By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
One of the obstacles that stands in the way of convincing taxpayers that there are workable alternatives to the current public school system is a lack of data demonstrating that the alternatives work. Something beyond the rhetoric about “teacher union monopolies” and “parental choice in education” is needed to do that, some empirical evidence that demonstrates the wisdom of moving in a new direction with our schools.
We now have some data to offer in that debate, specifically regarding charter schools, tax-supported schools that operate independently of local educational authorities and union regulations for teachers. Granted, charter schools do not satisfy the wishes of those who are working for a voucher system or tax credits for parents who send their children to parochial schools, but they move the ball down the field toward a system where parents will have some say in the choice of their children’s schools. This campaign needs to be fought one battle at a time.
The California newspaper The Orange County Register on August 25 featured a story on what happened to New Orleans’ schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 hurricane that slammed the Gulf Coast, causing more than $100 billion in damage and almost 2,000 deaths.
The Register writes of the “profound rebuilding of a major American city’s education system,” one of “the greatest transformations ever witnessed in American public education,” that followed when “Katrina left most New Orleans schools literally underwater. Most schools remained officially closed for months. Many New Orleans families fled the city to escape the floods and rebuild lives; some never returned. Many students who remained missed months of classes.”
The authorities in New Orleans knew that “the Big Easy’s schools were symbolically underwater,” even before Katrina hit, and did not want to go back to the same old system of low-performing schools. So, following Katrina, in the words of the Register, “the legislature acted boldly….State leaders, confronted by unprecedented natural disaster, chose to not only rebuild, but to boldly reimagine New Orleans’ schools and acted with urgency. City schools were closed, and all teachers removed from their posts. Rather than reopening the same failed schools, a comprehensive network of charter schools was authorized and opened. New teachers were hired.”
As a result, 92 percent of New Orleans students now attend independent charter schools, resulting in “significant improvements in academic performance in the 10 years since Katrina.” In 2005, “New Orleans was the second-lowest-ranked district in one of the lowest-ranked U.S. states. Today, New Orleans students are closing the achievement gap with their peers, graduation rates have dramatically increased, accompanied by major boosts in achievement tests, and students are going on to college. Whereas just slightly more than 30 percent” of the city’s public school students “were above failing status in 2008, more than 80 percent were in 2014 — a significant turnaround.”
The Register calls this “nothing less than an education revolution. The storm and its aftermath did what no political authority or education advocate had previously dared to do. It provided the nation a North Star to follow in transforming chronically failing schools.” I doubt that Chicago mayor and onetime Obama aide Rahm Emanuel is a favorite of many readers of this column. Nonetheless, his famous line about “never letting a crisis go to waste” seems to be applicable in this case.
On another topic: This year’s column by Phyllis Schlafly column on the National Education Association’s (NEA) annual convention. Schlafly has been demonstrating for years now that the NEA — which has three million members and represents most of the country’s public school teachers — has become more a liberal Democratic pressure group than an association dedicated to the best interests of the country’s teachers. It is an organization with considerable political clout, with a half-billion dollar budget, raised through the mandatory dues of its members.
Schlafly found that this year’s convention, held in July in Orlando, went beyond the group’s “routine liberal buzzwords” about “reproductive freedom, racism, sexism, homophobia, and multiculturalism.” She writes that the “NEA moved right along to endorse the ‘transgender’ agenda for the nation’s public schools” in its “New Business Item 30,” which states that schools must provide “transgender students and staff access to facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the employee’s or pupil’s records.”
In turn, New Business Items 44 and 45 state that schools must allow students to dress in the gender of their choice, and should not require students to “obtain a court-ordered name and/or gender change as a prerequisite to being addressed by the name and pronoun that corresponds to their gender identity.”
Beyond that, New Business Item A states, “The NEA will develop educational materials for its state affiliates and members about the potential dangers of the so-called ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Acts’ or RFRAs, which may license individuals and corporations to discriminate in the theory that their religious beliefs require such actions.”
There is no mistaking what this New Business Item will require: When the topic comes up in class of someone such as a baker or photographer refusing to provide service for a same-sex marriage on the basis of their Christian beliefs about the nature of marriage, teachers will not give both sides in the debate — if they follow the guidelines of the NEA. Their Christian view — which is still supported by a majority of Americans in the polls — will be treated in classroom discussions as a “license to discriminate,” and depicted as one of the benighted opinions of the past that deserve to be denounced, rather than one side in the debate over an important issue of our time.
Schlafly is not exaggerating when she writes that “most teachers pay dues to a union whose policies are diametrically opposed to what parents and the public want their children to learn,” and that there “can be no positive change in America’s public schools as long as teachers unions have the power to collect mandatory dues from school employees whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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