This story out of St. Louis about an education reform effort exposed and busted should serve as a cautionary tale to reformers seeking to usurp local authority. What’s perhaps most interesting is the direct involvement of the Superintendent.
Here’s more from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
A fledgling effort to transform the city’s public education system imploded Wednesday after St. Louis School Board members accused outside organizations of attempting a takeover of the board’s efforts to create a citywide plan.
St. Louis School Board members said at a special meeting Tuesday they had just become aware of Better Futures, which lists several charter schools and their financial backers as supporters.
Agreeing to a moratorium on new charter schools needs to be the first step in any partnership with the district, said board member Alisha Sonnier.
Over in Jacobin, Derek Black makes a compelling case for public education while noting the policy trajectory since No Child Left Behind has been pretty bleak:
We really turned to the language of failure with the No Child Left Behind Act. Some people will say that its primary purpose was to paint public schools as failures in order to justify moving toward alternatives. In fact, there were many people who supported it in order to collect data to prove that states were not meeting their responsibilities to disadvantaged students and to force them to take action. But whatever the intention, the result was this language of failure.
At the same time, schools have been called on to fix more and more of society’s problems — homelessness, health care, hunger — but haven’t been invested with the resources necessary to solve them.
During the Great Recession, states took a hatchet to the public education budget. We saw Florida and North Carolina, for instance, lopping off a thousand or more dollars per year per student, so that schools in those states lost about three thousand dollars over the course of three years, which came out to about 25 percent of their funding.
Many defenders of public education thought this simply had to be done, and said “Sure, we’ll make some concessions, we’re all in this together.” But as the recession passed and the dollars for the public sector returned, what we saw was that everyone else got their resources back, but the public schools didn’t. Or, in some cases, those resources were never returned, given away instead in the form of lower taxes.