That it is necessary at all is a tragedy.
But I want it to be accessible. I want it to be legal. And I want it to be a whole lot rarer than it is right now.
That’s right: I’m pro-choice. Pro-SCHOOL choice, that is.
But just barely.
Is it really necessary? When less than one-third of all tenth graders can do tenth grade math, and high school graduates have a difficult time filling out a resume with complete sentences, there’s a pretty good case to be made that it is. And with the Douglas County voucher program making its way through litigation, it’s a case that’s going to be in front of us for the foreseeable future.
What’s funny to me is that friends of mine who take their children to charter and private schools don’t cite statistics. In fact, when I point out to them that, based on the School Growth Model, their school’s test scores aren’t that great, it doesn’t matter. Instead, they talk to me about high expectations, challenge, and their firm opinion that their school is less hostile to their beliefs than the traditional public school. They prefer a school that values accomplishment over “acceptance,” discipline over “diversity,” and excellence over “equality”—or at least puts all of those on an equal footing. And if the test scores aren’t impressive, their projects are.
There may be a case to be made that some parents would choose a “less rigorous” setting, given the option. But that’s sometimes the only option in the inner cities, and that’s even true in some of our suburban havens. To illustrate: my friend Cheryl asked around, and discovered that 12 of the 15 families in her upper-middle class neighborhood take their children somewhere other than the neighborhood school.
That is to say, four out of five families in an otherwise affluent neighborhood have decided that the school in their neighborhood does not meet their minimum expectations for delivering a quality education.
They’re all dentists, too.
That is a tragedy. A couple months ago I watched “Waiting for Superman,” and, as scathing a story it is about the dysfunction of the Big Education bureaucracy, the more important story is the desperation families feel to get their children out of the tragic parts of the “system.”
Because of my job, I am in a lot of schools, and I have never worked in one that mirrored the corruption and failure that inspired “Superman.” The vast majority of teachers I’ve worked with are dedicated, intelligent, and altruistic. But I also know the frustration teachers feel when they bump up against the protectionist instincts of a bureaucracy that, more than anything, needs to stay off of the nightly news. I’ve also watched with sadness the cumulative effect of that frustration over the course of 25 year careers marked with budget cuts, public scorn, and community disengagement. Try to imagine the disheartening effect of being told that we can’t expect students to do homework on their own because we don’t control their homes, and you’ll have an idea of the challenges we face.
And so I have to grudgingly allow that school choice is a good thing. But it is not my preference.
Public Schools should be palaces around which an entire community is centered; teachers should be well-trained, highly-valued members of the community; schools should have to compete for the services of the best and given the resources to attract them; curriculum should be thorough, broad, and at an exceptionally high level; and every student should be expected to come to school intent on and prepared to learn and to achieve.
But none of those are true.
And so, schools of choice fill a niche for families that want something more. Maybe we’ll be smart enough to study these schools and use them as models for fixing the rest of the public schools. Maybe. I hope so.
Because it is simply not acceptable for the neighborhood school to be “Plan B.”
Michael J. Alcorn (mjalcorn@comcast.net) of Arvada is a public school teacher, fitness instructor and father of three.
