A professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Thomas S. Poetter, has edited a new book about the danger of public school privatization, Vouch for This! Defunding Private Interests, Defending Public Schools. The book, conceived and written as a graduate seminar collaborative project of 15 students exploring the meaning of today’s explosive enactment across conservative state legislatures of new or expanded school voucher programs, explores the meaning for students, their parents, their teachers, and their communities of the growth of school privatization as represented by charter schools and publicly funded private school tuition vouchers.
I’ll begin where Poetter ends the book’s final chapter: “(G)reed and racism lie at the core of the voucher movement… Choice is difficult to exercise except for the wealthiest of us and the public schools aren’t weak, though they are underfunded and underappreciated. It’s about money and flight…. When students leave and take their many potential contributions as talented human beings with them, it impoverishes those left behind … It’s a little sad to me, that is all of the potential for success and community alchemy lost when others leave, the promise of mutual benefit we accrue when we share our differences and become one.” (Vouch for This! p. 133)
Poetter believes that academic work investigating public policy, is, by definition, political: “I… made the case with students early in the course that I wanted them to participate in what scholarly policy entities call ‘advocacy scholarship,’ which we would claim that those behind the voucher and charter movements themselves have been creating and participating in from their very beginning, from their own political and economic agenda perspectives even though they may not define their work as policy advocacy.” (Vouch for This!, p. xx)
Poetter’s graduate seminar which produced this book took place during a late spring-early summer six week period just as the Ohio Legislature was considering several possible school voucher expansions, any of which might have been inserted into the state’s biennial budget then being drafted for passage by June 30, 2023. In the book’s final chapter, Poetter summarizes the Ohio Legislature’s action: “Just recently a new universal voucher program was embedded in the state’s new budget in Spring 2023, with plans for it taking shape during our class (May-June) and with the details finalized just after we adjourned the class in late June 2023… One truth is that we have elected a supermajority in our state government that is hellbent on undermining/dismantling public education… (T)he legislature funded a new universal voucher plan in an education budget that guarantees generous tuition vouchers and funding for charter enrollments to every family/child in Ohio. The funding is not tied to tiny escape hatch nods to ‘failing schools’ as in the past, and barely protects the public from funding even rich citizens’ private education dreams, now realities (the economic exclusion is 450% of the poverty level or $135,000/year for a family of four, but every family will receive some scholarship regardless of income.)” (Vouch for This!, pp. 129-130)
Poetter organizes his graduate seminar according to a theory of currere, which demands that students explore scholarly study by considering the question: “What has been and is my journey in education?” This sort of study “brings the scholar closer to a point of view and the phenomenon at hand, not more distant… (as) in a… more appealingly objective, safe, and authoritative space….” (Vouch for This!, pp. xix-xx)
Of the fifteen graduate students in Poetter’s seminar, several are international students, others have chosen education as a career because of difficult experiences in their own schooling in some cases relating to family poverty. The students divided themselves into five teams of three to explore several topics the students themselves defined—democratic accountability for education—the effect of rapid school privatization on communities—the public school finance implications of voucher expansion—what families are expressing when they choose a school—the personal choices families make. The book includes a chapter from each three-person team.
Reading the personal stories and reflections the students share (or the fictional narratives some groups collectively imagine) through the five chapters, we learn not only about what the students internalized from the materials in the class reading list, with some of the books and articles theoretical, abstract, and technical, but also how their reading has shaped their reflection on their own life experiences. The required reading included the new The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, a collection of scholarly, academic, comprehensive, and in many instances technical articles examining today’s explosive growth of vouchers. The students’ task in their five collaborative writing projects is to personalize the findings exposed in this kind of research literature from the point of view of the students, parents, educators, and communities they know.
Here are some of the themes that emerge in the chapters written by the students as they reflect on school privatization in the context of their own experience, recount personal narratives, or create together a fictional narrative to depict their conclusions.
First: From the point of view of parents of students in underfunded urban public schools, school choice in the form of a charter school or a voucher for private education is often seized as a symbol of hope:
- Parents “desire for more, to experience a beacon of hope amid a public school system that is not academically strong or a public school system that prioritizes certain school buildings with added resources over other schools in the same public school district is what thrusts so many students and their families into the world of… charter schools. Many families say to themselves, ‘What do I have to lose?'” (Vouch for This!, p. 89)
- “For these families school choice represented a glimmer of hope, providing them with a sense of optimism for the future…They saw it as a potential pathway to secure a brighter future for their children, one that encompassed well-funded schools equipped with modern facilities and high-quality instruction. However….” (Vouch for This!, p. 10)
Second: Accurate and transparent information about charter schools or the private schools available through vouchers is frequently incomplete or simply not available or accessible for parents making such an important choice.
- “Our critical analysis of this educational policy issue… reveals that the voucher movement and charter schools encounter serious transparency challenges such that allocation of funds through these programs/movements lacks accountability, (there is) limited information, (there are) huge risks of unequal access to quality education, potential fraud, as well as abuse of public resources.” (Vouch for This!, p. 11) This quote is from the group of three international graduate students from Africa enrolled in the program. They also reference their awareness of the same problem with a privatized international program operating in Africa with funding from the World Bank and the IMF. (Vouch for This!, p. 8)
- “(A)ll this talk of current day vouchers has made me think about what if there had been a voucher system back then where an inner city, economically challenged student like me could have a parent… move me to a ‘better’ charter or private school?… How would my mother have known about it, or who would have made sure she was truly informed about the voucher system? If there had been this voucher system, who would have decided which students and parents were made aware of it? I wonder if my mother had known about it, given our economic status, would we even have been able to take advantage or this new system? ” (Vouch for This!), p. 63)
Third: In systems based on school choice, fear is frequently a motivator for parents.
- “I went online to see what I needed to do to enroll my (Kindergarten) daughter in the neighborhood public school. I searched online for the school and the first thing that appeared were the reviews: “Don’t send your kids here! Fighting, bullying, and incompetent teachers…” Negative words filled the page… After some more digging, I found that the school had been rated as failing for the past several years, and outcomes each year were worse than the year before… I pressed forward and chose a neighborhood charter school for my child. The building was beautiful, the teachers were friendly, the curriculum was STEM-focused, and the school boasted strong test scores… My daughter is now on her final strike at school. If she breaks the conduct policy one more time, she’ll be kicked out…. Jasmine is hyperactive and needs a supportive, understanding environment I wish they’d work with her more.” (Vouch for This!, pp. 105-106)
- “Charter schools and school vouchers rise up in the midst of trauma and tragedy as a potential savior to save Black and Brown families from failing neighborhood schools.” (Vouch for This!, p. 81)
Fourth: While they promote themselves as more responsive to parents than the neighborhood public schools, charter schools are not democratically operated.
- “The establishment of charter schools in economically disadvantaged areas does not adequately involve or empower local communities in decision-making processes. Charter schools have their own governance structures, do not have locally elected boards, and in some cases are run by large corporations who operate schools in multiple states. Parents have little say in the daily operations or educational tactics of the school… Charter schools tend to locate in urban areas with high concentrations of minority and low-income students.” (Vouch for This!, p. 22)
- “Charter school receive public funding but are usually exempt from some state regulations…. Additionally, charter schools receiving public funds often operate with minimal government regulation, and are not built to foster parental participation. In this regard, participating schools are not obligated to provide access to crucial school records, budgets, or administration details. The absence of external authority to assess curriculum, attendance, disciplinary measures, special education policies and practices further exacerbates the accountability gap.) (Vouch for This!, p. 12)
In the book’s epilogue, Professor Poetter addresses the practical meaning for the state’s public schools of the universal school voucher expansion the Ohio legislature inserted into the state’s new budget: “(T)he fact remains that the state will be spending more per pupil on individual children in private high schools with its voucher program… than it will for individual public school students across the state… And just think of all that could be done in our public schools to better our offerings… if we weren’t sending more than $1 billion a year into private hands to be used in ways that none of us would ever approve of in public education… Do citizens know that private schools and charter schools alike pay unqualified teachers, use public money to pay for the teaching of religious doctrine… and deliver students to the doors of charter/private schools on the public dollar every single day when many of those districts have drastically cut busing and when the football team at the public school in many locales has to find its own way to the Friday night game, no matter how far away the opponent?” (Vouch for This!, pp. 130-131)
Poetter introduces Vouch for This! by posing the following questions for readers to consider: “What becomes of our way of life, our democratic republic… when we create seemingly parallel systems of education that overwhelmingly advance the segregation of students of color and those who are low-income from the rest… when we establish rules of action so dissimilar (between public and schools privatized at public expense)… when we create school opportunities for students that don’t have the baseline protections we demand for every student in traditional public schools… when we give up on our responsibilities to maintain a public education system as a public good for all…? ” (Vouch for This!, pp. xxx-xxxi)