Traditional Education?

    I know public and charter school educators and constantly hear their perspectives. The dismantling of the public school system that educated me, to the degree I can claim such distinction, continues. And I am still shaken that my alma mater, Germantown High School, admittedly not even at the all-time apex of its academic fame when I attended forty-three years ago, but still capable of graduating reasonably literate students, has for “budgetary” reasons, been put up for salvage, while several Charter schools have been purpose built to service the same neighborhood.

  

  After sifting through competing political ideologies, which are about ‘something else’ – not education, weighing various partisan anecdotes for and against traditional public education, and surveying a small portion of serious academic researches, some employing such methodologies and formulae as “Stochastic Frontier Analysis” and “Fisher’s inverse Chi-squared test”, and locally, years of data from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) and its Annual Yearly Progress rankings (AYP), I found that Charter Schools, as a category, are statistically no better at arriving at desired proficiencies than traditional public schools. Surprised? I was! And after years (in some places decades) of being “no better”, public money is still building new Charter Schools, while still serviceable traditional public schools are closing. Moreover, there is a distinct lack of controversy over the extended mediocrity of the “Charter Schools”, with their advantages of preferred student selection, disciplinary flexibility, targeted-interest curriculums, freedom to employ innovative educational ideas, decentralized academic authority, no mandated (Social) support services, and other options and tools conceded by the same Federal, State and city authorities which are, in a mystification of laws and rules, somehow constrained from granting similar utilities to traditional public schools.

    

  Discovering incongruence between hype and reality I was left to marvel at the reciprocating manipulation. On one side of the political spectrum, those induced to identify with “traditional values” have become the most vociferous force against “traditional” public education. And on the other side, those supposedly enamored of the mutual obligations of the social contract are increasingly charmed by emulations of elitism. This strange, convoluted merger has inconceivably alloyed to denounce the public education system which was once the boast and crown jewel of the American Republic.

   So, since Charters aren’t delivering over-all better educational results, and government can “at will” integrate and utilize the same advantages and corrections of structure permissible to Charters in traditional public schools, why is there this growing and expensive trend to build and operate two distinct “public” school systems? There are two principle reasons. The first allows Charter schools to attend to the primary function of schools – education. Government had mistakenly comingled schools and social services provision instead of erecting separate infrastructures to address distinctive competencies and missions. And secondly, and most insidiously, to kill off one branch where there is strong unionization. The “inverted totalitarianism” of the Corporatocracy, which has openly displaced government as the arbiter of the social interests, has the goal of an union-less society; and among the few remaining obstacles to capital’s complete subjugation and silencing of labor, are the public service unions.

  

  I again point out that “Charters” as a category, almost as “non-union” as Walmart, by objective statistical measurements, haven’t overcome the metrics of non-success usually attributed to the evil impositions inherent in collective bargaining. But, the numbers are in, and they simply can’t blame the “union”. Nonetheless, plank-holders of middle class wages and benefits, street-educated and organized to appreciate the value of the property of their labor, find their grand-children have submitted to the unrelenting subliminal message that neo-feudalism is the default, inevitable destiny of economic Darwinism, stipulated to by disinterested Nature, and supposedly independent of the selfish interests of the self-interested with fulsome purchased access to deciding government power.   

  

  I don’t want to tell anyone what to think, but it is important for our society to question “big” changes, whether it’s the transition from isolationism to empire, or a public educational system that is supposed to be about “choice” that can only be profitably accessed if “it” chooses you.  The implications for conceptions of equity are clear, and expenditures of public dollars should primarily be about calculable equity.