“Are There any White Kids at Your School?”
After a six-year stint as an elementary school teacher in the tough LA neighborhood of Watts, PJM's Aaron Hanscom would like to know why wealthy Democrats like John Edwards don't support charter schools or voucher programs. Is choice in education only acceptable to Edwards if parents have his kind of money?
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“Are there any white kids at your school?”
That’s the question I was asked most often during my six years as an elementary school teacher in Watts, the neighborhood in Los Angeles more famous for its riots than its schools.
My answer was always “no” until last year, when a freckle-faced foster child - let’s call him Tommy - enrolled. I can assure you that Tommy was never given any special treatment for being the only white student at a school made up mostly of Hispanics and African-Americans. In fact, Tommy received the same crappy education as everybody else.
Tommy came to my mind earlier this week when I read what Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said during an eight-state tour designed to bring attention to poverty issues.
“We don’t just have racial segregation in our schools, we have huge economic segregation,” the ex-Senator told a group of 250 people in an impoverished area of Pittsburgh. Pajamas Media blog Say Anything posted the following rejoinder to Edwards’ wish to add diversity to the “two public school systems in America”:
“He’s going to encourage income diversity in our schools. So how does that work? Well to make “rich” schools more diverse you send more poor kids there. But to make poor schools more diverse? I guess you have to force rich kids to go there.”
Indeed, among Edwards’ proposals is the setting aside of $100 million to help finance buses and implement economic integration programs. It’s almost too easy - after the four hundred dollar haircuts - to levy the charge of hypocrisy against Edwards. But the fact is that those most opposed to ending the status quo of public education are very often the ones who opt to keep their own children away from failing public schools. Writes Clint Bolick in the Wall Street Journal: “When [Edwards] joined the U.S. Senate he sent his children to a religious school because, according to USA Today, the D.C. ‘public schools are deeply troubled.’”
For Edwards, choice in education is apparently only acceptable if parents have his kind of money. While Edwards this week proposed creating magnet schools in inner cities and giving money to schools in wealthy areas that accept low-income students, he made no mention of charter schools or school vouchers.
Why not?
Edwards has claimed in the past that school choice for low-income families would “drain resources” from public schools. (Bolick points out that D.C. public schools lost $132,000 when Edwards chose private school for his kids.)
But Edwards’ claim is simply not true. Alan Bonsteel, president of California Presidents for Educational Choice, has pointed out that since private schools and charter schools cost less than public schools per student, “when a students transfers from a public school to a charter school or a voucher-accepting public school, under normal circumstances, the public schools keep the difference in funding.” For purposes of comparison, California spends $11,800 per year per student while private schools spend barely half of that.
And what about the effectiveness of vouchers? After studying the voucher system in Milwaukee, Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University Caroline Hoxby reported: “No one lost in Milwaukee. Everyone did better. The kids at the regular public schools did better, and the kids who went to the voucher schools did better.”
That competition leads to better public schools was proven by the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was initiated in Florida in 1999. Six years later, with 750 students using the opportunity scholarships to attend private schools, public schools had clearly improved. A 2005 Wall Street Journal article found that “nearly half of Florida’s public schools now earn “A” grades, while a similar percentage scored “C’s” when the program started.” More importantly, a 2003 study by researcher Jay Greene found that the schools under threat of vouchers made the most gains.
What should really impress Edwards is the progress made by Florida’s minority students. From 2001 to 2005, the percentage of Hispanic and African-American third-graders reading at or above grade level had risen from 46% to 61% and 36% to 52% respectively. More minority students were also graduating from high school; the graduation rate for Hispanics went from 52.8% before the program was initiated to 64%, while the African-American rate increased from 48.7% to 57.3%. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court declared the program unconstitutional.
But it’s another decision, this one by the U.S. Supreme Court, that really disturbed Edwards. He disagrees with last month’s ruling rejecting school diversity plans in Seattle and Louisville. He overlooks the fact that Seattle schools have failed miserably to close the achievement gap. The district’s mission statement adopted in 2004 reads, “We must recognize the impact of institutional racism on standard success and question any excuses for not making necessary changes.”
Call those unnecessary changes.
Not only was an Office of Equity and Race Relations created, but former superintendent Raj Manhas ran workshops on cultural diversity and oversaw teams that monitored race relations. The results? Last year 23.8% of African-American 10th-graders passed all three parts of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning.
Educational reform does not have to be defended on partisan grounds. Consider the case of Mike Piscal, a former teacher at the elite Harvard-Westlake in Studio City, California. (Disclaimer: I graduated from Harvard-Westlake in 1995, and Piscal was my 8th-grade basketball coach.) Eventually Piscal (a Democrat) decided he was “going to open a Harvard-Westlake in the hood.” So he created the Inner City Education Foundation, which opened its first charter school - the View Park Prep Elementary - in 1999. Today there are three View Park Preparatory Charter Schools located in South Los Angeles, very close to where I used to teach. In 2005, View Park Prep ranked number one in California for educating African- American students according to the California Department of Education’s Academic Performance Index. There is a combined waiting list of over 4,000 students for 560 seats at the schools. Parents don’t seem to be concerned that over 95% of the student body is African-American.
Little Tommy would stick out just as much at View Park as he did at my school. But his future would be much brighter.
Aaron Hanscom is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
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12 Comments
Darin:As with most issues, if you happen to be someone who believes in results vs rhetoric, then this shouldnt even be a debate. Charter schools and vouchers work and that scares some people which would be understandable.
Jul 24, 2007 - 6:18 am suzanne:I graduated from one of these sickeningly expensive private schools in Los Angeles as well…Piscal creating one of these schools “in the hood” shows that it isn’t just money alone that makes for a great education…
Jul 24, 2007 - 7:12 am AJ:As an ex public school teacher in LA, and advocate/author on educational reform, I can only say that facts often get in the way of rants and claims made by Democrat politicians, school board members, teachers and the unions that protect them. Hanscom hits on many of these. If we could get the above entities (or John Edwards—biggest hypocrite of them all, and that’s saying something) to actually peruse and digest real information—rather than divisive platitudes—we could “progress” further. Unfortunately, education and the Political Left are all about REGRESSIVE politics, especially when it comes to race. Just watch last night’s Anderson Cooper You Tube “debate.” Tragic.
Jul 24, 2007 - 7:22 am Dora:Stronger schools. Good results. This shouldnt be an issue. More people should take such initiative, as Piscal did.
Jul 24, 2007 - 7:41 am Kafir:I can’t believe Republicans haven’t capitalized on this issue to bring in more black and hispanic voters. The Democrats are way too beholden to the teacher’s union to ever support this in any big way.
Jul 24, 2007 - 8:08 am mwl:How many more stories like this do we need to see before more people realize that competition always produces better results than a government monopoly? And that the problems aren’t racial, but cultural and economic?
Education is critical to the success of democracy. Ignorant students become ignorant voters, who then elect ignorant politicians. Just imagine how much better this country would run if all voters were to understand basic economics.
Jul 24, 2007 - 8:29 am Sotos:The model for public school behavior - that is the PS Administrations’ behavior in opposing school vouchures is complicated but can be simplified using the concept of the Cost Maximizing” institution.
This is a concept first developed by Seymour Melman, a very left wing Professor of Industrial Engineering at Columbia, when describing the Pentagon in the 60’s. I was a student of his, enjoyed his teaching and often disagreed with his views.
He pointed out that those in charge get prestige and pay based on the amount of resources under their control. It is not correlated with actual results. This runs counter to the usual economic analyses that economic organizations are cost minimizing (or value maximizing)- in order to compete. There is no direct pressure to minimize costs - only when some externality intervenes (parental/political outrage?) will the system make any changes. Even then it is always drawn back to it’s primary objective. This does not, of course, mean that there are not managers or administrators that do the right thing, or that these people are inherently evil, just that the real rewards are not clearly related to the quality or quantity of results. It gives any such system a tropism or tendency. At best it tends to produce what is called satificing behavior - the minimum needed to satisfy or get by.
This model is oversimplified, and my explanation oversimplifies it further, but it can give a powerful insight into behavior not only of public education, but of health care, and other institutions where span of control and resources used are more important to the managers’ careers than the results delivered to their customers.
Incidentaly, Melman would have a heart attack seeing his arguments used to support this kind of endeavor: his response alway was to nationalize everything - but “this time we will run it correctly”. How this was to be insured was never made clear. He was a compatriot of Barry Commoner, for those old enough to remember him. It always struck me as ironic that he wanted, in effect, to turn the entire economy into many little Pentagons!
Jul 24, 2007 - 10:42 am MarkD:The Democrats are owned in part by the teacher’s union. It’s not about the kids, it’s about the teachers.
Teachers pay the union. The union pays the Democrats. The Democrats stop school competition.
Jul 24, 2007 - 11:02 am RobertsonCU:It’s simple. Capitalism. That’s all this is. The more competition, the hard companies (schools in this case) strive to be the best to get the brightest and most intelligent students and when you have a school that only accepts the most intelligent, you have children and parents that WORK for their child to be the best.
The only problem is, Democrats don’t feel that children should have to work. They should all be patted on the back for doing nothing. Instead, like most things in this country, parents have to spend their AFTER-TAX money to better themselves and their family (401k, real estate investment, stocks, bonds, etc.)
Jul 24, 2007 - 12:40 pm Neo:I’ve never seen vouchers as a form of competition, but rather an escape.
The problem with most bad schools are usually a mixture of four problems: bad administration, bad teachers, bad parents and bad students. More precisely, it is based on how well each of those four groups is committed to getting or giving a good education.
If this was a problem of just bad teachers, it would have been solved a long time ago.
In neighborhoods, or isolated pockets, where education is ridiculed, the problems are the worst and no amount of money will ever change the outcomes until that attitude is changed. These people know who they are, so I won’t given any examples. Teachers, even with limitless resourses, who have deal with both bad parents and bad students, are made to look bad, whether they are or not.
Meanwhile, some school systems don’t even supply teachers with the simple requirements of books and paper, while school board members are driven about in chauffeured limos (i.e. Philadelphia).
Educatible children with involved parents are the biggest losers, unless the can pay for an alternative. This is here vouchers can help.
Jul 24, 2007 - 2:17 pm furious:Apropos of nothing, during the Demo YouTube debate, when asked whether the candidates’ children attended private or public schools, didn’t Mr. Edwards anwer unequivocally that his children attended *public* schools?
–furious
Jul 25, 2007 - 1:41 pm Paul from Florida:One of the nice things, from the Democrat view, is that these more or less now permanently brain damaged kids are now no long fit for an informational society that requires life long learning. Of course with industrialization they can not work picking cotton. So, they are, or become, life long sources of crime and with subsidized food and housing produce replications. All this provides Democrat jobs in Police, Fire, EMS, Social Service, Prisons, Trial and Defense lawyers, Administrators, and on and on. Public school pathologies is the goose that lays the golden egg for government workers. As they say in the union, “Do not kill the job.”
Keep these intellect destroying factories open and humming! Millions of public service jobs depend upon it!
Jul 26, 2007 - 5:11 am