I really loved this post on charter schools (where one progressive, Freddie deBoer, takes down pro-charter progressive Matt Yglesias for his argument that charter schools provide choice for poor people and therefore are good). Bold is mine.
Matt Yglesias pulls out his new hobby horse: rich people have more choices than poor people, charter schools increase choices for poor people (even if they don’t work!), and for this reason we should, I take it, undertake all the union-smashing ideas beloved of the reform movement.
… “rich people have more choices than poor people” is another way of saying “we live under capitalism.” Rich people are always going to have more choices because that’s the point of money. It is indeed the job of government to provide for certain material needs that the poor cannot procure for themselves. And the government should do the best job it possibly can. But government shouldn’t be in the business of artificially providing choice under the bizarre notion that just having choice is a virtue in and of itself, and it really shouldn’t be in the business of providing choices that can’t be proven to work.
Talking about choice as if it is a benefit regardless of the objective reality of whether the choices are beneficial is bizarre. And the idea that tax dollars should pay for that choice, in that absence of evidence as to why, is just a bridge too far. This seems like simple sense to me.
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I’ll ask again, as I asked in the prior post: why does this argument count against public education and not against any other governmental enterprise? Again, rich people have many more choices in transportation than poor people. Should the government fund a system of charter buses that perform about the same service as the regular bus? Where are Yglesias’s posts calling for such a thing? Or perhaps it’s a voucher model he favors. Should we allow any average citizen to withdraw his or her “share” of the public transit budget and use that money to purchase a car? If choice is so compelling, absent of any evidence that the choices being presented actually work, why isn’t Yglesias out beating the bushes for such a policy? Even this is a generous comparison: I’m quite sure that a Toyota can do as good of or better a job than the city bus. The jury is still out on charter schools.
This is the best takedown of the “choice” argument for charter schools I’ve seen.
And there are many studies out there that show that charters don’t perform any better, and may perform worse, than public schools. Draining our public schools of money and students doesn’t help us solve the problems in our public schools, and it appears to put many of our kids on shaky educational ground. As deBoer says, “dividing public funding for schools, even if you preserve per pupil funding, can effectively reduce resources, because education funding is largely based on pooled costs.”
Charters are less accountable, and often exclude underperforming students via selective enrollment, leaving those students behind to disproportionately burden the public schools but with no additional money to address their issues. But beyond that, maybe it’s just not our job as a society to provide everyone with tons of choices. Our job as a society is to set up a system that allows for some minimum sort of level playing field - which we do, by providing a public school system. We shouldn’t take our eyes off of improving our public schools in favor of some false notion that choice has some sort of intrinsic virtue.
[Via dkos.]
