Fighting Democracy
There are two questions coming out of the discussions about New Orleans and its privatized school system.
1) Did student achievement actually improve?
2) If that improvement did happen, was it worth the price?
The answer to the first question is "Probably not" (though the careful secrecy and hoarding of data makes a definitive answer difficult), but we can still move on to the second question without a definitive answer to the first, because the price in NOLA was the suspension of "local control," which is another way to say "democracy."
On twitter and in the blogs, reformsters like to frame the struggle as one between the rights of students and the preservation of the institution. "I won't sacrifice the needs of students to preserve the privilege of the school system," is a familiar construction.
But the school system is an arm of democracy.
Granted, democracy has some problems these days. We can get angry about outside interests taking over the Douglas County school board (check out the new documentary Education, Inc for a closer look)-- but only 17% of the voters actually voted. Large cities like Chicago and New York have long since mastered the art of subverting democracy. And that's before we get to the areas where politicians have come up with new and creative ways to keep the non-white and the non-wealthy from voting.
But the solution to a problem of Not Enough Democracy is not Less Democracy.
When certain areas of the country worked to disenfranchise black citizens, the best solution, the right solution, the democratic solution was NOT for wealthy, connected folks from outside those CURMUDGUCATION: Fighting Democracy: