out·post, \ˈaut-ˌpōst\, noun: an outlying or frontier settlement
ob·serv·er, \əb-ˈzər-vər\, noun: a representative sent to observe but not participate in an activity
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
By John A. Ostenburg
Shadow-boxing is supposed to build the muscles in advance of a boxer facing an actual opponent. After a certain amount of movement around the ring, throwing punches at no one, the fighter moves into true combat with another boxer and the real contest begins.
So, after so many years of shadow boxing with an imaginary foe on the education issue, isn't it time for policy-makers to begin throwing some punches at an actual opponent?
For years, teachers have been blamed for the sub-standard quality of a large number of students coming out of public schools in the United States. The "solution" has been millions of dollars being diverted over the last decade or more away from traditional public schools and into privately operated institutions, variously termed as charter schools, contract schools, or the like. In Illinois, this has been going on for about 15 years now, and the public's still to see any significant results from the experiment.
The greatest number of charter schools created in Illinois since the charter school law was adopted by a Republican-dominated legislature in 1995, and subsequently signed into law by a Republican governor, are to be found in Chicago, where that same legislature in the same year gave control of the schools to a Democratic mayor widely recognized as a political deal-maker. When the legislation was adopted, citizens were told that the charter school experiment was intended to come up with creative solutions to various problems in public education and that those solutions subsequently would be replicated in the traditional public schools, thus raising the level of educational opportunity for all students in the system. That was the sizzle that was sold to the public because the quality of the steak itself was a little less than palatable.
The charter school concept is not in itself a bad one. When proposed by the late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, it was supposed to be a path to school improvement through innovation and experimentation. A group of teachers, parents, and community leaders would get together and propose a new approach to instruction. It might be more inter-disciplinary. It might be more hands-on. It might reach beyond traditional classroom boundaries. It might involve teams of teachers all working together to instill a greater love for learning among their students. Then a charter would be drawn up as a type of contract between the innovators and traditional public school policy-makers and that charter would be the basis for a new school coming into being.
Somewhere along the way, however, anti-union forces saw charter schools as a chance to undermine the collective bargaining rights and opportunities that public school teachers had won at the negotiating table and on the picket line over a period of 30 to 40 years. They turned charter schools into privatized institutions with the opportunity for a handful of folks to make lots of money. The less that they paid to teachers for their classroom work, the more they could reap for themselves, either as private business persons or as high-paid executives of well-connected "non-for-profit" groups.
The political power of these educational entrepreneurs is obvious in the success they had in inspiring elected officials to give them everything they desired. They received large allocations of public funds for their various enterprises. They have been given new or newly renovated school buildings for leases of as little as $1 per year. They have been allowed to by-pass various teacher certification standards that are fundamental requirements for persons who teach in the traditional public schools.
A major argument for the type of change engendered by the charter school movement was that public education was the pits. That public schools failed to graduate adequate numbers of students. That American education is lagging behind education in the rest of the developed world. And -- by the logic of these critics of public education -- it all was the fault of the presence of teachers' unions in the public schools. Thus the drive to create non-union charter and/or contract schools as a public education option.
In truth, however, the critics of public schools really were talking only about the schools that are found in urban areas that often have high degrees of poverty. They were not proposing such changes for the public schools found in rich suburban areas, where many of the critics themselves lived. In fact, they convinced many inner-city parents that their kids could have the same educational opportunities as suburban kids -- if they were to go to a charter school.
But, in fact, do the charter schools achieve what has been promised? Perhaps a select few students do receive a better opportunity because they have the chance to escape their neighborhoods briefly each day for snippets of an alternative education. But what about the vast majority of kids who attend traditional public schools? Is anything better happening for them? To date, few if any of the innovative changes supposedly present in the charter schools have produced any programs that subsequently have been introduced into traditional public education.
And that's where the shadow boxing comes in: instead of doing battle with the true enemy of public education, which is the extreme poverty endemic to so many big city neighborhoods, these self-proclaimed educational reformers continue to fight an imaginary villain. And who is that imaginary villain? The teachers' unions.
A common opportunity given to charter school students is a personal laptop computer. Meanwhile, students in traditional inner-city public schools may have to do with just one computer to be shared by everyone in a class. At the same time, students in suburban schools might have had access to computers in their homes from the time they were pre-school age. Equal opportunity for all? Hardly. Yet, we expect consistent results from all of those students and blame teachers if the kids with less opportunity don't achieve at the same levels as their counterparts.
Kids in high-poverty neighborhoods often have to struggle to gain the same nutritional balance in their meals that are commonplace to their fellow students in suburban settings. They often have to deal with violence in their neighborhoods that makes study more difficult for them when compared with kids living in quiet suburbs. Their schools often lack the up-to-date textbooks and other teaching aids that suburban students take for granted. Are any of these conditions the fault of their unionized teachers?
Quite to the contrary. In fact, many times their teachers are the most stable element in their young lives. I know lots of teachers who take funds out of their own pockets to pay for their students to go on field trips, or to get them new clothing because what they're wearing to school is ragged and soiled, or to allow them to take a bus home rather than walk down dangerous streets. These teachers are not the enemy of quality education. They are not the ones with whom politicians should be boxing.
Instead, political leaders need to be giving the knock-out punch to poverty. That's the real culprit. Clean up neighborhoods. Give families an adequate income. Provide opportunities for healthy living. Get drug-dealers and thugs off the streets. But, please, keep those good and dedicated teachers in their classrooms.
Focusing on the true foe will bring positive results; struggling with an illusion will bring nothing more than illusory results. Just as no boxer is going to win a title by punching away at a shadow, no education reformer is going to bring about any positive change by scapegoating unionized teachers.
John A. Ostenburg is mayor of Park Forest, Illinois, and formerly served in the Illinois House of Representatives. He is the chief of staff for the Chicago Teachers Union. E-mail him at JOstenburg@aol.com.
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