Arthur Camins
Arthur Camins writes that individuals must make sacrifices to serve the greater good. Consequently, the education philosopher from Hoboken wants to eliminate school choice programs, including charter schools.
His reasoning is rooted in a skewed understanding of what individual choice means. “Be out for yourself and don’t worry so much about your neighbors or community,” he writes, believing this to be the mentality of parents and choice advocates. Addressing Democrats’ growing support of charter schools, he argues, “the spread of charter schools is morally corrosive and drains money from other local schools.”
To Camins, the act of choosing a better school for your child hurts those left behind. Fortunately, there appears to be evidence to the contrary, especially for low-income minorities attending charter schools (see pages 65-66 and 69). Camins doesn’t have to travel far either to see the small but positive impact of charters on low-income students in Newark and across the river in New York City.
Instead of offering choice, Camins proposes reducing class sizes further and increasing funding for education. Those ideas that are not mutually exclusive of school choice, and by the we’ve been reducing class sizes and increasing per pupil spending for fifty years now. How long will it be before we achieve the equity and quality he dreams of?
One of the bigger problems with inequality in education is the fact that wealthier parents can afford to flee bad schools. To his credit, Camins remains logically consistent and condemns the socio-economic segregation we see today in public schools. The question is whether government bureaucrats will ever achieve the “proper” racial and socioeconomic balances through geographic school assignment. They’ve taken too long already.
Grade: Needs Improvement
Denver Post (and a few Colorado school districts)
Some school districts in Colorado voted to allow charter schools access to property tax revenue to equalize funding between district and charter schools. Those school districts in Colorado deserve a great big “Satisfactory” of their own.
But this post is also about how the Denver Post editorial board sees the “controversial issue.”
They write:
It’s easy to forget, amid the fog of rhetoric from those opposing equal funding, that charters are public schools, too. After nearly a quarter century of experience, their equal treatment should not be controversial.
Right on.
Grade: Satisfactory
Larry Lee
Larry Lee, a public school advocate, makes more than a few complaints about Alabama’s tax credit scholarship program, but one stands out. He writes: “We were told repeatedly that this law was only about ‘helping poor kids stuck in private (sic) schools by their zip codes.'” The problem, he contends, is that “a large number of scholarship recipients were not from these schools.”
Of Alabama’s 1,500 public schools, fewer than 80 are considered “failing.” The fact that 30 percent of the scholarship students come from just 5 percent of all public schools is actually impressive. Also impressive: 98 percent of the scholarships went to students eligible for the Federal Free and Reduced Price Lunch program.
In short, the program is disproportionately helping the state’s most disadvantaged students, including those from low-performing schools. (Disclosure: Some employees of Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog and employs the author of this post, have assisted a scholarship organization in Alabama).
Low-income parents in Alabama have decided that, for whatever reason, the previous school options weren’t working for their children. Why are opponents of school choice trying to prove them wrong?
Grade: Needs Improvement
