[Peace-discuss] Charter Schools

[David Green]

Enlightened and reforming public school teachers understand the importance of public education in the education of a democratic citizenry, a tradition that goes back to Jefferson, Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Jonathan Kozol. Other enlightened reformers understandably gravitate to programs that will allow innovative and inspired individuals with the freedom to respect the human potential of our children. Single-sex schooling for African-American males is one of those reforms.
   
  From the late 19th century to World War II, the idea of education for "social efficiency" dominated. Schools were to assign students to their economic role in industrial society. This culminated in the influence of James Conant, President of Harvard, and the development of the "comprehensive high school in the 1950s." After Sputnik (1956), schooling was also closely associated with "national defense."
   
  Since the 1960s, public education has been most closely identified with the goal of "social mobility," in which students would find find rely on education to earn their just rewards in a "meritocratic society." The radical potentials of the Civil Rights and feminist movements were subverted by the notion of "equal opportunity," even when affirmative action was appropriately and effectively employed.
   
  Both the "social mobility" and "social efficiency" models do little more than reproduce the social class system, with the indivdiual exceptions proving the rule. Democratic schooling is drained of meaning, although always paid rhetorical heed.
   
  Like every other area of discourse in our political culture, that about education has allowable limits. It is assumed by both "liberals" and "conservatives" that "equal opportunity" is the answer to both educational and larger social problems. Of course, it is not. "Conservatives" stress "back to basics." Liberals stress "multicultural diversity" and affirmative action.
   
  The No Child Left Behind Agenda reflects long-term movements toward centralization and standardization in public education, applying a draconian neoliberal and conformist model in its employment of "marketplace" forces. But we can see from legislation proposed by Ted Kennedy in a Democratic-controlled Congress that liberals propose an expansion of federally-based standards on education at the state and local levels. There is no more of a substantive departure here than in liberal approaches toward foreign policy.
   
  In this context, it is understandable that some want to empower themselves and their children by abandoning the neoconservative/neoliberal public educational marketplace, which is designed to reproduce the class/race structure. It would be a mistake to think that that is a fundamental answer to a society with increasing levels of economic inequality. A true vision of democratic schooling--that is, one that genuinely values autonomy and self-government rather than economic mobility or efficiency--is still vital to educational reform that can have any hope of effecting substantive changes in the larger social order.
   
  Much more likely, substantive changes in the larger social order inspired by radical notions of human freedom and equality will allow schools, public or otherwise, the freedom to prepare children for a society that values them as human beings rather than ciphers in a class system. Schools will be able to tend to human beings when it no longer has to tend to cogs in a future machine. It will only be able to do so when education does not determine economic reward. That will be one consequence of socialism.
   
  In this limited context, I support both Germaine's struggle for teacher empowerment in a system controlled by corporate bureaucrats. I also understand Tanya Parker's and Karen's attraction to an immediate alternative outside the public system, in order to (in the words of Imani) catch those fruit that are falling from the vine as we speak.
   
  David Green
   
   
   
   
   

 
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