Charter School Reform: Doublethink and the Assault on the Vulnerable
The landscape of American society is rapidly changing. The ongoing financial crises following the "Great Recession" of 2008 continue to destabilize faith in bedrock institutions as Americans grow increasingly disillusioned by growing wealth inequality, stagnant wages, unemployment, and "failing schools." Discourse touting the "free market" as the panacea for public ills has seemingly won the day. As Michael Apple has argued, "[t]he attacks on the very idea that something 'public' might actually be valuable have intensified." (1) Additionally, Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine have shown, "[w]e are witnessing a strategic redefinition of democracy in which the free marketplace of goods and services is not merely a necessary prerequisite, but represented as the highest form of democracy." (2) Because, as William Watkins aptly illustrated, "[p]ublic education exists within, not outside, this context," (3) public schools are one of the many institutions being questioned by our shifting social order. The growing intensity of the charter school movement in the United States is reflective of this ideological shift in the American ethos. Supported by a national discourse that public schools are "failing" and "in crisis," (4) advocates of charter school reform are able to capitalize on common conceptions of public schools by advancing charters as the best viable solution. Referred to openly by charter reformers as "creative destruction" or "churn," "the goal of the corporate school movement is not to improve public education; rather, is to replace public education with a privatized national system of schools competing for scarce dollars, regularly going out of business and allowing profit seekers to try their had at making a dollar." (5) Despite its beginnings as a democratically minded campaign, where charter schools would support traditional public schools by creating and sharing "innovative" educational practices6 the charter school movement has since been co opted to serve the neoliberal agenda of consumer logic and "school choice." Emphatically embraced by both sides of the political aisle as demonstrated by the policies of both the Bush and Obama administrations the dominant logic of the charter school movement relies on the theory that introducing competition into the educational "marketplace" will increase the value of the "product." Recasting parents and students as consumers, so the logic goes, will force charter and traditional public schools alike to compete for customers in their attempts at producing the best possible product (i.e. test scores) At the outset, however, it is important to address a prevailing tension in the broader critique of charter schools namely, the problematic dichotomy that is assumed when we divide the landscape into two discrete sectors where "public" is assumed to be necessarily superior to the semi private sphere that charter schools often exist in. (7) This blurring between the "public" and "private" sectors further complicates the landscape of educational reform. Democratically elected officials, for example, are often involved in the diversion of schools out of public control and into the hands of charter groups or other semi private organizations. The proposed Opportunity School District in Georgia, which will be put to a vote in the upcoming November 2016 election, is a key example of the ways in which the "public/private" dichotomy on which so many critiques of charter schools rely covers over more than it reveals. The Opportunity School District (OSD) if passed, will create an amendment to the state constitution of Georgia that would allow a statewide takeover of up to 120 public schools deemed to be failing. Interestingly, Governor Nathan Deal has spearheaded the project which if passed would allow him to appoint a statewide superintendent, who would report solely to the Governor's office. (8) The traditional public/ private distinction often assumes that democratically elected officials necessarily create greater transparency and public accountability.