Here's a debate I'd like to see pursued vigorously within the Democratic Party. (Hey, everybody else gets to complain about this, why not me?)

Resolved: No matter how noble the original motives, public school "reform" as pursued by private interests in general, and by plutocratic dilettantes in particular, has been an abject failure and an almost limitless vista of low-rent scams and high-tech brigandage. 

Discuss.

Through the inexhaustible Diane Ravitch, we have found several recent examples of evidence for the affirmative here. First, there was this account in The New York Times about how the ragged remnants of the Detroit public schools were handed over to the charter-industrial complex willy nilly, and how that notion has crashed and burned in spectacular, if entirely predictable, fashion.

Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.

While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation's poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.

Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit's traditional public schools.





Of course, reply the folks on the other side, this was all done with The Kids in mind. Let's talk to Damian and his mom, shall we?

She enrolled her older son, Damian, at the charter school across from her house, where she could watch him walk into the building. He got all A's and said he wanted to be an engineer. But the summer before seventh grade, he found himself in the back of a classroom at a science program at the University of Michigan, struggling to keep up with students from Detroit Public Schools, known as the worst urban district in the nation. They knew the human body is made up of many cells; he had never learned that.

When his school stopped assigning homework, Ms. Rivera tried enrolling Damian at other charters, but the deadlines were past, the applications onerous. Finally, she found him a scholarship at a Catholic school, where he struggled to rise above D's all year. "He doesn't want to hear the word engineering," she said.

Of all the sanctimonious fckwads infesting our politics, the school reformers are unquestionably among the fckiest and the waddiest. Even with this transcendent failure in Detroit, here comes the Walton family, some of America's biggest welfare moochers, to save the day for charters all over America, training the next three generations of underpaid help, I guess. Tell me you're kidding, Wall Street Journal.

Nope.

Elsewhere, a new report out of Georgia found that the students in that state's charter schools performed pretty much the same way as did children in the state's regular public schools. And down in Florida, in Duval County, things are not going much better, if The Florida Times-Union is to be believed.

Recently released results from the annual Florida Standards Assessments and from state end-of-course exams reveal that in 17 out of 22 tests on reading, math, science, history and civics, charter schools averaged fewer students passing the tests than those in district schools.

In some tests and subjects, far fewer. The biggest differences were in science.

Nearly three out of four Duval students taking biology last year passed its end-of-course exam, compared to less than half, 48.4 percent, of charter school students. Fifty-two percent of Duval's fifth-graders passed that grade's science test, compared to 41 percent of their charter school peers.

In every tested grade except sixth, Duval students' English language arts passing rates and math passing rates exceeded charters.'

"You can see that our schools are improving at a faster clip," said Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.







And, no, this isn't because charter schools are improving the regular public schools through "competition." Education is not a damn marketplace. We ought to learn this pretty soon.

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Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.