No Rights Left Behind
The interrogation of precarity and freedom is well-documented and ongoing. However, we are not likely to ever hear about it this way. We are far more likely to hear the words choice, innovation, flexibility and the always best in show, freedom.
Words that, in the abstract, people can agree are objectively good things. This obfuscatory language is the wind beneath the wings of the school privatization movement.
According to the Center for Education reform, an organization whose mission is “ensuring that conditions are ripe for innovation, freedom and flexibility throughout U.S. education”. These are the differences between charter and public schools.
Source : EdReform.com
Do you know who else believes that the government is a freedom downer? Independent and parochial schools. This was the response to an oversight bill.
Source The NY Times
It does make a person wonder why independent schools would feel the need to challenge this considering their position in the education hierarchy. If you ask them it was for the sake of autonomy, which we can think of as freedom wrapped in elitism. Parochial schools cited religious freedom as the basis of their opposition.
The school privatization movement’s not-so-secret weapon is the hypocrisy of the wealthy. The top 20%, who send their children to well-resourced and often, very expensive schools. Schools that also tout their ability to have the freedom to innovate. So with that we’ve landed on two fundamental consensuses between the wealthy top 20% and the school choice privatization movement. The first is that private schools are seen as objectively best, and second, that good quality, innovative schools can only come from as little government involvement as possible.
Both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were federal programs that promoted the expansion of charters.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a near impossible terrain upon which to fight for the idea of public schools.
Wedged between private schools (educational freedom fighters) and public schools (tuition free). School choice advocates are successfully stoking class awareness and resentment to advance their movement.
Anyone planning to tell a mother worried about her child’s future that she should be more concerned with the ‘siphoning of funds from public schools’ than her child’s ability to get a quality education should plan on an uphill battle. Not even Aunt Becky could weather that storm.
The school choice movement’s strongest argument is the fact that charter schools are tuition free. If both independent and parochial schools need freedom from the government to actualize true innovation and offer an excellent education, to argue against charter school freedom isn’t equity it’s just education paywalling.
A morally indefensible position.
Who Gets Rights?
I began teaching in 2009 and have always been a mandated reporter. In New York State a mandated reporter is defined as being ‘a professional who is required to report suspected child abuse or maltreatment when they are presented with a reasonable cause to suspect child abuse or maltreatment.’ The list of people who fall into this category range from teachers to podiatrists to licensed creative arts therapists. Though you’d be wrong if they thought that ‘teacher’ included teachers in private schools. It didn’t include them until 2019 even though the law was signed in 1973. It was always separate and woefully unequal to have the government sanction such a policy. What made private schools so trustworthy to begin with? What benefit of the doubt was being visited upon them that my public school colleagues and I weren’t able to access?
Private schools cannot provide FAPE (Free Appropriate Public Education) meaning neurodivergent students are particularly disadvantaged even in a financially privileged situation, can limit free speech, and can have varying degrees of due and appeals processes.
The Center for Public Education notes:
“The hurdles erected by the U. S. Constitution’s Fourth and Fifth Amendments are exclusive to the nation’s public schools. Private K-12 institutions have far more leeway to conduct unfettered investigations, withhold findings if they choose, and unceremoniously ask a student or faculty member to leave. Tuition and employment contracts rule private school relationships, while America’s social compact and legal contract (the Constitution) governs how public officials must act.”
As I type this a heated battle is continuing to rage in New York, now dubbed the #yeshivagate scandal. To summarize, some jewish schools, called yeshivas, have been found after an eight-year investigation, to not be providing a sound basic secular education to students in contravention of state law. The state is limited in what they can do because they are private. The situation is still ongoing with some progress being made with some schools making necessary adjustments. Others are still balking at the suggestion that the state has standing to make any demands at all.
School choicers are picking up the ball the liberal double thinkers have put down and are running to the end zone with it. Unfortunately they don’t have very far to run in the minds of the people who are the targets of their message.
The fundamental issue that the school privatization movement brings before us is that it puts into favored policy and practice a system of deliberately separate and unequal schools under the banner of choice, innovation and freedom. Private schools do the same.
So as the Parent’s Rights movement makes its way through congress and across the country we should be advocates for the principle of ensuring that, irrespective of the type of school a child attends, No Rights should be left behind.
