Can graft and racial politics save public schools? Just maybe. Let me explain.
Public schools face an exodus of students. Even before COVID, parents were pulling their kids out of failing (and often unsafe) public schools in favor of private schools that cost more money but offered better and safer educations. Other parents were pulling their kids out for homeschooling, which is more work for parents but also can offer better — and certainly safer — education.
This trend put public schools at risk. The parents pulling their kids out were, on average, the parents most interested in their kids’ educations, the parents who’d been most likely to support school funding, to volunteer, to donate and to be voices for public education. With them, the schools not only lost student bodies — a blow in itself since funding depends in part on enrollment — but also vital political and financial support.
Those losses, naturally enough, encourage other parents to pull their kids. As schools lost the kids with the most involved parents — kids who tend to be the better students — even “good” schools faced a reputation hit. The result was a self-reinforcing spiral that in a book a few years back I called a “K-12 implosion.”
As I noted at the time, public schools’ potential salvation lay in charter schools. They’re publicly funded and part of the public-school system, but they have many of private schools’ virtues. To the extent that public schools could attract students to charters over private schools or homeschooling, they were keeping those students in the system and thus preserving funding and parental support.
The only problem with this approach was that it faced opposition from two deadly diseases: COVID-19 and teachers unions — the latter because charter schools, while generally better and more popular than regular public schools, also generally have nonunion staff.
COVID accelerated the flight from public schools, as unionized teachers resisted in-class instruction, mostly because teaching from home was easier. But while remote classes were easier for teachers, they were worse for students, and parents noticed.
And remote classes made it possible for parents to directly observe what and how their kids were being taught. Many were deeply unimpressed.
As a result, 1.4 million kids fled public schools during the pandemic. Most didn’t return.
On the bright side, charter schools saw a steep enrollment rise. But now that the pandemic is over, teachers unions are back to screw things up again, violently opposing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to allow about 100 more charter schools in New York City. Says Hochul, “I believe every student deserves a quality education, and we are proposing to give New York families more options and opportunities to succeed.”
Options and opportunities to succeed aren’t what the teachers unions want for New York, though. They want cushy bureaucratic jobs with as little in the way of accountability, comparison and measured results as they can possibly manage. More charter schools would undercut that by showing them up. If the best students’ parents want charter schools, what does that say about the rest of the system?
The teachers unions, who dropped a lot of fat campaign contributions on state legislators as late as January, want to kill this deal in the Assembly.
But sometimes greed and politics can be overcome by . . . politics and greed. In this case, there’s a countermove in favor of more charter schools from black and Latino legislators.
Their motives may not be entirely pure: In the name of “racial equity,” they want black and Latino administrators to run these schools. This is pretty much a straightforward political boondoggle for minority teachers’ support. (They’d also exempt minority teachers from paying state income tax, a move of dubious legality but indubitable popularity among minority teachers.)
The upshot is that if New York is going to see more charter schools, it will probably be because racial politicking by one gang of Democratic legislators overcomes union politicking by another gang of Democratic legislators.
I won’t say “Hope the good guys win,” since I’m not sure there are any, but I will hope the end result is more choices and opportunities for New York schoolkids. They may not be a priority for the unions or the politicians, but they deserve better than they’re getting.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
