When I first heard about the charter school movement, I knew it boded no good. Having escaped Catholic School for what I consider to have been a great school (HPHS, say it louder we’re the best!), I have always been grateful for, and felt protective of, public education. The fact that the people pushing for Charter schools are the same people that are destroying the middle class in many and sundry ways just reinforces my suspicions. I’ve come around to the point of view that the objective is not to improve education, but to produce workers who have been trained to believe that they can expect nothing better out of life than a minimum wage job, supplemented (if they’re lucky) by food stamps. Sort of like the life of a Wal-Mart employee, and isn’t it a massive coincidence that the Wal-Mart family has spent a billion dollars to promote charter schools.
A commenter on Diane Ravitch’s blog put it nicely, and I’m passing it along:
There is also a social engineering aspect of charter schools, especially prevalent among the “no excuses” chains (KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools, et. al.), which are obsessed with herding and controlling children in punitive, Skinner Box- type environments. It’s about training children, not educating them, to be docile and obedient, no matter the oppressiveness of the environment, prepping them for the lack of autonomy they’ll face in the adult workforce, and preventing them from having even an inkling that another world is possible.
If you can convince them when they’re young that the best they can hope for is life as a drone, then you don’t have to deal with uppity union organizers and you can count on them acquiescing to a political order with a facade of democracy and a reality of autocracy.
As the commenter points out, it’s also about disempowering teachers, thereby reducing them to drones too. Only in America could anyone give credence to the argument that disempowering teachers and paying them less is bound to improve education, but that’s the essence of the claim. Why pay teachers well, when that taxpayer money should go into the pockets of the heads of for-profit charter school companies, for once they’ve destroyed the public system, you can kiss the non-profits goodbye.
Unfortunately, the push for charter schools still has a bipartisan flavor to it. Obama’s education secretary of education was terrible on the issue, though he’s a rabid public school fan compared to DeVos. Here at home, the Malloy administration has been horrible, shoveling money toward the charters while starving the public schools, all well documented by Jonathan Pelto on his blog. (Yes, I know Jonathan can sometimes be a bit over the top-who among us is not, but the facts support him in the main.) I’m ready to support the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 2018, but in the primary I’ll be looking to see who has the best position on public education.
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