Urban school reform in the United States is characterized by contentious, politicized debate. This course explores a set of critical issues in the education and educational reform space, with a focus on aspects of the field that have sparked controversy and polarized views. We will dig into these debates, situating them within the larger history of public education and school reform, and considering the viewpoints, the evidence, and translation of issues into educational policy. We will consider three broad topics in this course: 1. Federal Strategies in School Reform: How has the federal government legislated and incented public school reform? 2. School Choice: How does school choice aim to improve schools? 3. Accountability: What is the history of accountability in American public schooling? What are the policies and practices associated with accountability? Learning Goals This course will enable participants to: 1. develop an informed historical perspective about public schooling in the United States; 2. understand the unique contextual elements of the American approach to public schooling; 3. analyze and assess divergent viewpoints about American public school history and school reform policy. Teachers may be able to receive continuing education credit for successful completion of this course. To earn continuing education credits students must purchase and earn the Course Certificate, which they can then submit to the credit-issuing agency in their state. Students should also fill out the requisite paperwork stating that the affiliated provider is the Graham School at the University of Chicago, and that average time for certificate-level course completion is 18 hours. Students outside of Illinois should contact their state’s accreditation board to determine whether this course is eligible for continuing education credit. Note that it is up to the schools or districts that employ teachers to decide whether this course meet their requirements.
The School Choice Debate Interviews
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En provenance du cours de The University of Chicago
Critical Issues in Urban Education
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Interlude 2: Interview and Panel Discussion on School Choice and Charter Schools
We had the pleasure of interviewing several experts in the education space from around Chicago and the Urban Education Institute. Listen as they discuss issues surrounding School Choice and Charter Schools. They will have a variety of perspectives from that of a researcher to a practitioner. Which do you identify with? Did any of the participants resonate with you?
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Sara Ray StoelingaSara Liston Spurlark Director and Clinical Professor
Urban Education Institute
[MUSIC]
Well, I think, the best way of thinking of it is that people become
increasingly aware of the inequities about the achievement gaps and
so forth between poor kids, rich kids,
between minority kids and non-minority kids.
And that, in many cases, choice is offered as a way.
If wealthy kids have choices, poor kids should have choices too.
And additionally, the idea that choice could also be competition
within a system that would drive improvement across all sectors.
We haven't seen that happen yet anywhere, as far as I know, but
that's sort of the theoretical perspective.
So it's sort of driven by inequality and
the desire to reduce the inequalities and achievement gaps.
And I think to foster competition.
>> Well, I think it is something that people hear in this
country enjoys the opportunity to be able to choose.
And so I think once the concept of charter schools sort of permeated our culture,
I think it was really attractive to individuals to say,
I don't automatically have to go to the school in my
neighborhood in order to receive an education.
But I can shop around a bit and see if I can go to another free school and
get what may be a better education for my child.
And so I think that's simply why school
choice ended up being something that was attractive to families.
And from a policy standpoint at the state level,
I think that there was certainly the attraction of creating some
sense of competitiveness within the school environment.
To better ensure that people were going to be looking to constantly move forward,
and not stay stagnant in terms of what was happening within the district for
fear that people would start to take these other options seriously.
>> So school choice, I'm not exactly sure why it's become so
important in the United States, but
I think it has a lot to do with this local control.
So this idea that parents should have the ultimate, no matter who you are,
you should have the ultimate choice to go to whatever school you choose,
because that's sort of the American way.
I think it's somewhat ingrained
in certain populations.
I am not convinced that all parents want this vast array of choices.
I think what parents want is that the public school in their neighborhood should
be a good one.
And that if we said that we put all our resources into helping every
neighborhood public school be great, that I think parents would be just fine.
>> Some of the critique that charter school
proponents are people that are out to
dismantle some of the larger bureaucratic
structures inherent in big school districts.
I think part of that is in response to this big school
district is not doing a good job at educating its kids.
Let's see if we can get something that's more nimble, and that's more reflective of
the people that are going there and see whether that can do a better job.
So you add the desire to get away from bureaucracy,
move to nimbleness, you add that to the desire of parents to have more
control over both the building and to where their kid goes to school.
Those are pretty compelling arguments.
The downside of all of that is that the parents who have the desire or
the wherewithal to make those choices make those choices.
And then what's left in the neighborhood school are those children whose parents,
many of whose parents, they just went with the default.
Sometimes parents make active choices to do that, but often times,
it's just well, of course, this is where that child goes.
>> The second choice of putting new schools into cities or
into neighborhoods and then increasing the quality of those schools and
giving a family the option to go to those, I think, is a temporary solution.
It ends up being sort of what we saw in waiting for superman.
At the end of the day, how many quality seats are there?
If there are 25,000 students in a region, and there's 10,000 quality seats,
that means that 15,000 students still, no matter what,
don't have access to the seats that would be needed to prepare them for
high paying jobs and prepare them for college access.
So I think ideally, we need to do something.
The market correction is right, in that by introducing new schools,
you perhaps revitalize the arena and
bring in new innovative ideas into how to prepare students for college success.
But if those ideas don't reach all of the schools that are still open and
still serving young people, then it's not a large enough market correction.
And only the families or students who are able to navigate that process really kind
of analyze that information about what makes a quality school and
what choice they have.
It doesn't impact everybody at scale, and then
it probably really doesn't impact those families that are the most vulnerable.
And if we're thinking about school reform and we're thinking about school choice,
I think typically we are thinking about the families and
students who are most vulnerable because they need the most assistance.
They need the most support for
their students to make it through the educational process.
>> So the choice appetite is a big one in our country,
it's like the American ethos, right, is that you get to choose and
then underlying that is another part of the American sort of gestalt,
and that is you get to compete.
So competition and choice are tightly wed in the school world.
And I think the basic debate is do we need to give
parents more options, or do we need a public school
system where parents can rely on, count on,
their neighborhood option inevitably.
Then add the politics.
Choice and charter schools are fundamentally a threat to organized labor
because charter schools typically, their teachers are not members of
the local bargaining unit, the local teacher's union.
And so the cause has been picked up by some pretty Messianic,
freedom-fighting, charter school loving,
kind of Milton Friedman-channeling types who think that this is
a great opportunity for us to undercut this tremendous,
dark evil of organized labor in our country.
And on the other hand, there's those in the labor camp who say,
this is a threat, and those people are not looking at results necessarily.
And they're just coming after us, and
so we're going to resist them with all we've got.
So it's a fractious, and in some ways, quite distracting part of the educational
reform debate, because, in fact, the charter school space is,
probably, no more than, what, 10, 12%, if that, of the total
school population actually attends these things called charter schools.
And yet, probably 80% of the public discourse and
debate that one reads is taken up by this quite voracious choice discussion.
>> The theory for a lot of choice advocates,
they believe all families should have options for where to send their child.
They shouldn't have to just go to the local school.
They should be able to choose from a variety of schools,
schools that they may feel fits their student better than just one local school.
And as a result of that, especially in recent years,
we've seen a proliferation of different kinds of public schools that are seen as
alternatives to the neighborhood school, the default school where everyone goes.
So we have charter schools, we have voucher programs where families can
get vouchers to attend private schools or to attend other kinds of public schools.
We have open enrollment policies where families
can enroll their child in other public schools that have open seat available.
Sometimes these policies require that the families live in adjacent town or
an adjacent district.
Other times, they just have open slots for anybody that wants to go there.
All of these policies are intended to give greater freedom to families,
greater choices in case they are not happy with their local schools.
A lot of times also, people see choice systems as raising the bar for
the local schools.
Bring in competition, if you don't have competition,
schools can just keep running the same way they always have, and
maybe people feel like that's not the best for kids, right?
If you have competition, then the local schools have to step it up and
offer the same kinds of resources, the same kinds of activities that some
of the alternative schools offer their students.
>> Everyone is required to send their kids to some form of schooling,
whether that be homeschooling, private schooling, or public schooling.
There is no choice.
The state says your kids have to be educated.
So to some extent, there isn't really choice in this particular framework.
But there's this notion of within education,
if I have the resources, I'm going to choose the best for my kids.
The problem with that, of course, is that these resources that I spoke to,
both voice and economic, are not evenly distributed.
[MUSIC]
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