As we discussed in class, the specific effectiveness of both charter schools and voucher programs seems besides the point. They are certainly utilitarian, and are more or less effective (depending on the specific context of the school, students, and district). They fail, though, because they use an inappropriate capitalistic model that is inappropriate for education. Ravitch (2013) cites John Merrow, who asks "why America- which had pioneered the mass-produced automobile with the Ford Model T- had not been able to mass-produce high quality schools" (p.174). The answer seems obvious: regions are different, schools are different, and children are different. Attempts to mass-produce education will never yield quality education so long as these things are true.
I am leaving aside the shady business practices, conflicts of interest, ethical violations, etc. that tend to follow charter schools and voucher programs, because I want to emphasize that even if those issues disappeared, and we could somehow trust boards of directors to be moral, privatizing education is bad for students, teachers, and communities.
References
Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Vintage.
Gorski, Paul C., and Kristien Zenkov, eds. The big lies of school reform: Finding better solutions for the future of public education. Routledge, 2014.
I am really glad you pulled that quote from the Ravtich book because I feel like it totally sums up the whole argument for privatizing education.
ReplyDeleteSo many of these people who push for charter schools and vouchers seem to think that education can be ran like a business, but like we talked about last week, education in the United States does not have the ability to turn away the "defective parts" the way an assembly line can. It seems even more far fetched that these reformers think privatizing education is the answer. However, if you follow this capitalistic line of thinking, I guess that is the answer since you do have the ability to turn away the parts that do not work.
I think our best solution is to help people understand that every student is different and by extension there is no one type of reform fix all strategy that will work. Different schools in different regions need different types and levels of support.