Ten years ago, in an essay for the Washington Post, I wrote that the federal push for charter schools had corroded commitment to community responsibility in the United States. Students, educators, and parents had suffered through the Obama Administration's Race-to-the-Top requirements for charter schools and standardized test-based merit pay for federal grants. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was spouting anti-union rhetoric. Across the next three presidential terms, the push for charter schools continued unabated despite substantial evidence of corruption and ineffectiveness. Subsequent Republican-led efforts to implement school vouchers against the will of most voters accelerated.
Four years of Trump's presidency let loose hatred and promoted acceptance of instrumental immorality for selfish gain. It also unleashed revulsion sufficient to defeat him in 2020 and many of his congressional acolytes in 2022. However, the next three years of Biden's leadership amidst Democratic political weakness only emboldened the school privatizers.
I am not optimistic but haven’t lost all hope. The Reverend William Barber II talks about the need for a moral revolution. I see in the massive intergenerational, multiracial public outcry against the killing of innocent civilians Israel and Hamas the germs of a moral revival.
Barber wrote in an X post, “These same voices are challenging the U.S. government. I've seen these same voices and faces stand against other forms of death and violence: gun violence, the violence of poverty that makes it the 4th-leading cause of death in the U.S., the violence of a lack of healthcare.”
If the immorality of U.S. support for Israel’s murder of countless Palestinian children thousands of miles away can rouse the public to action, maybe they can also rise against the immoral attack on our children’s public schools. Voters are beginning to question why Congress can find hundreds of billions for foreign aid to Israel, while critical human needs like housing and medical care go wanted, and education budgets remain not just under-resourced but siphoned to fund charter schools and vouchers for private schools.
Below, I repost that still all-to-relevant 2014 essay (updated and edited for clarity and length).
February 26, 2014, at 6:00 a.m. EST
Over several decades, policy and media discourse about education in the United States has changed–and not for the better.
Year after year, education reform policies attacked the professionalism and integrity of educators, leading to their widespread demoralization. [Bans on books and discussions that expose racism in U.S. history have made matters even worse.] Over-testing of students, opening and closing of schools, constant promotion of choice, and highly conflictual school board meetings have exacerbated parents' anxiety.
But there is a more subtle and harder-to-resist, morally corrosive process underway. Public acceptance of the foundational out-for-yourself principle of charter schools and vouchers undermined the fundamental moral principle of community responsibility.
The famous quote attributed to the ancient Rabbi Hillel provides a worthy moral compass:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” [Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14]
Extending the educational choices currently available to the wealthy to the poor has become one of the principal arguments for charter school expansion. This rationale for increased public investment in charter schools fails the morality test. Disturbingly, it has permeated popular thinking and promoted false hopes while maintaining the disingenuous and illogical claim to mediate the effects of poverty.
We all make small moral choices every day. In countless ways, we decide whether to be out only for ourselves or act to support the well-being of others. When bone tired, do we give up our seats on a crowded train for the elderly or handicapped? Do we advocate for programs that increase our taxes to support the needs of the less well-off? Do we use special influence to induce principals to assign our children to the teacher with the best reputation, knowing that our child's gain is another's loss? Do we support school assignment boundaries that segregate based on race or socioeconomic status or those that encourage integration? Do we endorse policies such as tracking that advantage some children to the detriment of others?
Each of these moral decisions turns on how we balance the interdependence between personal well-being and the needs of the whole community. Advocacy for charter schools as laboratories for innovation freed from bureaucratic constraints has faded. The segregation roots of charter schools remain but are usually unmentioned. In its place, promoters tout choices for individuals in opposition to dysfunctional public schools (that far-right disparages as government schools).
This only has broad appeal because our nation refuses to substantively or systemically mediate inequity or address persistent racism. However, even the strongest advocates accept that charter schools will vary in effectiveness. They argue that successful schools will win the competition for students and thrive, while others will wither and close. Schools in this market framework are considered consumer goods like automobiles or dish soap. Left unsaid, this strategy is inequitable because the disruptive effect of school closings negatively impacts students in already unstable communities but not those in stable middle-class or wealthy communities.
I do not expect any parent–given the choice between sending their child to an orderly, successful school and one that is not–to choose the latter. Such an individual choice would fail the, "If I am not for myself"precept. However, government advocacy for a public system of choice based on the explicit idea that schools differ not just in educational emphasis but in quality fails the "If I am only for me moral principle." Privatization as public policy raises the impact of choosing one's well-being over that of others from an ethically questionable personal decision to a fixed society-wide norm. In doing so, it shifts the improvement focus from a shared concern or common struggle about the community's children to individual parents making self-interested selections only for their children.
The wealthy have always had such choices for their children. The rich have the flexibility to move to neighborhoods without the educational challenges that come with poor neighborhoods. Families with enough money can opt out of public schools and pay for select private schools with enormous resource advantages. Exclusion of others from their communities and schools is normative and attractive to the wealthy.
Perception of differential school quality has been a major force for mobility and neighborhood segregation. It is well known that low-income students experience greater educational attainment in small classes in economically and racially mixed schools. Tellingly, there are no calls from wealthy charter school supporters to open their children's schools to others.
Wealth-based access to high-quality education is not a natural function. It is a product of policy choices that permit income disparity and geographic isolation to determine educational opportunity. We could, for example, stop funding schools from tax dollars determined by widely divergent local wealth and property values. Instead, policymakers could implement more progressive income taxes or increased capital gain taxes. Lawmakers choose to not do so. Communities could incentivize local planning boards to support mixed-income housing while providing disincentives for exclusionary residential zoning laws. Increased state and federal investments in housing that is affordable to all could eliminate the housing insecurity that results in family mobility that undermines students' readiness to learn. Sufficient funding for the small class sizes and teacher professional development could enable the individual attention required for successful, diverse classrooms in which students learn with and about one another.
Unfortunately, the choices made by elected officials have frequently prioritized wealth accumulation and privilege over educational equity. These policies fail the "If I am only for me"precept.
There is no evidence that for-profit or non-profit charter schools vary any less in quality than current community-governed public schools. Shift in authority over schools from communities to independent charter boards diminishes parents' voices.
Widespread acceptance of the idea that the way for low wealth families to ensure their children's future is to make a personal choice to send their child to a charter school [or use a voucher] rather than their neighborhood school undermines the impetus for social action to ensure the future of all children. That promotes self-interest over social responsibility as a human value.
Individualism and community concern have always been in tension in the United States. The rise of unions and the civil rights and feminist movements between the 1930s and the early 1970s may represent our historical zenith for valuing we over me.
Gains these movements wrought were the product of compromises but still driven by people who saw their futures bound up with that of others.
The outlines of a society-wide shift in our moral compass have been emerging for some time– at least since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. However, the recent push for self-directed rather than community-focused government policies in public education–from "school choice" to individual performance pay to undermining collective bargaining–strikes me as an especially egregious violation of Rabbi Hillel's moral principle. Self-concerned personal choices seem rational in a society that refuses to address inequity systemically and only if everyone becomes convinced that collective action is a hopelessly naïve moral and strategic principle. Our history and morality suggest otherwise.
Hope rests on a call to join together to demand that politicians reject charter schools and vouchers as immoral because they elevate the illusion of personal choice over the guarantee of high quality, equitable education for all. The choice is clear. Our nation needs to stop de-moralizing and start re-moralizing education policy.
It is time. "If not now, when?"
Arthur taught and led science professional learning and curriculum and assessment development projects for 50 yrs. He writes about education and social justice. He loves spending time with friends and family, hiking, and gardening.
Follow him:
Substack: https://arthurhcamins.substack.com/
X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/arthurcamins