Charter Schools vs. Public Schools

In the 2nd century A.D., Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius penned a series of personal writings and reflections known today as “Meditations.” In Book 1, the emperor shares some of his debts and lessons learned, and offers a glimpse at his experiences as a student. Even then, from the sound of it, we were still letting schools get in the way of our children’s educations.

From his great-grandfather, Catilus Severus, Aurelius learned “to avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.” And that was 1,800 years ago. The more things change…

The Federalist

Democrats’ War On Charter Schools Is Sending Families Into The Arms Of Republicans

BY: JENNIFER STEFANO

SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/23/democrats-war-on-charter-schools-is-sending-families-into-the-arms-of-republicans/

Democrats’ war on education opportunity is hurting them in public opinion, and it will hurt them in November.  

There’s a war brewing in education — and this time, it’s not just against traditional public school parents. That fight hasn’t gone anywhere. Parents still must advocate for a say in what their kids are taught within the confines of district schools across the nation, but leftists have staked out a new enemy in recent months: charter schools. 

Democrats declaring war on charters is particularly sinister considering the majority demographics these schools serve are low-income and minority students. These students often flee to charter schools because their normal district schools — the schools assigned based on zip code alone — are unsafe, failing, or both. 

Nationwide, nearly 70 percent of the 3.5 million students served by charters are minority students, while two-thirds are low-income. In places like Philadelphia, more than 60 percent of the enrollment in charter schools are black children, as opposed to less than 50 percent in the district’s traditional schools. This was news to me.

Parents have made a clear choice to provide a better, safer future for their children, but too often, Democrats do not respect their decisions. And now, the opportunity to even make that decision is being threatened. 

Consider Philadelphia, where the city’s school board hasn’t approved a new charter school since it took over charter authorizations. 85 percent of the charters closed by the Philadelphia School District since 2010 were led by people of color, including two schools that the district voted to close in June.

In Pennsylvania, 78 percent of eighth-grade students are not proficient in math and 47 percent are not proficient in language arts. Yet no one is demanding the closure of these schools; instead, government union executives are demanding more tax dollars to “fix” the problem. But more money won’t fix a systemic problem. 

This isn’t isolated to Pennsylvania. Instead, it’s a nationwide coordinated attack by progressives — which includes the Democrat-funded teachers unions — to further limit competition in education at the expense of student outcomes. 

Despite enrollment in charter schools increasing by nearly a quarter-million students in 2020-21, the Biden administration continues to fight the will of parents at every turn, most recently by slapping regulations on how charters qualify for federal grants. 

The new rules — which require applicants to prove a need and community support for the school, among other nonsensical oversteps, prove Democrats are more concerned with meeting the demands of government union executives than those of parents. It’s no wonder parents are shifting support to Republicans when it comes to education. 

That’s according to a poll released by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which specifically looked at likely voters in congressional battleground districts.

Another poll commissioned by the American Federation of Teachers — the second largest teachers’ union in the nation — found similar results: Voters have more confidence in Republicans to deal with education issues. 

And they should. Republicans are putting parents back in the driver’s seat of their kids’ education, while Democrats kowtow to the government bureaucrats running taxpayer-funded education into the ground. 

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on increased school choice, and the 56 percent of parents who supported him — in a state that President Biden had won by 10 points just a year before — sent a clear message: We will vote for Republicans when they give us more control of our kids’ education. 

It’s a similar story in Arizona, where Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed the single largest expansion of school choice in the nation. 

Arizona’s “Empowerment Scholarship Account” (ESA) program gives families direct access to around $7,000 in state education funding to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, curriculum, and other approved expenses. Unlike previous programs that restricted scholarship eligibility to students from low-income families or with special needs, Arizona’s program now offers universal eligibility. 

Fighting against the will of parents — especially when it comes to the future of their kids — is a losing message. Yet Democrats seem hell-bent on clinging to it as they fight the expansion of charter schools and other school measures at every turn. 

It’s not difficult to see why when you examine the relationship between government unions and the Democratic Party.

The American Federation of Teachers, for example, spent almost $20 million for the 2020 election, with nearly all its political contributions going to Democrats and left-wing groups. For the current election cycle, government unions have already spent $13.6 million on politics, with 85 percent of their political action committee donations going to Democrats. 

The result? Our kids are failing. Parents have limited options, and in some cases, no options at all. Increasingly, they distrust the political party that continues to take their options away.  

7 Exciting Education Reform Ideas Republicans Need To Try

BY: JOY PULLMANN

Author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates.

APRIL 27, 2015

https://thefederalist.com/2015/04/27/7-exciting-education-reform-ideas-republicans-need-to-try/

Revive The Good Ideas Already

“Testing” and its supposed synonym, “accountability,” are just not getting the job done, and we’ve been trying this brand of government monopoly for nearly three decades now. Conservatives need new ideas—or, rather, to stop mucking about in bureaucracy maintenance and finally recover some old ideas about educating children that have excellent track records.

Here are a few ideas I gleaned from the article:

Explicit Test Opt Outs for Kids

Perhaps the number-one exciting thing in education right now is the unprecedented wave of parents defying federal testing mandates to sign their kids out of these tests this spring.

It’s a protest measure against both the Common Core, as these tests are the first iteration of its new annual nationwide tests, and against the mechanisms of power that sprung it on the people unannounced.

(SAT and ACT tests are no longer used for determining college scholarships.)

We’re talking hundreds of thousands of kids refusing these tests this spring, whereas before Common Core trial testing runs last year, perhaps a few hundred have ever done so in any given year. In New York alone, estimates of the number of test refusals put the number at 300,000 kids and counting—nearly a third of all kids tested in that state.

At its heart, the opt-out wave is about individualism versus collectivism. As hundreds of thousands of kids refuse tests, many local school officials have told families that they’re not allowed to customize a public-school education by refusing bits of it this way.

Enrolling in public schools is a package deal, they say. As one Ohio administrator told a parent, if you don’t like the tests, homeschool. Many others have forced these young conscientious objectors to “sit and stare” at the testing screen all day, doing nothing, while their classmates dutifully fill out the computerized bubbles. Others have threatened parents with holding their kids back a grade if they don’t take the tests.

Enough. Either parents run education, or the collective does. State and national lawmakers who support parents and individual rights should give everyone the explicit power to accept or reject these tests, and any other component of public schools they find objectionable.

From a Missouri middle school teacher to parents.

“I wanted to send you an email to let you know that today students received back 2 formative assessments and entered their data into their data trackers which are located within google classroom.

With the middle school’s switch from a traditional grading scale to Standards-Based Grading, this means that grades will no longer be reported to you on a 100-point scale, but rather based on specific Priority Standards students are working on, and their scale on a value from 1-4.  

Since this is a new process for both students and teachers, I wanted to reach out and explain the first assessment pieces you will see entered into SIS and also on your student’s data tracker.

1. Collaborative Conversations:

For this formative assessment, the target score being assessed was a “2′ – acknowledging new information expressed by others. As we continue to work within this standard, upcoming assessments will build on the skills to work toward proficiency in the 3 and 4 categories.

2. Analyzing characters, setting, and plot – Literary Devices

For this formative assessment the target score being assessed was a “1” – could students identify the meaning of commonly used literary terms. 

As we continue to work within this standard, upcoming assessments will build on the skills to work toward proficiency in the 2, 3, & 4 categories.

Some assessments in ELA may target specific score levels, and some assessments may include questions for which a student could express their thinking and understanding which could score across multiple point-level categories.

As teachers, we are learning the ins and outs of Standards-Based Grading and are trying to find the best and most efficient ways to communicate your student’s progress to you.”

Opt-Out for States

A corollary to the above is allowing states to tell the feds “Thanks, but no thanks” to the feds’ use of state tax dollars to bribe states into activities those same state taxpayers may not support. The provision would allow states to get their education dollars back as a block grant while opting out of federal strings, as long as they promise to adhere to civil-rights laws and improve education for poor kids.

The argument for this is simple, and data-driven: Federal mandates have done nothing to improve education for the past sixty years, even for poor and minority kids. Their central function has been impoverishing states and shackling teachers to pad bureaucrats’ butts.

Support Supply-Side Education

Merely creating some sort of “school choice” program is not enough to encourage new entrants. Most existing school-choice programs and the general education field itself is so regulated that new voucher or tax-credit scholarship programs mostly fill existing empty seats in existing private schools.

Instead, private investors should seed new schools with startup grants. States need to axe their regulatory thickets that are built for incumbents rather than new entrants—for example, state scholarship amounts are typically too low to pay for the majority of the cost a student brings to a school, so current private-school students effectively subsidize choice students.

Here’s another: schools typically can’t participate in school-choice programs unless they’re accredited, but accreditation requires three to six years of operation before schools can apply for it. which requires new private schools to cater to an entirely different clientele to get to the point where they can reach more and poorer kids, and families who take that leap with them are often disqualified from getting any scholarships once the school can accept them because many states bar existing private-school students from choice programs.

In other words, starting a private school is a catch-22. Charters have worked through these sorts of things, and states need to import some ideas like provisional accreditation into the private choice sector if they ever want to encourage a startup rather than an incumbent culture. That’s supposed to be a central justification for school choice, but programs labeled “school choice” almost entirely ignore this fundamental set of problems.

Deregulate Private Schools

A companion to the previous point is that states need to deregulate private schools. It’s not currently very well-known, but states micromanage private schools.

Some have curriculum mandates, most have teacher credential mandates (although research shows that traditional teaching credentials are an utter waste of time and mostly Progressive brainwashing), and almost all have accreditation mandates.

It’s not very well-known, but states micromanage private schools.

In the first place, there’s nearly no proof that the things accreditation requires improves school quality.

“Develop a school improvement plan that incorporates all stakeholders,” blah blah blah. “Develop a sustainability and inclusivity plan that incorporates the whole community with a special focus on minorities.” How about reading, writing and arithmetic instead?

In the second, as in higher education, using accreditation as a condition of allowing taxpayer funding corrupts the accreditation process. It gives accreditors power to tell schools, “Nice little Christian school you got there. Be a sad thing if you actually taught your religion’s sexual ethics and therefore lost your ability to accept taxpayer aid.” Accreditation needs to be entirely privatized for private schools. End of story.

Further, the federal government, in all its wisdom, provides funds to “help” private schools by giving their teachers the same crappy “training” that helps public-school teachers perform so well. That can go, too, thanks.

End the Teacher Education Monopoly

People. The research says certification doesn’t produce better teachers. That’s probably because teacher certification and teacher degree programs are more about Progressive indoctrination than about academics or effective teaching.

Mostly, we have no idea why effective teachers are effective. So,we can’t teach it. We can only open more opportunities for more people to try, and quickly cut the ones who don’t rise to the occasion.

We can also deregulate education in general, because the education culture of “Mother, may I?” turns off smart people who can make big payoffs in other fields by busting their butts against far less mindless opposition.

It also attracts people who care more about self-esteem and box-checking than they do concrete achievement. The best box-checkers get promoted to principal, then superintendent. Now you know why education is such a mess.

State-mandated teacher credentials will always be terrible because they create a monopoly for whomever issues the credentials.

The certifiers alone get to say who can teach, who can’t, and can charge would-be entrants.

I taught college level courses in American and European history for 27 years, and yet I am deemed unqualified to teach at the K thru 12 level in Missouri.

End Curriculum Monopolies

It was Progressives who came up with the idea to “standardize” education along the lines of the “scientific management” of big business.

They’ve brought this general principle into all of education, and it deforms curriculum under the guise of “education standards.”

These are mindbogglingly stupid, unintelligible, politically correct lists of state (and now national) mandates for what teachers must teach in each subject in each grade.

Yes, I know Republicans as well have been gung-ho about curricular central planning since before Reagan. But it doesn’t work. 

Research shows education standards have nothing to do with student achievement. Again, that should be no surprise, because monopolies destroy quality.

They create a power center that naturally attracts special-interest groups, whose inevitable dominance erodes self-governance, thought, and language.

So, it’s time for state and federal lawmakers to get out of the curriculum business.

Now folks, don’t get me wrong. I am all in favor of public education just as Thomas Jefferson was.

However, I am opposed to what it has become.

The ideas presented today should be adopted by our public school system. Break free of federal and state regulations and mandates and return the education of our children to “We, the people”.

If that cannot be done, then we should push for totally independent charter schools, free of federal and state mandates, funded by our tax dollars, hiring our local teachers at a good wage, and working with them to set our own curricula for our kids.

It is called capitalism. If public schools won’t comply, let them compete.

The choice is theirs.