Re: On privatization and accountability

[ABurke5054@aol.com]

We have a system that is big, has lots of money, and  looks out for itself, 
even to the point of opposing the best interests of  parents and kids.  No need 
to invoke conspiracy theories (under whatever  name) for why we have NCLB.  
Just experience and common  sense.   
 
 

We need fundamental changes.  Playing word games  about whether NCLB is a 
"conspiracy," a "plan," an "accountability  Frankenstein monster," or a ruse, 
plot, distraction, subterfuge,  innovation, historical anomaly, or  whatever, 
philosophizing about "hermetic links," and searching  for the right "generalized 
abstract notion" of public education are  exercises in silliness.  
 

Art


 
In a message dated 5/16/2006 3:02:41 PM Pacific Standard Time,  
sdorn@tempest.coedu.usf.edu writes:

Jerry, I'll accept  your vocabulary correction, but I don't really see how 
that changes the  analysis. Regardless of the words used, it's specious (if 
tempting) to claim a  hermetic link between accountability and privatization. If 
you think I'm  wrong, you need to explain to me how the Florida assignments of 
letter grades  and the relatively few voucher students in the related program 
over the past  seven years constitutes a move towards privatization. 
 
Art, if you just  want to tear down Jerry, you're not really looking at what 
I've written. I  didn't write the phrase "accountability Frankenstein monster" 
 casually.
 
Peter has an  interesting argument about the changing meaning of "public 
school," and in  this regard, he's correct that people have different definitions 
of what  "public" means in this context. But it's an historical illusion to 
think that  there's a natural definition, a definition we really inherit from 
the 19th  century battles over the shape of education. As Michael Katz put it, 
200 years  ago people associated "public school" with "charity school," and it 
is only  over several decades of experimentation with the structure of 
schooling and a  good bit of argumentation and political battles that we acquired a 
four-part  definition of public education: funded with public dollars, 
controlled through  a public and democratic process, open to the public at large, and 
distinctly  different from private education. We acknowledge now that the 
third part was  incomplete until relatively recently, with the exclusion of 
children with  disabilities from schools until the 1970s and segregation before (and 
after)  the Brown decision. I've written elsewhere (History of Education 
Quarterly,  Fall 2002) that the last part is also historically inaccurate, with 
regard to  special education. In his wonderful book, _The Strange Career of 
Bilingual  Education in Texas_, Carlos Blanton describes (among other things) the  
relationship between public and private education in late 19th-century Texas  
and how many counties allowed bilingual education because they were concerned 
 that public schools were not attracting enough non-Anglos to do their job, 
and  because private schools were successfully attracting students with 
non-English  instruction. So half of our inherited (and constructed) definition has 
some  problems.  
 
Right now, we're  about 15 years into another wave of structural 
experimentation, with magnet  schools, charter schools, management contracts, and, yes, 
vouchers. That's  been helped along significantly by the private purposes that 
many parents and  other see in public education ("help get my kid into a good 
college"...). I'm  skeptical of any experiment as a panacea, but I've been 
educated too well in  my field to think that a particular definition of public 
education is  inherently defendable, or that focusing on that will seriously 
address the  political or policy issues involved. People understand the problems 
with  corruption and incompetence. People will understand the argument that 
states  with weak or unrecognized unions have worse problems than states with 
strong  unions. They'll definitely understand the argument about double standards 
with  privatization, and they don't like vouchers. But those are all p
articular  arguments, and I just don't think that will translate into a generalized  
abstract notion of public education... even if I wish that it  could.
 
 
Sherman  Dorn