After reading Professor Chambless’s pro voucher anti public
school piece in the Orlando Sentinel, by the way I too am glad his boys will
never know slavery, about vouchers and horrible public schools I wondered why
he didn’t also blame them for Benghazi and global warming? He did leave
something out of his rant and that’s public schools arguably more than anything
else contributed to the greatness of our country.
I find it interesting that he referenced Martin Luther King
Jr who was a big supporter of public schools and advocated that they get more
resources not less and President Johnson’s war on poverty because the thing is
when we were actually fighting it we were winning, just sadly we stopped
fighting it decades ago.
He asks us to consider the fate of the rich parent who is
able to send their child to any school they want but what he doesn’t want you
to know is the private schools that the rich send their children too for the
most part are a lot different from the schools that the parents of students who
receive vouchers are sent to. Some are located in abandoned strip malls, others
pay their teachers with associates’ degrees 12.50 an hour and then even more
teach creationism as science. The state of Florida even says that despite being
able to pick who they take and keep and the ability to put requirements on
parents that they aren’t doing any better than public schools.
Then he uses the tired old government school monopoly
argument refusing to acknowledge that parents even the parents of poor children
have always had choices. They can home school and they can get involved with
their local schools or local politics to make them better too. I don’t know
about where Mr. Chambless lives but in most places local schools have local
representation something that is lost with charter schools and private schools
that take vouchers. But what insults me the most about Chamblesss’s argument is
he says the parents of poor children are lazy. He says they won’t do anything
that they have to for their children and that they would just accept failing
public schools unless the government, the same government he rails against
provides charters and vouchers. If Mr. Chambless truly cared about the poor he
would insist that the schools in neighborhoods wracked with poverty received
extra resources to mitigate that poverty but he doesn’t and instead he wants
those children to go to schools that are often worse.
If it was up to Chambless he would let the private sector
sort it out hoping the public won’t notice the lack of accountability that
private schools that take vouchers strive for and all the scandals with the
Mckay scholarship program and the over 250 charter schools that have opened,
taken public money and closed here in Florida. He wants you to ignore poverty,
which is the number one factor in determining success in education. The bottom
line is kids in poverty don’t do as well as those that aren’t.
The he attacks teachers, these pro voucher guys always
attack teachers, for not being able to completely overcome poverty and blames
tenure and unions, unions by the way don’t hire and fire teachers, set
curriculum or allocate budgets, these are canards that have no basis in
reality. And finally what he doesn’t mention about Finland is that the teachers
are highly unionized, something he seems to dislike, they have small classes
and they don’t have standardized tests or basically the exact opposite of
Florida.
He is right in one regard the poor and minority are the
primary victims of the system we have stet up but instead of fixing it and
addressing the inequalities he wants to create something worse.
Chris Guerrieri
Education Matters
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