The Nation Explains How to ‘Save’ Public Schools, Scare Quotes Necessary

The traditional public school system is an ailing
beast, and many of us at Reason would like it to succumb
to its wounds as quickly as possible. But if you are of the sort
that would like to save American K-12, preserve the tyranny of the
teachers unions, and continue funnelling millions of dollars into
the coffers of what is perhaps the most alienating government
bureaucracy of all, The Nation’s latest special issue is
just for you.

The “Saving Public Schools” edition contains nearly a dozen
articles with such scare-quoted headlines as “Venture
Capitalists Are Poised to ‘Disrupt’ Everything About the
Education Market” and “The
Secret to Eva Moskowitz’s ‘Success‘” (emphasis mine).
An unsigned editorial titled “Our
Public Education System Needs Transformation, Not
‘Reform’” gets the ball rolling:

Charter-school advocates and others who claim the mantle of
education reform have now seen their ideas put into practice in a
number of areas—from high-stakes testing to digital learning to the
takeover of struggling public schools. The results are in. How are
they doing? Suffice it to say, if this were a high-stakes test,
they’d fail.

As the articles in this issue illustrate, the strategies pursued
by education reformers frequently dovetail with those of austerity
hawks. The latter burnish their conservative credentials by cutting
budgets and defunding schools. The reformers sweep in to capitalize
on the situation, introducing charter chains like Rocketship and
K12, which produce real no benefits for students. The chains do,
however, generate cash for investors, as a new trove of public
money is directed to private coffers. Far too many poor kids,
meanwhile, are consigned to schools like Philadelphia’s Bartram
High: buffeted by violence, wracked by relentless budget cuts and
choked by the “white noose” of wealthy suburbs (in
the evocative phrase of former Mayor Richardson Dilworth) that
soak up a disproportionate share of resources.

As always, the comparison between charter schools and public
schools is no comparison at all. At least when charter schools
fail, they go out of business. Public schools, on the other hand,
flourish financially even as they languish academically. Despite
the vast sums of money poured into public schools in America’s big
cities, results seldom materialize. That’s because the money
doesn’t go toward rewarding innovative instruction in the
classroom. Many public teachers receive “lockstep” pay increases
that correlate to time on the job and degree attainment rather than
classroom effectiveness. Studies
confirm the uselessness of such an approach—and can you think
of a well-run private company where bad employees continue to draw
automatically increasing salaries despite lack of results?—but it
remains nevertheless.

The difference is that traditional schools have to put up with
public teachers unions: cartel-like organizations that vastly
exceeded any legitimate need for unionization eons ago. The
organizations
publicly denounce dissenters and push a stridently far-left
political agenda of dubious benefit to their rank-and-file members.
Remember, competent teachers aren’t getting paid any better than
incompetent teachers, and that’s the way the unions want it—in
fact, they routinely fight tooth and nail to protect the jobs of
bad teachers.

Meanwhile, union leaders—like the imperious Karen Lewis of
Chicago—draw huge
salaries while somehow still disparaging income
inequality, as if the income gap were between regular people and
teachers (public teachers actually get paid quite well), rather
than between union bosses and other teachers. But criticize the
union and it will hit back; even impersonal disagreements are
treated as declarations of war. Just ask Michael Mulgrew, president
of the New York City United Federation of Teachers, who
menacingly told opponents of Common Core that “I’m going to
punch you in the face and push you in the dirt.”

If this kind of system sounds great to you, well, I would guess
you’re in the union and at the top of its food chain. For everyone
else, traditional schooling shackles kids to learning environments
that are stifling at best, and at worst, wholly inadequate or
even detrimental. The social cost of this folly is enormous; the
financial cost is obscene.

Thankfully, the
libertarian approach to education is winning the long game.
People increasingly agree that school reform is a liberating force
with the power to rescue kids from the death sentence of public
education. Giving parents more of say in their children’s futures
has a better success rate than ritualistically increasing the pay
of Lewis, Mulgrew, and their cronies.

With any hope—and with heartfelt apologies to The
Nation—it is too late to “save” traditional public
education.