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The Death Of Public Schools
NMB, Florida February 2, 2002 A.H. Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on Issues, Ideas and Reflections on the Times. Published Now and
Then. Opinions Pro or Con Are Welcome.
THE DEATH OF ONE OF AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEMS
On this palindromic day the NY Times Op Ed page has a piece on "Public
Education in Private Hands" by William C. Kashatus. It is a clear piece
dispassionately told and easily understood. Public officials had thrown up
their hands after a long process of being unable to alter the facts that the
Philadelphia system of public schools was too troubled for ordinary citizens
to fix. There were some telling phrases in this article and I would like to
follow them down the column and comment.
William Penn's plan for schools in his colony ".provided a universal
education for all children, rich and poor, to the age of 12; and all were
required to be educated. Families that could pay tuition were expected to
do so, but poor children attended free, with Quaker philanthropy providing
support. Community-supported education - which became tax-supported in the
early 19th century - has been part of our earliest heritage." This
statement is descriptive of what happened in the rest of the country.
Religious support was part of the original package but the ENTIRE community
took education over, extended it and was responsible for it.
Mr. Kashatus says further: ".subsequent reform of centralization brought
bureaucratization that could be rigid and stifling. And by the 1960's, the
city schools, like other school systems elsewhere in the country, were
weakened by urban problems of white flight, increasing crime rates and
greater poverty." At one point, the City of Philadelphia ended the system
begun by William Penn and took over the school system. It was still public
but no longer in the hands of a city board of education. Mr. Kashatus summed
up the role of a private company coming in to help.
".the State hired Edison Schools as a consultant to examine the district's
finances and academic performance." This was in early 2000. By December 2001
an agreement was reached to hire Edison Schools as the manager of the school
district of Philadelphia
The story is one where one of our stellar states in the formation of the
democratic educational systems we have enjoyed has come to the point where
it no longer has imagination and can continue to create something good out
of what once was new and untried. The old system worked for many years and
was charged with making Americans out of immigrants and keeping children
from roaming the streets causing trouble and ending up in jail.
Where did we go wrong? One of the things is that the mantra of "private"
has supplanted the belief in "public". It is frightening to me to think
that profit-making companies are being hired to run all sorts of what were
once "public" agencies. Condominiums, city governments and prisons are some
of the entities being touted as failures and in need of some nice private
firm to come in and solve our problems. As for our American system of
Government centralized in Washington, D.C. the present Republican
Administration would like to turn it over to the people who run Wall Street.
"Edison schools" is a nice firm but it works for a profit. They will scale
down the costs and exact a price. One of the results will be that public
education with all its warts and wrinkles will no longer be the same and our
children will not be educated to be citizens of a democracy but cogs in the
wheels of companies run by distant executives. We see where that got us in
the examples of companies growing ever larger through acquisitions and
take-overs and collapse - as in ENRON.
Carol says: As the older enthusiastic dedicated educators retire there have
been all too few young people willing to become the teachers of our
children. Someone has to pick up the slack - hence the need for Edison
Schools and the like.
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