Editor’s note: This commentary is by Bruce E. Buxton, who is headmaster emeritus of the Falmouth Academy in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and executive director of the the Scandinavian Seminar in Amherst, Massachusetts.
[T]he politically driven educational enthusiasms that have so undermined public confidence in our public schools show themselves in the current national controversy over charter schools and, in Vermont, the efforts of some to limit school choice. It is disappointing that the critics defending the status quo misunderstand a grass-roots school choice movement, driven by a hunger for accountability, not as its critics suggest, a desire to eliminate accountability.
The chimera of accountability as promoted by our pension driven system fools no one outside the collusion of back scratching pensioners, who include the professors of education selling expensive certification degrees to hopeful superintendents, principals and teachers anxious to build resumes. Unhappy parents must navigate superintendent’s bureaucracies which occupy offices far from the schools their children are sent to. These distant offices house layers of bureaucrats including assistant superintendents for this or that, who hide behind opaque professional sounding schemes for school improvement justified by bromides and certifications. Parents are reduced to appealing to obscure school committees not in daily contact with their child’s school. They are assured that their schools are somehow accountable, officially accredited, and the teachers are degreed, licensed, supervised and approved and to suck it up. It’s indeed unaccountable that a system that pretends to offer accountability and opposes any unorthodox effort to achieve it, has so lost the confidence of its clients.
The critics of school choice fail to understand the flaws in the circular pension driven accountability schemes, in which the professors are paid to license the superintendents (with the absurd credential of a doctorate in education) and these same doctor-superintendents in semi-retirement go on to teach education courses at the graduate schools of education that sell expensive master’s degrees in education to the members of the teachers unions (degrees that make everyone in the system appear accountable but are notoriously unconnected to any real performance). And the critics seem unwilling to address the central issue behind the only grassroots reform in American education: school choice.
Magnet, pilot, homeschooling and alternative schools sprang up everywhere long before charter schools became a household word, and in the ‘70s, country day schools grew apace in affluent communities where they could attract support. The begged questions in the orthodox criticism of school choice are always the same: Where did such powerful dissatisfaction come from, that American families were ready to bail out of their traditional public schools in such numbers? If the unions were doing such a great job and all those shiny new education degrees amounted to anything at all, why were parents and children so ready to bail? If these schools are so accountable, how is it that they are so opposed to any market test of their product? To answer those questions would require some analysis of the dynamic of tenure in our graduate schools of education and some analysis of how unions have fouled the air in so many schools. And it would invite a look at the school superintendents as corporate enablers, happy to invent and manage programs to address social problems politicians have swept under the schools. The school as rug of convenience offers ambitious superintendents a platform for aggrandizement. The more programs the school runs, the greater the justification for high salaries for administrators. To navigate a smoke and mirrors accountability scam, follow the pensions.
The real injustice in the political failure to come to grips with the central issues in the school choice movement is that those teachers and parents who are among the most idealistic among us have struggled against the odds to set up, unsupported by church or state, private schools, charter schools and other forms of accountable choice. The 70-hour workweeks common to teachers in charter schools, so shocking to professor Dianne Ravitch and other critics, are not uncommon among faculty in private schools, who scorn to cling to the protections of unions because they value being able to teach as they feel called to teach. When they enjoy that freedom and encouragement, they are like artists who love what they do: pensions be damned! They recoil at the notion that they should be in it for the cash or comforts. These are the teachers we want for our children.The charter schools, like the private schools they are modeled on, attract such teachers, unencumbered by union rules and education degree pieties.
The false accountability foisted on an unsuspecting public includes the false democracy of the elected school board, easily manipulated by the superintendents and essentially removed from and unknown to the electorate (ask any parent to name two of them) but trotted out as a bromide for democracy in the name of accountability. The failure of a sensible accountability free from the pieties of the unions, school committees, superintendents and education professors, an accountability that could have withstood expensive fads like open classroom high schools (approved and promoted by the public school committees and the pensioners) standards, testing and on and on would suggest that a different model of accountability based on a history of results is in order. Private day schools charging near $30,000 for a product the public high school next door can’t give away suggest a market sensitive accountability the pensioners have disdained to deliver.
An Ozzie and Harriet faith in a public school system that forms a healthy core of civic identity is many a day late and millions of dollars short. It fails to notice what Ted Sizer tagged as the self-dealing “treaties” or tacit self-serving agreements among the pensioners and how those treaties have undermined the product we expect our schools to offer: a healthy literacy and a training for confident skepticism and informed decision.
