Who Do You Support?

Who do you support?  Do you support Little League?  Boy Scouts?  Pet adoption centers?  NPR?  Your church?  A civic organization?  A social club?  Who do you support?

What is the evidence of your support?  Do you give time, do you give money?  Do you show up for events?  Do you work to improve and expand the function of the group you support?  How would you respond if someone organized a system to gradually demolish the group you support, reduce its funding, burden it with regulations and accountability, fund alternatives to your organization, and set your organization up to compete with other similar organizations?  What would you do?

And now a simple question, do you support public schools?  It is a question we should be asking every elected legislator and every appointed educational bureaucrat.  (To maintain full disclosure, I am an appointed educational bureaucrat.) 

An affirmative answer to the question would imply much.  It would imply the evidence of support listed under the other groups that you supported.  It would imply support for the notion that every kid in the US should have a free education K-12.  It would imply that we expect public schools to do the best they can to educate every kid.  It would imply providing institutional support for the efforts of public schools and for the kids least able to learn and least ready to learn.

I suspect, however, that most politicians and bureaucrats will answer in the affirmative but practice in the negative.  If so, then the follow-up question should be what is the evidence that you support public schools?

Have you supported deregulation of public schools, decreasing the myriad of mandates and compliance items assigned to the public schools?  Or, have you supported adding additional mandates to the institution and turning to schools to solve more and more of our society’s problems?

Have you supported at least maintaining and hopefully improving the funding of public schools?  Or, have you supported diverting funds from public schools to other social experiments gone awry such as charter schools and vouchers?

Have you supported professional educators?  Or, have you assumed you know more about what is the best way to run schools than the pros?  Have you supported teachers?  Or have you argued we must link student outcomes on standardized tests with professional evaluation?

Have you supported the notion that the schools with kids who have the lowest success need the most resources?  Or have you supported judging schools, teachers and kids by one standardized test with sanctions attached?  Or, allow those districts with the most property wealth to keep their wealth for the most part creating an inadequately funded system?

Have you supported collaboration among public schools?  Or have you nurtured the notion that schools will perform better in a competitive setting? 

Do you support public schools?  If so, what is the evidence?  If it is not the same kind of evidence as for the other groups you support I suggest you may not be honest with yourself or us.

We will find out as the Legislature convenes in January.  We are getting strong hints already from the Governor, Lieutenant Governor and the Commissioner of Education.  The simple fact that so many school districts have sued the state for adequate funding should be an embarrassment to our Legislature if they argue that they support public schools.  But no, they are fighting the suit.  They argue we can do more with less, we can raise standards and have more pass, we can be held more accountable, and we can and should compete with charters and private schools who should be allowed to siphon money out of the public school system.  They argue that we need a voucher system so that those who already pay private school tuition then would receive state funding and public schools would receive less.  None of these are strategies of folks who actually support public schools and the philosophical assumptions underlying public schools.  None of these so-called competitive strategies have ever really worked anywhere.  All of them are counter-intuitive:  the competitive market competes for choice among many consumers who can choose otherwise.  The public service sector provides services via tax dollars that are wasted if spread too thin to other alternatives.  The consumer pot is large.  The tax dollar pot is small.  And yet, the push remains to shrink the funds for public schools, then divert money from the public schools to alternative models of education.  That is not choice and that is not competition.  That is merely a funding swap to the harm of all concerned.

It appears to me that the dominant philosophy in Austin, perhaps Washington, is anti-public schools.  Scary and sad thought to those of us who have devoted our professional lives to this noble and most democratic of all institutions in the US.

But for me and my house our answer will be yes, we support public schools.