Arlene Ackerman, Tony Bennett and Kenneth Whalum are hardly a representative sample of elected and appointed officers in public school systems across the nation today. But their participation on an American Federation For Children National Summit panel Friday does chip away at the imaginary wall between public education and parental choice.
"We have allowed our opponents to draw a caricature of us that says we're against public schools," said Bennett, state superintendent of public instruction in Indiana (pictured here). "I'm not an adversary of public schools. I'm an advocate for public school children."
Whalum, an elected member of the Memphis Board of Education, was more dire in his remarks. He used a Titanic analogy to describe the educational predicament facing this generation of students. But he sees nothing inconsistent in providing public or private options or anything in between. "I'm responsible," he said with a degree of volume in his voice, "for distributing the lifeboats."
To a manager such as Bennett, charter schools or voucher schools are simply another tool to meet the needs of individual students and to stimulate traditional public schools to think of new and better ways to answer those needs. For Ackerman, the former superintendent for Philadelphia schools, the issue is also intensely personal.
Ackerman spent 40 years in the traditional public education system. She says she was proud to see the growth in reading and math achievement for Philadelphia students until she asked her staff to compute how long it would take the district, at that pace, to assure that all students met basic proficiency standards. The answer is part of the reason she left and is now trying to bring about change from the outside. That answer: 2123.
"That's a number I cannot get out of my head," she told the audience. "How can any of us live with that?"
A Monday New York Times story headlined, “As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics,” suggested that as doctors increasingly abandon their private practices and become employees of large health care institutions, they are no longer thinking like Republican-learning owners and instead thinking like Democratic-leaning workers. “Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices,” the article states, “but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening.”
The parallels with public education are instructive. A primary rationale for government taking over public education in the mid-1800s was the need for universal access to quality education. Horace Mann and other state political leaders argued that too much decentralization was undermining quality and allowing too many children to go uneducated. Their answer was a more centralized, uniform public education system owned and managed by local governments under the guiding hand of state governments.
The industrial revolution that transformed our way of life in the 1800s also transformed how the government organized and managed public education. By the early 1900s public education had become a government-run factory with educators being assembly line workers. In the late 1950s and early 60s, teachers began organizing industrial-style unions to protect themselves from the abuses of these politically-run factories, and in doing so became a core constituency of organized labor and the Democratic Party, which is where they remain today.
According to the Times story, health care and doctors are beginning to follow a similar path. But, ironically, while doctors are abandoning their private practices to join large health care factories, teachers and parents are increasingly using charter schools, homeschooling cooperatives, dual enrollment programs, publicly-funded private school options and virtual schools to create smaller, decentralized teaching and learning options. Schools, or learning networks, with fewer than 50 students are still rare, but they're proliferating. Perhaps in a decade or two more teachers will own private practices than doctors. Then political debates over tenure, merit pay and employee evaluations will be more common in medicine than education.
Finding the proper balance between contradictory forces is a challenge we all face in our daily lives, so it’s not surprising to see doctors and educators struggling to balance big versus small, centralized versus decentralized, and government-owned versus practitioner-owned. Despite the power of ideology, pragmatic concerns will ultimately control how these tensions are managed, although doctors should spend time in school districts talking with teachers before abandoning their medical practices and joining large health care factories. Working on an assembly line has its downsides.
As publicly-funded private schools have become more integrated into public education, the terms “publicly-funded education” and “public education” are becoming synonymous. I noticed the latest evidence of this semantic merger from Sara Mead earlier this month on her blog, Policy Notebook. Mead wrote that:
... charter schooling and publicly funded pre-kindergarten are both ultimately structural reforms that expand the boundaries of public education and create new spaces and opportunities for educators to serve children. Charter schools do this by allowing organizations other than school districts to operate public schools. Publicly funded pre-k does this by allowing districts and early childhood providers--both existing and new--to receive public funds to serve 4-year-olds.
She's correct. Publicly-funded providers are expanding the boundaries of public education. Public education today no longer means district schools only, but instead means all publicly-funded education, including charter schools, virtual schools, district schools and private schools receiving pre-K vouchers and tax credit scholarships. One reason I like this semantic and systemic integration is that it move us beyond the trite "private" versus "public" school debates. If all publicly-funded education is public education, then private schools receiving public funds are part of public education. School choice opponents can no longer argue that private schools receiving public funds are draining funds away from public education because these private schools are public education. And teacher unions can provide services to employees in publicly-funded private schools and still maintain their ideological and rhetorical commitment to public education.
Governors and legislatures in states as diverse as New Jersey, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Mexico are discussing legislation to provide families with more publicly-funded learning options via private providers, and many of these proposals will become law in 2011. The merger of public education and publicly-funded education is accelerating.
