Mark:

Publicly funded charter schools, from the humanizing point of view, are far superior to what we normally call “public” schools….Schools whose identities are formed by a distinct vision produce better citizens, because they are more likely to have a substantive notion of the human good and of community, and so to think civic engagement and debate is worthwhile and important.

I agree completely. Obviously, there have been, and will no doubt continue to be, abuses under the cover of charter schools, and their opponents will make the most of them (the xenophobic schools, the Afrocentric or Christian Identity ones, etc.). But the whole point, I think, of public education is to add some degree of “public” or “civil” awareness–which invariably must mean at least some abstraction, some artificial broadening of horizons–to the communal sense that ought to already be there. When the schools become responsible–because of irresponsible parents and/or a rapacious state and federal bureaucracy–for the formation of the whole character of the student, then the demands of diversity bleach anything substantive out of what the schools might ideally have offered. Charter schooling is, I think, a very good way to get back the proper balance between preserving distinct, local visions and giving students produced by such the tools to reach out and engage a wider public.

Dennis,

Not to worry; I took no offense from your comments.

I’ve lived in four cities with my wife and four children; our children range from 23 to 14 in age. In each of those cities, the local gentry heavily patronized the public schools: mayors, doctors, lawyers, bank presidents, stock brokers, entrepreneurs, you get the idea….It isn’t a matter of whether or not parents ‘can afford to’ provide for their own children’s education, rather of that education not being a high enough priority. I agree that there are families too brutalized by life to be able to pay for educating their children. In those cases, we should all share the cost. But there are families in the tens of millions who live materialistic lives and beggar their negighbors to subsidize their own children’s educations. With such un-serious families, nothing much can be done.

I see what you’re saying, and again, I agree. Public schooling can become a playground to the most wealthy members of our polity; whereas some are looking to the public schools to provide the bare essentials for children who otherwise would struggle to find any kind of niche in our democracy, others see them mainly as a place to provide babysitting while they pursue their aggressive two-career couple dreams of material success. Or–and in some ways this is arguably worse–they make the schools a training ground for their own sort of people, throwing their energy into fundraising and organizing to skew the allocation of resources throughout the school district to make certain that all the scholarships, summer trips, swimming pools, and so forth are available to fill their children’s time, leaving the other schools in the district to fight over scraps. I fear you’re correct that with such “unserious families, nothing much can be done”…though maybe that shouldn’t stop us from grabbing our pitchforks and trying!

Largely because of inertia, I can’t get excited about public schooling. Though, through the great efforts of my parents, I was not raised in the public schools, they’ve always been there, and they seem more or less a fact of life. (I think this is the “historical legitimacy” mentioned above.) I think most of us could hardly imagine a society without public schooling, and no one respectable is calling for the abolition of public education.

But the similarity with public health care perplexes me a little. The moral case for supporting education from the public fisc can be made even more strongly for a public medical system. The public educator can raise the specter of illiterate children in making his case, but the specter of consumptive, scrofulous or dead children seems much more terrifying.

One hundred years from now will public health care be something everyone accepts as historically and morally legitimate? The case against a federally bureaucratized medical system seems strong, but it may not even be intelligible once people get used to the government footing their medical bills.

The rat is smelled though and the public appears to be waking from the charade and perhaps this sinecure in State-Sponsored Penury will sharpen their wits a bit .

I know, call me an optimist.
Good Evening,
Count Pollyanna

Not to be quarrelsome…I agree that we’re all in this together. All parents should be able to use their taxes for their own children –not only parents patronizing the government’s schools. All parents. Society benefits from well-educated students, even those or especially those in Catholic or private or home schools. I’m a Catholic, and the Documents of Vatican II specifically forbid such discrimination as characterizes the public school financing ‘racket’ as I would call it. The Church is right and the school boards are in the wrong.

I’ve lived in four cities with my wife and four children; our children range from 23 to 14 in age. In each of those cities, the local gentry heavily patronized the public schools: mayors, doctors, lawyers, bank presidents, stock brokers, entrepreneurs, you get the idea. Heavily. The cars in the public school parking lots are at least as nice as those in my childrens’ Catholic school parking lots. I had the junk man pick up my own work car for $20. We’re no elitists here.

It isn’t a matter of whether or not parents ‘can afford to’ provide for their own children’s education, rather of that education not being a high enough priority. I agree that there are families too brutalized by life to be able to pay for educating their children. In those cases, we should all share the cost. But there are families in the tens of millions who live materialistic lives and beggar their negighbors to subsidize their own children’s educations. With such un-serious families, nothing much can be done.

As for diversity of student populations, most public schools are neighborhood schools: kids go to school with kids mostly like themselves. Catholic schools are fully diverse, in our experience. Hispanics, Somalians, Koreans, American Indians, Philipinos, etc.

Regards.

Schools whose identities are formed by a distinct vision produce better citizens, because they are more likely to have a substantive notion of the human good and of community, and so to think civic engagement and debate is worthwhile and important. Why should the students shuffling through hollow bureaucratic institutions ever come to think such a thing?

Some combination weighted in favor of charters and vouchers would, I contend, end up serving every aim of education better than characterless public schools of any size. My only reservation about this claim is the one Russell emphasizes: race. But that is a consideration that really does depend a great deal on locality. (Evidence from my neighborhood, by the way, suggests that black parents, given the choice, would prefer church and charter schools where their children will develop better characters.)

Well, I suppose I’d have to own up to the “someone with centralizing tendencies” description, at least in regards to slightly more things than just defense and mail delivery. Education in even its most classic sense was tied up in notions of humanitas, and “humanity”–arts, sciences, the world around a person–cannot avoid at least a little bit of abstraction. This is where I find Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities valuable. Of course not even Rhode Island could be a “community” in a natural sense; given the limits of human beings, probably nothing over a couple of hundred people could be. And yet human societies have routinely invoked–”imagined,” if you will–larger associations that that, through reading the same local newspapers or pledging allegiance to the same flag or whatnot. Does that mean any and every state can and should drape itself in the label “community,” and start talking about treating all its members justly, etc., in accordance with that? No–or at least, not every state, and not in ever way. But public schooling cannot help but be, I think, one of those areas in which he have to historically–and morally–grant the legitimacy of involving the state as playing some sort of communitarian role. To content ourselves with the delivery of humanitas solely on the basis of how it is realized in very specific, limited, natural, community contexts is something that most of us (at least, as I mentioned above, since Brown v. Board of Education) has recognized is not entirely in the best interests of our polity or our children.

If you want poor districts to have more money, then give it to them. It can come from a state fund.

Frankly though, public schools are not about education, no matter all the rhetoric. They are about keeping kids out of the way, busy with mostly useless trivia. If people had any guts they’d do what the Amish do. Grow their own schools. Oh but those are religious! Gasp. We can’t have local values in schools! The remote intellectuals must overrule any such nasty thing…! Sorry, pet peeve here.

I wonder what suggestions you have, if any, for solving the riddle. Assuming, since you’re on FPR, that you support decentralizing power, how do you do square localization with the Supreme Court’s decision and our current methods of funding education? One of them seems to have to go.

You’re that there doesn’t seem to be any good way to compromise between these two different conceptualizations of education. I suppose that, as much as I recognize the Pandora’s Box that it opened, I’m unwilling to back away from Brown v. Board of Education; sometimes interventions are necessary in order to defeat local abuses, and if that opens up the local to a dependence on such (federal and state) interventions, that may be just the price that must be paid for our own willingness to countenance such local evils in the first place. It was the decision in Brown that introduced the idea that public education should be considered a “right,” and thus something to be legitimately assessed–and funded–in terms of equity and fairness. If follow-up interventions such as this are what to come, then I’m at least happy to see them happening on the state, rather than the federal level.

As for the specifics of funding itself, I think the dependence of the public school system on property taxes is ridiculous, but that’s a slightly different topic.

It is a good thing to make them pay, in some significant way, for their beggary of the rest of us. It is a good thing to acquaint them with an economic cost for educating their children. They have no concern for the rupture of ‘community’ when they drive taxes and costs for the rest of us through the roof….Handwringing over the plight of parents and families who are too cheap to fund their own children’s education is pointless.

In some important, surface way I don’t disagree with anything you say here: the costs of education–particularly an education which aligns with the diverse and specialized opportunities afforded to those who choose and/or manage to climb the meritocratic ladder–must be paid, and you can’t forever maintain a system of education that partakes of this kind of largess which simultaneously can remain small. However, I suspect that beneath the surface we have some deep disagreements. Often, for example “the plight of parents and families who are too cheap to fund their own childrens’ education” reflects racial or class divisions that, if unaddressed, can compromise the very community which a public education is presumably designed to support. Even those who have no children, or who only home school their children, should–I think, anyway–recognize the civic imperative involved in assuming those costs in the name of results which can hopefully build egalitarian and mutual connections between all those in the community, both those publicly educated and those not. This isn’t a blank check for free riders, of course, but just a reminder that in a community, to a degree, we’re all in together, and can avoid the hard work of striving to enlist all in the common project, even those who may justly dissent from parts of it.

how much force should we grant to the demands of those who defend the integrity of their local communities when such (certainly justifiable and even valuable) defensive actions may unintentionally help to perpetuate an injustice (the continuing decline of certain districts which will likely never be able to be able to provide an education comparable to that available in other school districts) within a larger community: namely, the sovereign state of Arkansas, which had an integrity and a set of constitutional obligations all its own to protect?

Obviously we know how the centralizing liberal would answer this question. But it seems to me that only a centralizing liberal, or at least someone with centralizing tendencies, could even ask it. Now there’s nothing wrong with centralism as such, since some things (e.g. the army, the post, &c.) need to be centralized if they’re going to work at all.

But the centralization of community is dangerous. It’s impossible in fact, of course, since only the tiniest state could be coterminous with a single community, but it is possible in theory (which is where we get the collectivisms of left and right).

But unless one already has a centralized (that is to say, statist) idea of community, one could make sense of neither of the premises of Mr. Fox’s question.
1) The question assumes that the state of Arkansas is a community. But the integrity and constitutional obligations of Arkansas do not constitute a community, unless we believe a community is some notional entity whose existence may be asserted from above.
2) To assume that inequalities are injustices is to assume that the unequal parties exist in a relationship that implies an obligation of fairness. Most persons are not in such relationships. A father, for example, is not obliged to expend the same energy on all children as he does on his own, since kinship imposes obligations that “common humanity” does not. And a community, or at least a community that emerges naturally, is something like a family, and some sort of mutual obligations could be understood to exist there. If in a community, for example, some people claimed all the wealth or land for themselves, they could be understood to have committed an injustice against their fellows. In a community, one ought to “spread the wealth,” at least to a degree. But to assume that these obligations include a whole state (or as our President might prefer, a whole nation) is to assume a community where there may not be one.

If we make these assumptions, we can ask the question quoted above.

However, I’d like to think that there’s another way, since I don’t like the conclusion that communities need to fight all higher powers tooth and claw. It may be the rationalist in me, but that just seems uncivic.

Any thoughts?

With respects to the advertising department of Bell Motorcycle Helmets, ‘If you’ve got a ten dollar head [student], buy a ten dollar helmet [education].’

Handwringing over the plight of parents and families who are too cheap to fund their own children’s education is pointless.