School Choice

[Annie]

http://www.blackprof.com/archives/2005/12/the_absolute_necessity_of_scho.html

The Absolute Necessity of School Choice

“[T]he Negro’s education, North and South, remains, almost totally, a segregated education, which means that he is taught the habits of inferiority every hour of every day that he lives.”

“[A]ny Negro who undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic.”

-James Baldwin

Two companion conclusions reached by James Baldwin forty years ago, which, in many respects, reverberate today. The academic performance of Black children in America’s public schools is abysmally poor. Results on the National Assessment of Education Progress, for example, show persistently that a sizable majority of Black children fail even to perform at basic reading and math levels. The picture is even bleaker in urban districts, which disproportionately serve Black students. In many of these districts, more than half of Black students fail even to graduate from high school, let alone to achieve the minimal levels of competency necessary for postsecondary education.

At the same time, many inner-city school districts have witnessed substantial increases in public funding over the course of the last couple of decades. Whether through litigation-related efforts under Brown or correlative efforts under state constitutions, inner-city schools throughout the country have enjoyed considerable increases in government funding. Despite this increased investment of public dollars, the performance of public schools in effectively educating Black students, at best, has stagnated and, in many respects, has worsened. While more money for virtually any public good is undoubtedly a good thing, the chronic incapacity of public schools effectively to educate Black children has deeper and broader antecedents.

Among these is the extent to which, as James Baldwin suggested forty years ago, public schools disproportionately subject Black children to a host of policies reflective of diminished conceptions of their academic and cultural potential. Black children, among other things, are disproportionately referred to and classified as educationally disabled; disproportionately disciplined under public-school suspension and expulsion policies; disproportionately tracked into remedial classes and away from advanced classes; and disproportionately advised by guidance counselors to apply to and attend vocational, technical, and other forms of postsecondary training that do not call for matriculation at four-year colleges. These particular manifestations are simply iterations of a predicate disease: A host of studies suggest that public-school officials simply imagine and expect less of Black students.

It is essentially indisputable that public schools are not systematically serving the educational interests of Black students, and have not done so for decades. I submit that the reason for this systemic failure revolves substantially around the way in which public schools are held accountable for performance. Public schools, particularly those serving poor, inner-city communities, are held accountable only through a political process — containing national, state, and local permutations — that poor people are weakly positioned to influence meaningfully. Educational philosophy, curriculum, and pedagogy are set entirely by political actors with limited, if any, accountability to poor communities generally, let alone communities of color specifically.

Indeed, even local school districts controlled formally by officials of color possess insubstantial authority to impact systemtically the politics of public schools. The findings of political scientist Wilbur Rich, in Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark, are representative: “Blacks control the school boards but not the finances. . . . Since school programs are so dependent upon multiple sources of school finance, administrative sovereignty is lost in the process.” Like many other areas of Black socio-economic life, the educational needs of Black children suffer the extent to which Black folk are disempowered from materially influencing the institutions that deliver public goods.

It is in the light that I argue that school choice is an educational necessity for Black families. School choice empowers parents to decide where their child is educated, and thus radically democratizes the way in which public education is delivered. Rather than government making all choices for all parents — or, better yet, all poor parents (folk with money always have choices) — as to where their children are educated, school choice empowers parents not only to select the venue where education is delivered, but correlatively to influence meaningfully the substantive and pedagogical philosophies driving the kind of education provided in that venue. Choice fundamentally alters the political priorities of public schools, which — heaven, forbid — would actually have to perform effectively in order to convince parents to send their child to a public school.

In the current model, public schools have little incentive to respond meaningfully and systematically to the interests of Black parents, particularly poor Black parents, as these parents simply do not have the political capital to impact systematically the way in which public schools deliver education. A choice model, however, consistent with the most basic predicates of freedom and democracy, begins to grant poor people the opportunity to opt out of the public system if it continues miserably to fail their children. At the same time, it empowers Black parents to select educational models less contaminated by diminished conceptions of Black existential capacity -- a phenomenon James Baldwin warned us about forty years ago.

Posted by Shavar Jeffries on December 6, 2005 01:41 PM

 

[Abbey Normal]

Kathianne, I am the choice specialist for our school district. I have to run to my daughter's brass choir church concert right now, but if you have any questions about it, or particular points you think are worth discussin, I'd be happy to discuss them later (after I've had time to read the whole article).

 

[Hobbit]

The problem with schools as they are is that you are forced to pay for the school in your district, whether you use it or not, and cannot have that money refunded to send your child to a better school. Instead, sending your child to any school outside your district involves you paying tuition twice. This leaves the school no incentive to improve beyond the minimum required to stay open, which results in crappy crappy schools. If the parents were given a choice of where their education dollars went, it would give the schools incentive to be the best in the region, rather than the only one it town. It would be like privatizing it. In industry, you produce the best there is for the cost or you go out of business.

In fact, the only people against school choice outside congress are the teachers' unions, because they know their members will actually have to work if there's a chance the students will just go elsewhere.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

The problem with a school choice system is that it's still influenced by government. It won't do any good to choose a school if the blizzard of rules, requirements, and regulations is set by government. The best thing to do would be to abolish government-funded education alltogether. The resulting slash in property taxes could allow lots of people to send their kids to school in itself, or even have one parent (gasp) stay home and home school the kids. Or, most of these planned communities you see could offer free schooling to people in the neighborhood as a fringe benefit, like they do with golf and whatnot. Classes would be smaller, the neighborhood community building could be used, and busses wouldn't be necessary. But no, we've got to centralize the most minute details into a state bureaucracy, or better yet federal bureaucracy.