Checkers and me
By Todd Alan Price
Given the thrashing that public education has taken for almost a quarter of a century since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence In Education under the Reagan Administration, it is ironic in the extreme to hear people like Chester Finn, who have been on a relentless course to replace public schools with privatized education, pose as advocates of saving the public schools.
It is also ironic to hear Democrats and liberals, given the violent way they reacted against A Nation at Risk in 1983, defend NCLB and look for ways to fix it and keep it alive.
What will be left of the public schools and what will they look like when this privatizing firestorm that goes by the name No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has run its course? For an answer to this question, a place to look is Ohio.
For the past three years in my career as an educational researcher I had more than a passing interest in NCLB. I had received funding from my institutional home, National-Louis University, to work with Ohio-based co-producer Geoff Berne on an educational documentary entitled Public Education In The Crosshairs to shed light on the implementation of the law. I did so starting not in Chicago, where I currently reside and teach, but in the city of Hamilton, Ohio, Ohio’s eighth largest city, where NCLB was signed by President George W. Bush on January 23, 2002.
Ohio is rightly the birthplace of public education. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made it so. From the pioneers navigating the rivers and back ways through the new frontier, so emerged the northwestern territories of Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin, and with them a shared ethic in favor of the state having a role in educating its citizenry. The language of the ordinance provided for a “thorough and efficient” system of state-supported public schools led to a commitment to education for the masses, a system that has endured up until 2006.
Yes, 2006.
In Ohio, the term “public” in “public school” has actually been stretched to the breaking point of meaninglessness in a 2006 Ohio Supreme Court decision State of Ohio EX REL. Ohio Congress of Parents and Teachers Et al v. State of Ohio Board of Education Et al. and White Hat Management LLC et al. As a result of this ruling, which echoes the Finn creed that charter schools are really “public” schools, Ohio corporations can now be called “public” schools, too. Without a shred of evidence that the educational establishment, the media, local government, and the people are aware of this ruling or the full impact it will have, Ohio public education is now definitively lost at sea.
A particularly staunch fighter for public schools until his recent death, Ohio Federation of Teachers president Tom Mooney led the Coalition for Public Education that filed the suit challenging Ohio’s establishment of two systems: one of the traditional public schools and the other a charter school system that would operate out of the boundaries of the public school’s checks and balances while still using public taxpayer funds. Mooney died at age 52 in December, 2006, but leaves behind a pro-public school constituency—that exists almost entirely outside of the Democratic or Republican parties—that seems determined to restore the integrity of a unitary rather than bipolar public school system.
With public funds in the amount of more than $500 million being spent annually on charter schools rather than traditional public schools, and 275 charter schools now in operation throughout the state, Ohio is far and away the number one state in the country in its support of private schools and privatization of public education.
And yet the results of the “choice” experiment in Ohio have been notoriously dismal. In 2004, more than 70 percent of Ohio’s charter schools were ranked deficient and placed under academic emergency or watch (contrasted with 14 percent of traditional public schools). About 50 percent of Ohio’s charter school teachers quit each year, compared with 10 percent in the public schools. Charter schools have 30 students per teacher compared to 19 in public schools. Seventy-eight percent of charter school teachers have less than five years experience compared to 27 percent in public schools.
Meanwhile, the magazine Education Week gave Ohio a D-minus grade for equity of school funding.
Because NCLB puts mechanisms in place to punish rather than repair schools with failing student populations by shutting them down and either giving students a “choice” of transferring to alternate schools or handing the schools themselves over to for-profit management companies, Ohio public education has been put on death row and is awaiting the hangman’s noose.
How disturbing is it, therefore, to see not only the typical American ultraconservative leadership and think tankers but the Democratic leadership under supposedly progressive-liberal Congressman George Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, commit doggedly to the preservation and reauthorization of No Child Left Behind with its sure consequence of the eventual total privatization of education in states like Ohio that are ripe for it. Miller seems intent upon saving this ship and navigating it to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ favorite place for sinking schools, what she calls “Safe Harbor.” Safe Harbor works like this: a school or school district that is failing is “rescued” from being closed. The only catch is you might have to open your school administration to a private body, get rid of all your staff, and reopen as . . .a charter.
Why are Democrats who have been public education’s traditional defenders fighting to keep this law afloat? Why save a law that is at its heart meant to punish schools, especially, it seems, those schools with the least resources in spite of having the greatest need for improvement? Why force students to take inane fill-in-the-bubble tests, year after year, when testing companies like Harcourt Assessment Inc. can’t even keep up with the increased demand, fail to provide the instructional materials to teachers, and screw up the recording and reporting of students’ test scores?
Why waste all the Title I education money, sending millions of dollars to Sylvan Educational Solutions and other so-called Supplemental Educational Service providers — like the company of President Bush’s brother, Ned Bush, Ignite Inc.— when only 11.9 percent of the students who truly need the services get them?
Why would we keep a law that is failing, and in so doing making the schools, teachers, students, principals and parents miserable? Why, in so doing, would we eliminate recess, shorten school lunch, and as even the pro-privatization Fordham Foundation panelists in Washington admit that even they fear is happening, discard the knowledge of the ages to make room for test prep? Why would we turn over the 200 years of the liberal democratic education tradition of free and appropriate education, the American public school system, to a consortium of transnational corporations in the form of charters . . . and call the new system “public?”
I was recently interviewed on WGTD, Kenosha’s public radio station, to answer questions like this. Some other questions and comments from callers included, “How did the law come together and why is it bipartisan?” And, as with the war in Iraq, “You would think that anyone associated with it would by this time be looking to jump ship.”
Perhaps the Democrats think now that they have control over Congress they can use their newfound leverage to free up money to pay for the law. Perhaps they are worried that the Fortune 500 companies and former Secretary of Education Rod Paige are going to utterly privatize the public school system if NCLB fails. Perhaps they share Checkers Finn’s worshipful obsession with profits and competition.
Most likely though, they are just plain afraid of being seen as leaving children behind if they oppose the law. Can plain old political cowardice explain something so grotesque over an issue that is so vital to the essential functions of our society and our democracy? A brief study of our nation's history says yes.