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Sparkle (5)
When I read this week about the investigation into possible (probable) cheating on standardized tests in the District of Columbia school system, I can’t say I was surprised.
I was teaching in the D.C. public school system when No Child Left Behind was launched and very shortly after, one of the “best” public school districts in the country--a Maryland one, in a suburb of the District—was found to be cheating on the tests. (Teachers who were supposed to be moderating the tests were giving students the answers.)
In a system that rewards high test results with extra money and takes away funding from low-performing schools, what can you expect? We ought to be able to expect academic integrity, sure, but I’m not shocked that desperate teachers, pressured by desperate administrators, pressured by high-stakes testing help desperate students in a pinch. If your choice was to nudge a kid’s pencil slightly to the left or lose your job, what would you do?
In the recent case in D.C., reports suggest that after Michelle Rhee, the District’s controversial superintendent until 2010, claimed an enormous turnaround in test scores--from 10% passing to 58% passing--at one of the city’s lowest performing school, parents complained that the scores didn’t align with their children’s real world performance in reading and math. But Rhee gave the school principal and teachers their high-score bonuses and took home bragging rights for herself.
Rhee is notoriously anti-union, anti-tenure and pro-privatization of public schools—which you learned if you saw her in Waiting for Superman. She’s been making a name for herself among conservative governors in recent years and travels the country preaching the gospel of charter schools—privately run, publicly funded schools that don’t answer to the same level of government regulation and oversight as regular public schools.
The trouble with this is that studies have shown charter schools to be no better—and often worse—than ordinary public schools. And the ones that do perform better than the neighbor school are often keeping out the kids with disabilities or kicking out the low test scorers to boost their results. In short, they aren’t true public schools, though they are funded by taxpayers.
As a parent who planned and prepared to home school for the first five years of motherhood, then was converted to a wonderful, private Montessori school which both of my kids now attend, I am often told that A) I have turned my back on the problem of public education and am not supporting public schools and/or (in spite of the contradiction) that B) I haven’t got the right to have an opinion about what happens to public education, since my kids aren’t using it.
I beg to differ on both counts. But first, let me clear up one thing: I am not telling you where to send your own children to school. When you have a five-year-old, you don’t have twenty years to wait for education reform to actually make positive changes in the public school system. You have to get that kid into the best kindergarten possible right now. If that school is private, and you can afford it, send your kid there. (I certainly won’t blame you, that’s what I’m doing.) If it’s a magnet or a charter school, and you have whatever cultural capital (and/or luck) it takes to get in, send your kid there. As a parent, I refuse to sacrifice my kids to my long-term political and social ideals about public education. I am sending my kids to school now, not in the future when all my dreams will have come true. Maybe my grandchildren can go to those dream schools.
But.
Even as I drive my kids from one of the most racially and economically diverse neighborhoods in the country into the lily-white, million-dollar home suburb where their school is located, I am fighting for the right thing in public education when I oppose charters and vouchers and other “public” alternatives that are really private—and take resources out of the public system.
As a child, I attended Catholic parochial schools even though my family was not Catholic, because those schools were the cheapest private option in a city with some of the worst schools in the country. My parents lost two small businesses and we ate a lot of generic peanut butter in those years, even at that. Then somebody proposed the idea
