SOUND OFF: A reader responds
I had a productive exchange with a reader regarding the views expressed about school choice in my VERBATIM post this week
This morning I exchanged emails with a reader who had feedback about the school choice commentary in yesterday’s VERBATIM post.
Two things came of the exchange:
In one section, it read as if Derrell Bradford expressed sympathy for the school district’s role as the primary education player during the pandemic (when I said that), and…
From a personal context, the reader offered nuanced thoughts about the school choice commentary in VERBATIM.
With permission to reprint, here is the reader’s response:
Before the few years I spent working as a classroom teacher, I had been indifferent to homeschooling. I grew up in an evangelical church where homeschooling was somewhat common. I later learned that the quasi-preschool program I attended at my church was a program run by and for the homeschoolers, which they allowed me to attend while my mom was leading a Bible study.
My early exposure was to homeschooling which was done well and produced kids who were generally ahead of their peers in terms of academic progress, non-academic experiences, and overall maturity.
When I learned first-hand how incredibly hard it is to teach (and especially to teach well), I began doubting the wisdom of homeschooling for most people. On top of that, I later learned that a few of my " homeschooled " friends wound up significantly behind in school (and even life) because they got away with doing much less learning than their parents thought was happening.
One of my best high school friends ended up functionally dropping out of school -- he had switched to homeschool partway through high school, and his homeschool work gradually fizzled until there he was: 19 with no high school diploma, living in his mom's basement and working a low-pay part-time job. Fortunately, it wasn't long before he got his GED and eventually got back on track.
Another friend (the maid of honor in our wedding) homeschooled throughout her youth and then attended district high school. She entered 9th grade significantly behind academically and struggled to earn Cs and Ds through most of high school.
Considering all this, it's exactly the utopian optimism of libertarians [Chris in an email] mentioned that keeps me from ever feeling like I can fully throw in with them.
Related: My state was very slow to require anything from private schools participating in our tuition voucher program. To begin with, there were no requirements for data reporting, no participation in the state test... nothing besides an annual financial audit (which had to be submitted to the state but was not made publicly available) to ensure school leaders weren't embezzling funds to buy a fancy car (which happened more than once).
Over time, they've been required to administer the state test to students attending with a voucher, submit some data, and participate in the state's system that awards report cards to schools.
However, we've always stopped short of setting up any academic accountability for private schools taking public funds. The only way for a school to get kicked out of the program remains financial impropriety. The right-wingers usually cite free market ideology in defending the lack of accountability, saying there's no higher form of accountability than parents voting with their feet. (These same folks will often condemn district schools for being unaccountable despite being subject to this same 'highest form' of accountability...)
My take: We let people buy many things, including things that are bad for them. For example, you can walk into a liquor store and pick up various alcoholic products. However, we won't let you buy stuff with harmful levels of methanol that can make you blind or even kill you. When it comes to schools, I think it's reasonable to decry the paternalistic and doctrinaire (to employ a great word you used on this week's podcast) perspectives of many technocratic reformers who define school quality in very narrow terms that don't match up with what parents want and need.
However, I can't get down with the opposing faction. I'd much prefer we set a performance floor that says, "you can pick a lot of schools, but you can't pick one that will leave your kid functionally illiterate and innumerate -- you can't buy the academic equivalent of moonshine... at least not with public funds."
On the point in the original post about how conventional school districts responded to the pandemic: I'm genuinely glad to hear your district did a better job than mine of standing up for its pandemic offerings.
The best examples of pandemic schooling I saw came from charters, and the worst came from districts. My perception could be a function of my media bubble, but I try very hard to consume an omnivorous diet of news, information, etc., especially on education.
Still, I think many districts did do a great job with this. And I'm confident that many non-district schools botched it. On average, smaller districts and those in rural or suburban settings seem to have handled things well, and larger districts in big cities typically didn't. So it's not necessarily that I think charters and other non-district schools did an amazingly better job than the districts that handled things well... it's more that in the districts that did poorly, non-district schools were much quicker to respond and provided much stronger offerings. This is a benefit of a more decentralized system of autonomous schools: you don't wind up sticking ALL families with the bad decisions of a very small number of people.
But as is often the case among ed reform people, I'm certainly over-dialing on urban districts in forming a perception of how the American education system handled this. Zooming all the way out, you are correct that charters remain a relatively minor factor in the big picture.
I love dialogue. It is the fuel to human understanding. If you have thoughts about this post or others, please send them to chris@citizenstewart.com.