CHARTER SCHOOLS, VOUCHERS, IT'S ALL BULLSHIT

From the Huffington Post news wire:

School Vouchers: John Boehner Pushes To Revive
Program In DC As Model For National Reform

GOP House Speaker John Boehner and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced legislation Wednesday to revive a school voucher program for District of Columbia students nearly two years after Congress began phasing it out.

In a statement Wednesday, Boehner said the D.C. program is a model that can work well in other cities and should be the starting point of any new bipartisan education reform legislation developed with President Barack Obama's administration.

"There's only one program in America where the federal government allows parents from lower-income families to choose the schools that are best for their children, and it's right here in D.C.," Boehner said. "If we're serious about bipartisan education reform, then this bipartisan education bill should be the starting point."

More here.

Sigh. The whole voucher thing is nothing more than a stupid conservative ploy to privatize the schools. Unfortunately, liberals are pretty stupid, so the idea continues to bounce around political circles as though it somehow has merit.

The ostensible concept here is that when you give parents some choice in where they send their kids to school, the principles of capitalistic markets kick in, making schools "competitive." And everybody "knows" that competition makes everyone and everything better. Problem solved. Bad schools lose the competition; good schools win. Just because capitalistic competition makes everything better.

But nobody has even tried, ever, to explain more precisely how this works. When you have soap companies competing for consumer dollars, sure, things like lower prices, better cleaning ability, cool and refreshing scent, all these things can loosely be described as good results driven by market competition. But what is it that we're trying to get when we say we want better schools? Okay, we want our children to be better educated. But that doesn't really answer the question, either, because there isn't a universally accepted vision of what a better education looks like. I mean, for the last twenty years or so, it's all been about standardized tests: better education means better standardized test scores. So, I guess, even though there is no universally accepted understanding of better education, as far as the politics and public discussion go, we're talking about standardized test scores.

This is wildly problematic from the get-go because it assumes standardized test scores accurately reflect how well a student has been educated, and this is just not the case. I mean, standardized tests are actually not a bad assessment tool when used with lots of other methods, but the prevailing cultural winds are placing the lion's share of emphasis on testing, which gives us an astoundingly inaccurate picture of what's going on in the schools. But it gets worse. We don't even really need to do the testing to get the scores: all we have to do is use parental income figures, and the results are the same.

That is, so-called superior educational outcomes, the kind of thing that these hypothetical "better" schools are supposed to generate, have far more to do with family and community, things that are totally outside a given school's control, than with efforts teachers make in the classroom. So schools with rich kids are always going to be "better" than schools with poor kids. Always. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, but generally these anomalies generate decent test scores by gearing their entire institutional emphasis toward test-taking, the old "teaching to the test" strategy. Unfortunately, this isn't education: it's teaching dogs how to beg, shake hands, and roll over. Or even worse, these "underperforming" schools, because the pressure to raise test scores is so overwhelming, just straight-up cheat. And that's not education, either.

So sure, yeah, under some kind of competitive school choice system, every school is going to be working its ass off to raise test scores, but that in no way means that competition would be making schools better. Actually, given the emphasis on test scores to the exclusion of everything else, market competition would generally make the schools worse.

So the cockeyed voucher concept is bullshit. And it funnels money out of the public school system into private schools, making the public system even more crippled. What's particularly appalling about the persistence of the voucher notion is that, as I've observed, it's not based on any real ideas. It's just this blind conservative belief that market competition makes everything improve, when, empirically speaking, such is not always the case.

On the other hand, the schools are, indeed, pretty fucked up, but for reasons that are utterly ignored in the public discourse. Nobody seems to be interested in solving or even discussing the real problems. So why should I give a shit one way or the other?

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