Posted to Social Media on December 4th, 2020
Someone in one of my teacher support groups asked this question non-rhetorically. At the end of her rope feeling unsafe and watching the daily news become a constantly ticking death counter, she turned to our group for answers:
“Why are schools staying open now, when the Covid case and death rates are higher than when we closed in Spring?”
The reason is charter schools.
Follow me on this.
Public schools are funded based on student numbers and attendance. The entire argument of a push toward both private and charter schools is this idea of “choice” in education – which on the surface sounds like a good idea. Parents should have some kind of options so that they can get their students what they need. In almost every industry, a monopoly signifies high prices and bad service: “school choice” lures people into thinking they’re likely to have better options simply by merit of having more options.
But schools aren’t a business offering a product; they are a public entity offering a social service. Choice only improves options when “none” is an option. Buying a television is a choice, so when BestBuy and Target are both trying to sell me a television, they’ll compete with each other for my business. Choice is good! But choice doesn’t have the same effect when we’re talking about social services like schools, utilities, and healthcare.
Why doesn’t more choice lead to better services?
In reality, what charter schools actually do is operate more like a business: they’re selling education as a product, and market themselves the way a business does. What this often looks like is adjusting their budget in ways that give the school a more marketable face, while cutting the budget in ways that lead to less equitable education. Charters are notoriously terrible at offering Special Education services, and will often find ways to expel students who are unsuccessful academically so that they don’t have to service high need students. (Note: not all charters operate this way. The problem is that they CAN.)
However, because funding for public schools is based on enrollment and attendance, in order to continue operating with the budget they need to actually offer equitable programming, public schools are now in a position where they are forced to also behave more like a business offering a product, rather than like a government agency offering a service. In order to keep their budgets, public schools now also have to market themselves- and an already underfunded government service shouldn’t have to compete with a business for profits. It will always lose.
School districts are remaining open despite it putting communities at risk because the parents are demanding that schools be open – and presenting this as an equity issue, when this actually only exacerbates equity issues: kids in public schools who are choosing Face-to-face are more likely to come from households that have no better option: a single parent working an “essential” job has no choice but to send their children to school. Schools have to stay open so that parents can go to work. Top-down, the government refusing to offer financial support to families on the brink of financial crisis in the middle of a pandemic NEED a place to send their children.
An already underfunded government service shouldn’t have to compete with a business for profits. It will always lose.
So parents are demanding schools be open – and schools cannot afford to say no, because they risk losing enrollment to charters, and therefore the funding they need in order to operate at all. Charters, of course, are staying open because.. well.. they’re businesses.
This is, by the way, the same thing that is happening to the US postal service – an essential service has been systematically defunded while expected to compete with a business for “customers” while the people who are most in need of that service (such as rural citizens who are gouged or not served by private shipping companies) have that service defunded out from under them.
Charter Schools aren’t the enemy…. not really.
And the problem is not the teachers at these charter schools, nor is every charter equally bad. It’s just the function of treating education as a product rather than a service having a negative impact on the educational community as a whole. This concept that public schools and charters schools are natural enemies, or that school choice is a fundamentally bad concept isn’t a problem inherent with the existence of charter schools. It doesn’t have to be like this.
The problem is that charter schools, private schools, and public schools have been forced to compete for already diminished funding. The problem is that all schools are consistently asked to do more with less: smaller budgets, higher accountability. Smaller staff, higher student ratios. Smaller course offerings, higher parent ratings. No school, public or private, can keep up with these demands. If charter schools could exist and receive funding alongside well-funded public schools, then these options would actually operate as functional choices. But the limited funding offered to either means that neither can specialize and offer a better product: both are just trying to stay open… even when people are dying and they should be staying closed.
Notably, there are charters that exist specifically to offer better programming to high-need students. Charters are not universally bad any more than FedEx or UPS are inherently bad for leading to the downfall of the USPS – the problem isn’t that Charters exist, it’s that the government is funding public schools in a way that punishes public schools for the existence of charters.
So why are schools open now, when cases are soaring- when we closed down last March when cases were so much lower?
It’s money.
The answer is, as usual, money.
Gloria Adams 