equating that stance with a defense of the teaching profession as a whole. They have effectively mobilized progressives (and resurgent socialist activists) to their cause, which they identify as a defense of “public education” — rather than a particular form of public education — against scheming billionaires.
Imagine the progressive stance on education as a series of expanding concentric circles with the peripheral actors only barely aware of the core dispute: at the core, a tiny number of bad teachers, protectively surrounded by a much larger circle of union members, surrounded in turn by an even larger number of Democrats who have only a vague understanding of the issue as one pitting heroes (unions) against villains (rich privatizers).
In the recent book Slaying Goliath, Diane Ravitch, a Democrat turned conservative turned populist leader of the education-reform backlash, jubilantly declares the charter-school movement dead. While that declaration is premature, she is correct that her struggle to redefine charters schools as toxic among progressives has succeeded almost totally. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Elizabeth Warren bashed them, and even as clumsy a candidate as Bill de Blasio understood that his hostile relationship with charters was one of his few selling points. “No one should ask for your support or be the Democratic nominee unless they’re able to stand up to Wall Street and the rich people behind the charter school movement once and for all,” he said at one forum. “I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate’ — our teachers taught us not to — I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them.” Perhaps the most instructive candidacy, though, was that of Cory Booker.
As mayor of Newark between 2006 and 2013, Booker had overseen a major charter effort; his goal, he said at the time, was to make the city the “charter-school capital of the nation.” The project worked. A recent study documenting the gains found that Newark’s students, whose performance on statewide tests had once ranked in the 38th percentile, had vaulted nearly 40 points. Newark’s charter-school students now exceed the state average in math and language, an extraordinarily impressive result given their high poverty rate. And the report found gains among charter students had not come at the expense of students in traditional schools, who were also gaining, albeit not as rapidly as the charter students. This was one of the most impressive executive achievements any candidate in the field could boast. But Booker was unable to tout his success. Instead, the issue played as a liability. News stories assessing his candidacy presented his support for charters as a kind of dark secret in his past, for which he “faced scrutiny” and “could create still more problems.”
Snip.
Polls show that the backlash against charters has been mainly confined to white liberals, while Black and Latino Democrats — whose children are disproportionately enrolled in those schools — remain supportive. It’s not that upscale progressives don’t care about minority children. Their passion is quite evidently sincere. Rather, they have convinced themselves that better schools by themselves do little good, because only structural reform to the entire economy and social system is worth pursuing. In 2019, Nick Hanauer wrote a widely circulated Atlantic essay titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.” Hanauer, a former charter-school donor, argued that the economy has deeper problems that education alone cannot solve. On its own terms, the point is obviously true: Good schools can’t eliminate inequality. For that matter, eliminating inequality can’t solve climate change, and solving sea-level rise can’t eliminate racism. The world has lots of problems. It is odd to dismiss the value of solving one problem by pointing to the continued existence of other problems.
Hanauer was echoing a theme that critics of education reform have been developing for years. They dismiss the very possibility of better education outcomes as unimportant or impossible on the grounds that poor children cannot learn at the same level as middle-class ones. “The biggest correlation in education is between poverty and test scores,” Ravitch has said. “If you think the test scores are too low, go to the root causes.” The education-reform critic Richard Rothstein has claimed that we will “never fix education in America until we fix the poverty in our society.” The left-wing social critic Joshua Mound has written in Jacobin that “increases in equality tend to increase educational attainment, not the other way around.” And so on. The message to poor urban parents who want to send their kids to a decent school is that they simply need to wait for the revolution.
For social justice warriors, reform is the enemy of revolution. Educating poor inner city blacks doesn’t help them destroy capitalism or “whiteness” and so holds no value for them. The only black lives that matter are those that can further the cause by dying at the hands of police.
Chait has done a good job of mapping out that: A.) Charter schools work, and B.) the Democratic Party is implacably hostile to them, but makes the error of assuming that if Democrats just understood how well they worked, they would be in favor of them. He’s wrong. You can’t convince a man of the error of his thinking if that very error is central to his business model.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
