Diane Ravitch, a guru of educational
practice and philosophy, recently
summarized many of the negatives of privatizing some or all of our
public schools. She attributes Trumpian enthusiasm for this to (1) the
influence of the rich in the top 1% (she does not specify what they would hope
to gain by this move on life's chessboard), (2) the influence of Pres. Obama
with his Race to the Top moneys, (3) the initiatives of certain wealthy
visionaries who anticipated both big profits and higher levels of student
achievement, and (4) the influence of various wheeler-dealers who hoped to make
a quick buck, even if it meant having the schools opened for only a short time,
which would have been enough time to line their pockets (in other words,
cynical exploitation of children and their real educational needs).
She clearly states the shortcomings of the
charter school/privatizing movement. Although these issues need to be
addressed if privatizing goes forward, as Donald Trump says he will do, they
are hardly decisive reasons for not privatizing. Ravitch indicates that
financial rip-offs have taken place, teacher turnover has often been great
owing to excessive demands on their time and energy, selectivity for admissions
has enabled the charter and private schools to exclude some of the more
difficult to teach students, and the vision of the common good is disrupted.
But what about the negatives in the public
sector that have made the "school choice" movement seem increasingly
attractive? Ravitch addresses none of these. For example, financial
waste and corruption of billions of taxpayer dollars has much to do with the
increased momentum of the privatizing movement. Take the New York City
schools. Each school now has to have a financial report called a
"Galaxy Report" online along with that school's testing statistics.
However, these reports are far from self-explanatory, and a citizen could
understand them only with some exhaustive research, which the average parent of
a school-age child has neither the time nor the inclination to do.
Therefore, these "reports" of school finances or school test
results merely provide charades of transparency.
Nobody is privy to actual shifts of funds
by the principal from one line of the budget to another, nor are audits of the
individual school's books, if indeed there are audits, ever made public.
This former teacher never once in over 20 years of teaching saw any audit
of the funds of any high school published by the NYC Dept. of Education.
The assistant principals for organization in the high schools typically have
never had even one accounting course in their years of education, yet they are
often, along with the principals, the key players in superintending the revenue
flow allocated to the school
School construction for the repair,
renovation, and building of schools is to this observer a racketeering
enterprise. This writer in the 1990s taught in an NYC high school being
renovated. In 1988, the bid for the job when it started was $28 million,
but by 1995, the "cost overrun" (laughable terminology) had the job
at $97 million. And when the job was completed, the roof still leaked, the
tiles of the floors were scuffed and ugly after one year, and the doorknobs had
been broken off or stolen from the doors of the music wing. The high
school was declared a failing school by N.Y. State and, under the brilliant
leadership of Joel Klein, eliminated as a comprehensive high school and broken
into three "academy schools." A few short years later, these
three schools were in turn declared failed, phased out, and replaced with four
new schools. This corrupt farce was in only one high school in our great
metropolis. Multiply this scenario by dozens of high schools, middle
schools, and elementary schools, and we can begin to see the true impetus for
the charter and privatizing movement.
Prof. Ravitch insists on seeing the
privatizing movement as a scheme to make money by individuals and
corporations that already have too much money. At the same time, she
chooses to ignore the phenomenal profits of various educational corporations
such as Houghton Mifflin, Cengage, and Pearson from their relationships with
the public schools. Add to this the College Board, which provides all the
SAT and AP exams for the public schools, and the vast bureaucracies needed to
run all the educational programs and to service the vast data collection that
is at the heart of Common Core, and we see more than a little pecuniary stake
in having "business as usual" in the public schools. Robert
Weissberg in his many books and articles as well as Bruce Deitrick Price, both
frequent contributors to American Thinker, have documented how bogus and
wasteful the programs supposed to improve education have actually been.
Yet there is another problem with the
public schools that Prof. Ravitch fails to discern. She expresses concern
that privatizing will detract from the "common good" served by the public
schools. This observation begs the question – namely, what is the common
good? It is obvious to all discerning citizens that the public schools
increasingly exist in a moral vacuum. The Ten Commandments can no longer
be displayed, prayer is prohibited under the false doctrine of "separation
of church and state," and displays of creches, for example, at
Christmastime are also not allowed. Ironically, and as a well kept
"open secret" at one high school where I taught, Muslim students were
allowed to use classroom space for times of prayer.
One NYC high school for years had a Mr.
and Ms. High School contest (school name omitted to protect the guilty), where
the girls competed in bikinis and the boys got to flex their muscles while
wearing jock straps or the smallest skivvies. Additionally, the textbook
in a sex ed class in that high school said that some people believe that you
should wait until marriage to have sexual intercourse, and those few people who
believe that way "should be tolerated." Another page in the
same book told the studious teens that while some believe that the size of the
male organ is important, that is a mistaken belief in terms of sexual
satisfaction. It is rewarding to know that this kind of information is
being made available in a college preparation curriculum.
Under the great progressive leadership of
schools chancellor Joel Klein and NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, a leadership
academy was set up to seek and train promising individuals for
principalships. One young woman in her twenties spoke to potential
candidates and openly thanked her mother, who already was a principal in New
York, for this wonderful opportunity. She did not even realize that in
doing so, she was admitting the nepotism that won her the spot as a principal
despite almost no experience. Another young man in his late twenties or
early thirties, politically correct but also without much experience, was the
principal of a middle school for social justice in the Bronx, one of the
subdivisions of New York City.
Social justice has become a code word for
the "cultural Marxist" agenda. In another high school where
this writer taught, the Star-Spangled Banner was never sung, but under the
rubric of "social justice," a different song, "Lift Up Your
Heart and Sing" was regularly sung. It's referred to as "the
black national anthem."
Thus, just based on this anecdotal
evidence about official school policies regarding sexual activity and sexual
identity, about finding inexperienced but compliant, left-wing know-nothings
for leadership positions, and about pandering to identity politics rather than
the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of Almighty God, we must question
Ravitch's assumption that the public schools are serving the common good.
The common good denotes not only unity, but an ideal of the moral and upright
individual linked by mutual respect to others in an extensive, righteous,
caring, responsible, freedom-loving, and unified community. The failure
of the public schools, especially in our cities, to do this is the key reason
why we must support the privatization of our educational system.
E.J. Ludwig's book The
Catastrophic Decline of America's Public High Schools: New York City, A Case
Study is available at Amazon.com.
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